Category Archives: Employee Engagement

Career Confessions from Gen Z: The Spiral of Silence is Strong With This One!

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A hot topic of discussion this week was Kayne West. It seems as if Kayne or other members of his family are always infiltrating our lives, but this news was bigger than most. Kayne sparked some controversy when he publicly announced his support for President Trump on Twitter. Many people had a hay-day, calling him out for his support, while others supported him for sharing his opinion regardless of its unpopularity.

His tweets and the following responses got me thinking about unpopular opinions. We all have them. For instance, I don’t like Mac n Cheese. You may not like Beyoncé, which is just wrong, but that’s beside the point. Everyone likes or dislikes something that is in opposition to the norm.

I want to clarify something about my definition of the word ‘unpopular’. The word is defined as “not liked or popular”. There are two sides to this definition. One side speaks to the majority opinion or whether something is liked or not liked by the majority. The ‘popular’ part is interesting because something that is popular may not be liked by the majority.

There is a common phenomenon called the “spiral of silence”, where people who hold unpopular opinions are a lot less likely to share these opinions because they fear social isolation. It makes sense; why would anyone want to share their feelings and then get hated on for them?

In a world where everyone is sharing everything at all times, it’s hard to conceal these opinions. Often when they are brought up, we find ourselves lying to others or staying quiet, but this isn’t always beneficial. While it may be okay to keep your opinions on Trump’s tax plan to yourself and save everyone from a heated argument, it may be helpful to share your feelings on a team decision even if it contradicts everyone else.

Although the concealing of unpopular opinions is done in all groups and at all ages, it is especially found amongst young people. Adolescents are inherently more insecure because duh and thus, they are much more unlikely to speak up and share their not popular feelings.

This serves as a love letter to my generation and a warning to my elders. To my fellow Gen-Zer’s, don’t be afraid to speak up and don’t be afraid to disagree with everyone else! To the millennials and Gen-Xer’s and whoever else is reading this, be on the lookout for your agreeing Gen-Z employees. Encourage them to speak their opinion in a comfortable scenario. And try to be sympathetic if you find them agreeing with the majority because we were all self-conscious young people once.

Also, I’d like to point out that I learned about the “spiral of silence” in one of my classes this semester and I’m out here applying it to real-world scenarios! (@my professors and @my parents).

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Announcing the HQ for HR Game Show – Sign Up to Play Today!

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Most of you know I founded another site called Fistful of Talent – we are getting ready to do something cool based off of the HQ series many of you play and have some fun in the process…

Fistful of Talent has teamed up with Paycor to bring you HQ for HR every Tuesday at 1 PM, starting May 1st. We’ll air five episodes with fifteen different HR leaders! Watching this could be the best 15 minutes of your day!

Here’s how it works – hit the link here or below to register for HQ for HR, and you’ll automatically receive email notifications each week about when HQ for HR is going live each Tuesday.  Click the link and join us and answer 12 HR body of knowledge questions digitally while you watch your peers answer them live on air.  You can do it from your desk or your phone, we just want you there!
After every episode, we’ll post a top 10 leaderboard at Fistful of Talent and here at the Capitalist showing who among the participants is an HR LEGEND.  We’ll use that leaderboard to invite you on the show live the following week – we’ll keep working down the list until we have 3 takers!  The top 5 cumulative scores across the 5 episodes will receive a major award to be announced during Episode 1.
PS – no Google allowed – or even Bing, people. We trust you because you look trustable, and let’s face it, most of you are in HR.
Check it as FOT’s Tim Sackett and your friend KD get down to the nitty-gritty with some of the sharpest minds in the HR/Talent industry!

Career Confessions from Gen-Z: What is Gen-Z looking for in a Mentorship Program?

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Hey everyone, I’m back! I took a week hiatus (finals week man) and more Gen-Z posts are coming your way! (Dad editor’s note: I didn’t give him a week off for finals! Buck up, son! Welcome to the show! It’s called multi-tasking! Sure I’m paying you nothing, but I still expect a post each week!) 

For my freshman year of college, I wanted to get away from Michigan and the Mid West. So, I decided to move to New York and attend a school called Marist College. At Marist, I was on the swim team and was immediately overwhelmed. Swim was hard, being away from my Mom was hard, having no friends was hard. It was a rough time.

Before I had gone to college, I had signed up to be apart of a student-athlete mentorship program, where upperclassmen athletes at Marist got paired with freshman athletes of different sports. I got paired up with a guy from the cross country team and I immediately knew that I didn’t want to be apart of the program. The purpose of the program was to meet up, maybe get lunch or coffee, and talk through any problems you’re having at school and in your sport. After a few forced hangout sessions, we stopped talking altogether and went our separate ways.

Now, I think that mentorship programs are a great idea. Having gone through a program myself, and not getting much out of it, I have gathered my own list of how to make a successful mentor program and what I would like to get from a mentor:

  1. Be Relatable: A key characteristic of having a good mentor relationship is being able to relate to them. The mentor needs to be able to relate to their “mentee” and vice versa, or there won’t be any necessary help given or received. This is the main reason that my mentor relationship wasn’t successful. We had absolutely nothing in common and neither of us could relate to the other. 
  2. Be a Role Model: As a mentee, I would like to be able to look up to my mentor. I want my mentor to have some quality that makes me want to be like them. Although it would be nice, it isn’t vital for a mentee to want the same exact position as their mentor but is vital that the mentor possesses some qualities that the mentee aspires to have.
  3. Share Advice: This feels like a no-brainer, but it relates back to the type of mentor/mentee relationship you have. In order to give worthwhile and helpful advice, you need to be able to relate to your mentor/mentee AND the mentor needs to be a role model figure. In my mentor relationship, I received a lot of advice but none of it was necessary to my experience. The things that I needed advice on, like how to choose a major or how to handle being far from home, weren’t areas that my mentor had any advice to give.

****Bonus factor! Experience: This is my extra little bonus factor to making a mentor program top notch. Any experience that a mentee can directly gain with their mentor by their side will not only be the best form of “advice” they can get, but it will help to strengthen the relationship. Something that a mentor/mentee duo can do together to gain experience is a group project in whatever field the mentee is interested in. This may feel a little intern-y but most of your Gen-Z employees will be interns anyways!

You can follow as much or as little advice as you want from this but the bottom line for a successful mentor program is effort. If both sides are willing to try and get something positive out of the experience, then they probably will! Not every mentor you have can be like Yoda (I know very little about Star Wars but hopefully this analogy works), but just be willing to try and make it a worthwhile experience!

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @HRmarketer now has Employer Brand Advocacy!

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On the Weekly Dose this week I review HRmarketer’s new Brand Advocacy product. If you don’t know who HRmarketer is they are someone you should probably take a look at. They were originally developed as a real-time data and HR industry insights product to help drive HR marketing and media relations campaigns, primarily for the HR vendor community to sell better to all of us (and they still do a great job at doing that!).

What HRmarketer found out over the past years was that they had built most of what an Employment Brand function would need to have a fully automated employee brand advocacy tool as well. Since they already built a brand advocacy tool for vendors, building one for employees was pretty similar with a few changes.

So, what the heck is an employee brand advocacy tool!?

Think of Employee Brand Advocacy the way you think about all those consumer brand you follow socially and love. One of my favorite brands is Nike. I follow them on Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc. If they share cool content, I tend to share a lot of that cool content with my followers. As you can imagine, Nike loves this kind of content share, because it’s coming from a fan.

Now, think about how you can use that with employees with your employer brand.

Not all of our employees love us. Some just like us, or they’re on the path to loving us! We all have a few employees that are truly in love with us! They love us, we love them! If you asked these employees to share some content with their networks, they would in a second! Without even asking why. Remember, they love you!

If you truly want to build and grow your employment brand, you need employee brand advocates! Now, you can do this manually and send a million emails asking for help, then send more emails showing them a piece of content to share, then hoping most will share. You can do that. It’s tough, and it’s hard to maintain.

This is where HRmarketer comes into play by automating the entire employee brand advocacy function for you! It’s like Employee Brand Advocacy on steroids!

What I like about HRmarketer’s Employer Brand Advocacy program:

– It’s priced to get people to test it! You don’t pay by the size of your company, you pay by the number of advocates that use the program. So, you can start small with one group and see how it works, then, as you prove the value, you can expand where you need it. (HR vendors should take note, this is a great pricing model).

– Super easy to create as many employee groups as you want. By skill, by location, by demographics, by hiring a manager, etc. Want more female referrals? Just create a group of all of your female employee brand ambassadors and have this group share content and job openings with their network.

– Advocates don’t have to live inside the platform. Once it’s set up and permissions approved, email reminders of new content go directly to your ambassadors who can then pick and choose what content they share and how they share it. You can also set up mobile and desktop notifications as well for new content.

– It measures the analytics so you have real data on the effectiveness of various content you share. Plus, you can also see which advocates are having the most impact, and figure out how can you leverage these employee ambassadors even more, or even set up rewards.

I’m a gigantic fan of this technology!

If you’re running a large TA shop, an employee brand advocacy program is a must. If you want to do it really well, employee brand advocacy automation is a must. HRmarketer made this platform super easy to use, you don’t have to be techy to use it, and they made it cost effective to test and show your organization the value.

So, I tell you to demo a lot. I know, I love tech and I geek out about this stuff, but this is one you really need to demo if you want to start an employee brand ambassador program, or just have interest in what and how other organizations are using these programs to expand their employment brand. Just demo it, you’ll see!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The Latest Dating Trend has Always been a Leadership Trend!

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Have you heard of the dating concept called, “Stashing”?

Here’s the Urban Dictionary definition of stashing (editor’s note: you know you’re about to read a great HR post when it starts with a definition from Urban Dictionary!):

“Stashing is when you’re in a relationship with someone and you refuse to introduce them to your friends and family; mostly because you view the person as temporary, replaceable, and/or you’re an assh@le.”

There are other reasons you might ‘stash’ someone. Maybe you know your friends and family would approve of this person, so you stash them because you still like them, but you don’t want to upset your friends and family. Maybe you’re worried your friends might try and move in on this person themselves, so you stash them.

But, usually, stashing has more to do with there is something about the person that embarrasses you, most likely because you’re a shallow, horrible person, so you stash this person you’re in a relationship with. On the leadership side, stashing actually takes the exact opposite effect.

Leadership Stashing

Leadership stashing is when a leader purposely makes sure one of their direct reports doesn’t have a high profile, so that other managers within the same organization won’t know you have a rock star on your team and then try to steal them to their team.

This happens all the time, especially within large organizations!

Here’s how it works. I’m a leader of a group, my name is Tim. A year ago I hired Marcus right out of college. Your basic new hire grad. Green as grass, just like every other new graduate. I quickly came to understand that Marcus had ‘it’. He was a natural. I know Marcus will easily be better than me in the near future if he’s not already better than me.

As a leader, I’ve got a decision to make. Keep Marcus stashed on my team and reap the professional benefits, or position Marcus for promotion, in which I’ll probably lose him off my team. With Marcus on my team, I exceeded all my measures last year, and Timmy got a big bonus. So did Marcus.

When asked in leadership meeting what I’m doing with my ‘team’ to exceed all my measures, I let everyone know some of the ‘new’ leadership accountability strategies I’m using, and how it really comes back to setting great measures and then holding your team accountable to meeting those measures. Marcus, specifically, doesn’t come up.

Am I a bad leader?

Yes, and this is happening in every organization on the planet.

We love to frame this around, “well, Marcus just needs some more seasoning, and I’m the right person to give it to him”. “Marcus is young, and not quite ready.” “Under my leadership, Marcus is thriving, but under some of these other yahoos, who knows what might happen.”

The right thing to do is obvious and simple. My group is doing well, I let the organization know, it’s a team effort, but you all have to know, I hired a rock star, and we need to get Marcus on a fast track to leadership. That’s the right thing, but it’s not as easy as it sounds when you’ve been struggling to climb your own ladder.

What we know is leaders stash talent.

It’s our job as HR pros and leaders to find that stashed talent and elevate that talent within the organization. If we don’t, that talent will most likely leave because being stashed sucks in life and in your career.

 

Career Confessions of GenZ w/@CamSackett: Maybe You Should Take Our Smartphones Away!

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March Madness is fully upon us. This season unites us all over a love for college basketball or in my case, a love for winning money by googling an article about who the “Cinderella” teams are and somehow winning your neighborhood pool (it’s only happened once). Whether your team is out (sorry Dad) or still fighting (Go Blue!), the close matches between teams can be super distracting to everyone. I know that I was watching a game in class the other day, and I don’t even like basketball that much!

It’s been found that March Madness may potentially cost employers $4 billion in productivity. It’s almost impossible to stay focused when there’s a #16 seed beating a #1 seed! (shoutout to the person running the UMBC twitter). One negative marker of Gen-Z is our ability to be easily distracted or our inability to pay attention to one thing for long periods of time. An average college student’s attention span is somewhere between 10-15 minutes, while most classes are over an hour. Although this isn’t an argument about our screwed up education system, it does open up a conversation about how to best approach the use of things such as cell phones and social media which can be very distracting.

I’ve had a cell phone since I was 10 when a family friend forgot to pick me up at swim practice. Some younger members of Gen-Z have gotten them even younger than me. We have grown up with these distractions around us at all times, and it can be difficult to manage.

I am a big fan of teachers that try to embrace the qualities of Gen-Z rather than fight it. More and more, I see teachers and professors trying to implement activities using cell phones or allowing laptops in class. Although I commend these teachers for trying to work with us, it isn’t working. Every single time I bring my laptop to class, I end up online shopping and missing some important information. The same can be said when cell phones or social media is involved.

Although it seems I’m advocating for an eradication of all cell phones and social media use during work hours, I’m not. Frankly, I don’t really know the rules of cell phones at most offices, but I know that my Dad is pretty quick to respond to my texts during the day. What I am saying is that a healthy encouragement of no cell phone use is a good idea.

I think that something like a station where you could drop off and charge your phone for a period of time could be really beneficial to boosting productivity. When I have to get work done, I’ll go put my phone across my apartment from me and turn it off completely to avoid distractions. Whoever says they are good at multi-tasking is LYING. Whenever my phone lights up, I want to check it and I know you do too.

I don’t have a solid answer for you on this one. It’s a tricky topic that isn’t black and white, but it is important to acknowledge. It is important to remind your Gen-Z employees that they are adults and cell phones aren’t banned like they are in a lot of schools. Also, it is important to remind them that this is a place of work and they are getting paid to do a job, not to sit on their phones and send Snapchats about how bored they are (that’s all that we are doing on Snapchat. I promise!). Let me know what you think in the comments!

 

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

 

Career Confessions from GenZ: Are you Pre-boarding Interns?

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College orientation was one of the most uncomfortable and awkward experiences of my life. I would say that most other current college students would attest to this. I think it’s very unreasonable to expect a group of 18-year-olds to meet for the first time and become friends in a short time span while learning everything you’re supposed to know about the school you are attending.

Thankfully I am through the college orientation process, but I have a lifetime of job orientations ahead of me. Apparently, this process in the workforce is called “onboarding” (thanks, Dad!), but to newbies like me, we invented a new term to describe this orientation called “pre-boarding”.

This new style of onboarding is a more in-depth look into general ideas about the workforce in addition to normal onboarding events. This is for people that have never worked real-life jobs before (yup, that’s me). I like this idea of pre-boarding because I am a very curious person that has a million questions and likes them all to be answered! So, here are some specific topics that I want companies to focus on while pre-boarding newbies like me:

  1. Dress Code: For someone that has always put a heavy emphasis on what I wear, this is very important to me and other young people. The words “business casual” mean absolutely nothing to me. I need concrete examples of what to wear and this means VISUALS.  I want someone to show me pictures or even show me real-life examples of what I should be wearing every day to work. Please and thank you.
  2. Logistics: I’m calling this section logistics because it encompasses a whole array of logistical things. I need to know where to park, where to sit, when I eat, where I eat, where’s the bathroom, when I’m supposed to arrive, when I’m supposed to leave, among many other things. And I would like a concrete answer to all of these. Coming from a school environment, like most newbies are, we are always told when to do things and how to do them. Therefore, it is important to realize this and adhere to how your new employees have been given information for most of their lives.
  3. Job-related content: This part of the pre-boarding process should be different for every job because it has to do with the specific duties and tasks that new employees will be performing. This can include things like meeting your fellow team members, learning how to use certain software or programs, and other instructional demonstrations as needed (you guys already know how to do this part). Will I have a laptop, desktop, no computer, no desk? Should I bring my own laptop? What about my phone, you know I’m not going anywhere without that!? 

I’m sure I’m forgetting a million other things that are important, but these are just things that I specifically worry about. For this pre-boarding process, it is extremely important to leave all questions unanswered. Gen-Z (and young people across history) DON’T ask questions, so it is important to make sure you think of everything beforehand. This process will help alleviate pressure from your new employee and will warrant an easy and successful transition into their new position.

Here’s to hoping that my future bosses will be reading this post to make it easier for me!

 

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a GenZ? Ask us in the comments and I’ll have Cameron respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for Cameron? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: The Return of Disco! @trydisco

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Today, Disco launches an AI-based communication platform that enables workers to recognize fellow employees as they work by giving them kudos and micro-feedback on their tasks and efforts. Disco helps companies motivate the 68% of disengaged employees, while also rewarding those who are contributing to a positive company culture.
Designed to enable micro-feedback interactions throughout the normal course of daily business, Disco uses a combination of keywords, AI and natural language processing (NLP) to make it easy for employees to give and receive recognition.
Disco aggregates recognition data like task- and behavior-specific props, kudos, and thanks to consumable reports for company leaders. The data is then used to facilitate more meaningful and friendly communications, to drive high-visibility recognition, and to supplement performance reviews with peer-based micro-feedback. The outcome is that business leaders are better able to craft and
cultivate the company culture through a better understanding of their employees.
So, what’s is Disco really? 
– Disco is an easy-to-use, AI-based, NLP conversational UX for Slack and Microsoft Teams, with more communications platforms coming soon.
– Disco is the brand relaunch of Growbot. Basically, it’s an appreciation and engagement mechanism employees use within Slack to recognize and reward each other.
– Already over 20,000 organizations are using Disco because of its ease of use within Slack and Microsoft Teams.
– Your cultural data rolls up into a powerful dashboard and gives you actionable insights tied to sentiment, goals, and productivity.
If your organization and your employees use Slack or Microsoft Teams, Disco is definitely something you want to check to help you drive higher levels of engagement and appreciation. It super easy to begin using and fairly inexpensive, and really becomes an addictive part of how your organization communicates with each other. Go check them out.

The Weekly Dose of HR Technology – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some of the great HR and TA technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on the Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Sackett Office Holiday Party Rules!

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Today is my annual office holiday party. The HRU Holiday Parties are pretty freaking fun! Probably like most recruiting shops and groups of elementary school teachers, we know how to let our hair down when the time is right!

You will see about 500 articles and blog posts how this season on Office Holiday Party Etiquette. Especially, with all the craziness going on with the very public sexual harassment allegations! The one thing we know about office parties is once you add alcohol stupid stuff happens.

To help everyone out, in my own Sackett kind of way, I decided we probably needed a few ‘rules’ around this year’s holiday office parties.

The Sackett 2017 Office Holiday Party Rules! 

#1 – Have a designated driver or offer up the paid Uber/Lift option right up front. It sucks trying to talk a drunk employee out of driving, they’re drunk and usually don’t want to listen. So, just make it easy and tell your employee if you’ll be drinking, just take an Uber to the party and back home, and the company will pay.

#2 – No one wants to see your junk. Okay, maybe someone wants to see your junk, but you better make sure they ask to see your junk before you start showing your junk. In fact, if I’m you, I might actually get that on video! “Hey, before I show you my junk, do you mind just looking into the camera and just saying, ‘Hi, this is ‘state your name’, I want to see your junk!”

#3 – Don’t complain about the party, the food, the drinks. You look like a douchebag when you do this. Look, someone, or some people, put this together trying their best to make everyone happy, knowing you can’t make everyone happy. If you hate the food, don’t eat and then get something you like afterward. Smile. Be thankful. Stay as long as you need to, to make your showing, then go on with your life not being an idiot. “Yeah, but there wasn’t enough chicken tenders!” Yeah, we get it Brad, here’s twenty dollars go someplace else and find some tenders.

#4 – Talk to executives before you get to your third drink. This is important because drunk talking to executives only plays well if they’re drunk too, and that probably won’t be the case. Also, don’t use the holiday party to launch your ‘big’ news about a project you want to start that is going to change the face of the company. No one wants that crap at a holiday party.

#5 – Don’t bring creepy or weird dates. This usually comes in a couple of flavors. Office dude brings a super slutty date. Great for the office dude for later, but you are the immediate joke of the party. Or super sweet office lady brings Dungeon and Dragons dude to the party who is trying to talk to everyone about the 5th dragon in world 9 that is impossible to kill without a Merlin magic mushroom, and well, yeah, that’s creepy.

#6 – Don’t say you’re coming then not come. If you don’t want to come, make that known up front. When you don’t come, after you said you were coming, and then come up with a lame excuse, it shows that you’re not fully engaged with the organization and it gets noticed. Find that excuse up front and make it known you won’t be coming, but you wish you could.

#7 – Talk to spouses! Spouses of co-workers hate coming to office holiday parties, mainly because they’re bored. Make an effort to engage them and get them joined into the conversation. One cool thing I love to do is talk to spouses and tell them really good things about their partner. Nothing feels better to your partner than to hear other people talk about how great you are!

#8 – If you start to feel tipsy, that is not a sign to start doing shots. I know this can be really confusing, right!? When you start to feel tipsy, this is your body trying to tell you that you’re about to make an ass of yourself in front of people who will share the story long after you have left this job.

#9 – No really, no one wants to see your junk! 

5 Things Leaders Need to Know About Developing Employees

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I think we try and deliver a message to organizations that all employees need and want to be developed.  This is a lie.  Many of our employees do want and need development. Some don’t need it, they’re better than you.  Some don’t want it, just give me my check.  Too many of our leaders truly believe they can develop and make their employees better than they already are.  This is a lot tougher than it sounds, and something most leaders actually fail at moving the needle on.

Here are some things I like to share with my leaders in developing their employees:

1. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” -Maya Angelou.  I see too many leaders trying to change adult employees.  Adult behaviors are basically locked. If they show you they don’t want to work.  They don’t want to work.  Part of developing a strong relationship is spending time with people who are not a waste of time.

2. People only change behavior they want to change, and even then, sometimes they’re not capable of it.  See above.  When I was young in my career, I was very ‘passionate’. That’s what I liked calling it – passionate.  I think the leaders I worked with called it, “career derailer”.  It took a lot for me to understand what I thought was a strength, was really a major weakness.  Some people never will gain this insight.  They’ll continue to believe they’re just passionate when in reality they’re just really an asshole.

3. Don’t invest more in a person than they are willing to invest in themselves.  I want you to be great. I want you to be the best employee we have ever had work here.  You need to be a part of that.  I’m willing to invest an immense amount of time and resources to help you reach your goals, but you have to meet me halfway, at least. Don’t think this means a class costs $2,000, so you should be willing to pay half. It doesn’t. Financial investment is easier for organizations to put in than for employees, but if you pay for the class and it’s on a Saturday and the employee turns their nose up to it, they’re not willing to ‘invest’ their share.

4. It’s usually never the situation that’s pissing you off, it’s the mindset behind the situation that’s pissing you off.  Rarely do I get upset over a certain situation. Frequently, I get upset over how someone has decided to handle that situation.  Getting your employees to understand your level of importance in a situation is key to getting you both on the same page towards a solution. Failure to do this goes down a really disastrous path.

5, Endeavor to look at disappointment with broader strokes. It’s all going to work out in the end.  It’s hard for leaders to act disappointed.  We are supposed to be strong and not show our disappointment.  This often makes our employees feel like we aren’t human.  The best leaders I’ve ever had showed disappoint, but with this great level of resolve that I admired. This sucks. We are all going to make it through this and be better. Disappointment might be the strongest developmental opportunity you’ll ever get as a leader, with your people.