Tag: management

The real secret to managing employees? Just encourage them to manage you

Editor’s Note: I’ve been republishing some classic Skeptical Guy posts over the last few months. This one is from August 2017. A FEW YEARS AGO, I was working as Editor of a fairly well-known talent management magazine and found myself engaged in one of my frequent discussions with the publisher. I don’t remember what the subject was, but

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Dave Ulrich on Smart Strategies to help businesses thrive in ambiguous times 

BACK AT THE PEAK of the Covid lockdown in April 2021, New Zealand technology firm Fuel50 held a virtual FuelX Talent Mobility conference because it just wasn’t possible to stage a live event as they had done in the past. There were a number of great speakers — like Josh Bersin — but one had a very different presentation from everyone else. That speaker was Dave

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What do college graduates want from employers? A four-day week is a good start

RESEARCH CAN BE GOOD or bad, but when it is good AND useful, it can help guide us to better insights that improve our decision-making moving ahead. Here’s some research from earlier this summer that caught my attention — a survey that shows what new college graduates really want from their would-be employers. It comes

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Yes, this is probably the Greatest Job Candidate Cover Letter of all time

Editor’s Note: I’m occasionally republishing some classic Skeptical Guy posts throughout the summer. This one is from August 2018. REMEMBER THE OLD military concept of “shock and awe“? It got a lot of attention during the Iraq War, and is defined as rapidly dominating an opponent “by the initial imposition of overwhelming force and firepower.”

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What a cartoon from 1962 got right — and wrong — about today’s workplace 

IF YOU’RE A BABY BOOMER, there’s a good chance you remember the animated TV show The Jetsons that was originally broadcast between September 1962 and March 1963. This popped up in a Fast Company story titled What The Jetsons got right, and very wrong, about the future of work. As Fast Company describes it, “The Jetsons was created by the Hanna-Barbera animation studio in Los Angeles as

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Remote work has caused a lot of issues, but it never will stop office romances

ALTHOUGH THE RISE of remote and hybrid work has brought huge changes to the workplace, one thing hasn’t changed – when people work together, workplace romances usually follow. The Financial Post recently published a story that pointed out that, “Remote work hasn’t killed the office romance, but colleagues tempted to fall into each other’s arms might want to

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Tom Plate: a great journalist and my good friend. Life will not be the same without him

WE CONNECT WITH MANY people in our journey through life, but the few we truly cherish are the ones who, as the famous quotation noted, understand our past, believe in our future, and accept us just the way we are. There have been a few people like that in my life, but I don’t think

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When Robots Train Managers, Don’t Be Surprised at the Management You Get

EVEN I GET SURPRISED when I see something like this: According to The Wall Street Journal, companies are now turning to robots to train and coach young managers. Please insert your “bad manager” joke here. According to The Journal, the training comes in the form of a bot, “a manager-training app powered by the artificial

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Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO)? It’s Mostly Just a Workplace Fairly Tale

I CAN HARDLY contain myself when I hear people touting the wonders of “unlimited” PTO. That’s because “unlimited” paid time off is really just a big fairy tale. I know … that sounds pretty harsh because there are a number of companies that have gone to “unlimited” PTO, and they will defend it to the

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Could Manipulating Glassdoor Ratings Just be Just Smart Brand Management?

I LEARNED LONG AGO that user ratings — whether they be on Yelp, Amazon, TripAdvisor, or anywhere else — are easily manipulated. So, is anyone surprised that Glassdoor ratings get manipulated, too? The Wall Street Journal recently published an in-depth look at how some companies have figured out how to boost their ratings on Glassdoor

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