The Hays Canada 2024 Salary & Hiring Trends report warns, “Quiet quitting was the dominant theme in 2023, defined as ‘putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than necessary.’ This trend is evident in labor productivity, which has declined nationally in six consecutive quarters. But this quiet quitting trend could be about to turn into real quitting. More people than ever are considering quitting their jobs and looking for better opportunities elsewhere…as the economy recovers this will only get worse.” Leading the Way to Go or Stay Countless studies of turnover and engagement show ..read more

I was recently invited to be a guest on a podcast concerning training techniques. That got me reflecting on decades of my journey in this field. Waayyy back in the early days of my career, I was a young door-to-door sales rep and then sales manager with Culligan Water Conditioning. I took Dale Carnegie sales, public speaking, and management training courses and got turned on to personal and leadership development. I studied and started using coaching and development approaches with my direct reports and later as a sales trainer. Given the powerful results I experienced from these approaches I ..read more

As Yogi Berra would say, “It was Deja vu all over again.” Five years earlier, we’d conducted introductory service/quality improvement workshops for senior management and head office staff of a large company. Culture and feedback surveys gathered input before and during these follow-up workshops. The company clearly had problems with low engagement, faltering customer service, rising costs from inefficient processes and quality problems, and low innovation. We recommended a comprehensive culture change process. We showed how that could significantly boost the performance of the organization. T ..read more

Accountability is a mess in many organizations. Often good performers are put into bad processes within systems that subvert rather than support them. “The 85/15 Rule” emerged from decades of root cause analysis of service/quality breakdowns. This showed that roughly 85% of the time the failure is caused by the system, processes, structure, or practices of the organization. Only about 15% of the breakdowns can be traced back to someone who didn’t care or wasn’t conscientious enough. Organizations Making a VAS of Themselves VAS (Vertical Accountability Syndrome) entangles many organizations. I ..read more

Doesn’t it drive you nuts to watch a video where the lips don’t quite match the audio track? According to Vocabulary.com, “The verb sync, an abbreviation for “synchronize,” appeared in 1929 to describe the matching of sound and picture in the new ‘talkies.'” Some managers are badly out of sync. For example, a manager once hired me to speak to their organization about the work-life balance themes in Growing the Distance. This was an ongoing theme for their last few annual conferences. A participant told me later that last year’s conference required everyone to travel on Sunday to attend the Mo ..read more

  I’ve just completed a two-day retreat with a fast-growing leadership team. They scored themselves at the lowest levels we’ve seen on our Team Dynamics Survey. Rarely do we see a leadership team as dysfunctional as this one. Their unique products and growing revenues were papering over many huge cracks and barely holding them together. The CEO and second generation owner of this family business was completely frustrated, very unhappy, and hated coming into work every day. 18th century American explorer, Daniel Boone, once said, “I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for ..read more

  A scout leader was trying to lift a fallen tree from the path. His pack gathered around to watch him struggle. “Are you using all your strength?” one of the scouts asked. “Yes!” was the exhausted and exasperated response. “No. You are not using all your strength,” the scout replied. “You haven’t asked us to help you.” Weak managers don’t leverage the strengths of their teams. In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, reports, “a study by the Center for Creative Leadership of top American and European executives whose careers derailed, the inability to build and lead a tea ..read more

  How would you score yourself on these questions: I am happy at work most of the time. My work has a clear sense of purpose. Overall, I am completely satisfied with my job. I feel stressed at work most of the time. How would people on your team or organization answer these questions? These questions are from the Work Wellbeing Score from “Indeed, a major jobs website, to assess the relationship between workplace wellbeing and firm performance.” Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, led a team of researchers to correlate ..read more

  Decades of psychology experiments show strong links between our sense of control, well-being, and satisfaction. In a classic study by David Glass and Jerome Singer, people were subjected to loud bursts of random noise while they were given difficult puzzles to solve. One group was told they could press a button to shut off the noise but were asked not to unless they couldn’t stand the racket anymore. No one pressed the button. The other group was exposed to the same noise while they worked on the puzzles but didn’t have a button to shut it off. The group with the option to shut off the ..read more

  One of the root causes of our accountability mess is looking for who, not what went wrong. This leads to a search for the guilty as the cause of breakdowns in customer service, quality, communication, teamwork, and the like. It becomes a hunt to fix the blame more than fixing the problem. But those problems are often symptoms of deeper systemic issues. The fundamental leadership question is — for whose convenience are your systems designed? Way too many systems subvert rather than serve. Shape Shifters: Systems Mold Performance Results Managers who aren’t happy with the performance of ..read more