Do you avoid telling employees what you really think because you know they’ll get angry or drag their feet? When you give constructive feedback, do people get defensive or start blaming and making excuses?

Here’s a shocking statistic: According to recent Leadership IQ study, 51% of employees say they get too little constructive feedback from their boss. BUT it’s not quite as simple as just giving more feedback, because 65% of employees say that when their boss does criticize poor performance, the boss doesn’t provide enough useful information to help employees actually correct the issue.

This 60-minute teleconference and webinar called “Giving Constructive Feedback Without Making People Angry” teaches you how to have open and truthful feedback conversations, even about the toughest topics, without making people defensive or angry. The results are improved performance, better relationships, smarter decisions and greater accountability.

This 60-minute teleconference and webinar called “Giving Constructive Feedback Without Making People Angry” will show you:

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

DATE & TIME:
This 60 Minute LIVE Teleconference is being held on Thursday, March 11th at at 12:00 Eastern Time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 3 bestselling books, including Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

In this teleconference called Managing Remote Employees, we’ll show you the latest techniques for leading far-flung teams and employees. You’ll learn specific communication routines (including what questions you should always ask), how to keep employees disciplined (even when you can’t see them), and how to build trust from miles away. We’ll also teach you which personality types work best in remote settings, and what leadership adjustments you need to make to be successful in virtual settings.

Most managers have at least a few employees located in another building, state or even country. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s another 50 million Americans that work remotely from home. While technology has made this possible, the reality is that most leaders struggle to manage remote employees and teams. Managing the virtual team is not like managing the people outside your door. And many of the typical leadership techniques just don’t work in remote settings.

In this special 60 minute Teleconference, you call into a teleconference line to listen and ask questions and you get handouts/slides to download and keep. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like and even interact directly with Mark Murphy, one of the country’s leading management experts.

This 60-minute session will show you:

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in on a single phone line via speakerphone. You will also get slides to download before the session.

DATE & TIME:
This 60 Minute LIVE Teleconference is being held on Tuesday, March 16th at 12:00 Eastern Time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 3 bestselling books, including Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

Every one of us has sat through meetings that wasted time (whether face-to-face or remote). Where people showed up late, and unprepared. Where discussions raged endlessly without anybody making a decision. Where people kept getting off topic. Where one person dominated the conversation, and other passive people said nothing. Where you were pretty sure that people who were on teleconference were doing other things (like checking their email).

But if you want team meetings where people are focused, attentive, prompt, decisive, engaged and intelligent, then you need to attend this teleconference called Running Team Meetings That Don’t Waste Time. This special teleconference gives you the latest techniques (and technologies) for running extraordinary meetings, whether they’re remote or face-to-face. And we’ll show you how to use the latest tools to engage people DURING meetings, and keep them accountable AFTER the meeting.

This 60-minute session called “Running Team Meetings That Don’t Waste Time” will show you:

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

DATE & TIME:
This 60 Minute LIVE Teleconference is being held on Wednesday, March 17th at at 12:00 Eastern Time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 3 bestselling books, including Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

This event is now past. You can purchase this content with our e-learning library. You can contact Nicole Jordan, VP of Business Development, via email at nicole@leadershipiq.com

Superstar employees are NOT motivated just like everybody else (their psychology is very different). So you can’t use the same old techniques and expect to keep your high performers, let alone keep them operating at a superstar level.

Remember this disturbing fact: According to one of Leadership IQ’s most famous studies, 47% of high performers want to leave their jobs (but only 18% of low performers want to quit).

Your superstar employees need different motivators, different goals, different feedback and coaching conversations, even different development plans and career maps. Every company says they want high performers, but most have absolutely no idea what it really takes to keep star performers happy (and no, it’s not all about money).

This 60-minute session called “Managing & Motivating Your Superstar Employees” will show you:

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

DATE & TIME:
This 60 Minute LIVE Teleconference is being held on Friday, March 5th at at 12:00 Eastern Time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 3 bestselling books, including Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

These are just a few of the day-t0-day challenges members of remote teams are asked to face.  All difficult situations, especially for anyone accustomed to working in a co-located environment.   So, as more and more organizations take the remote plunge, it’s inevitable that a new set of leadership rules are almost daily being developed.  One of which is: Not everyone is geared to work well when working remotely.

Translation: your star in-house player, the person you depend upon to save the day when things get chaotic…despite that Hundred Percenter quality; he or she may fail if asked to work remotely.   What’s more, you may be surprised when you start to dig into the reasons why.  It takes a certain kind of personality to be an MVP in the remote work world.  But as many leaders have already discovered, the factors that govern success are not always what intuitively comes to mind.

For instance, it’s a commonly held belief that the quiet types (the folks who keep to themselves) are the high performers in remote work situations.  But think about it. If you’ve ever worked remotely, even for a day or two, you know how isolating it can be.  And that’s true even for those people who absolutely love their solitude. 

The fact is, it’s the outgoing personalities; people who are connected and who show a natural knack for building bonds, that make the most successful remote employees.   Technology can do a lot, and we’re continually provided with amazing new tools.  But no gadget or program can ‘fix’ someone who is reluctant to reach out and interact—or ‘plug in’ in a person who feels compelled to withdraw at the first signs of stress or trouble.

This event is now past. You can purchase this content with our e-learning library. You can contact Nicole Jordan, VP of Business Development, via email at nicole@leadershipiq.com

2009 was a very tough year for employees (employee engagement has plummeted at many companies). But now in 2010, you’ve got a rare opportunity to kick-start a new year, reignite your employees’ passion, win back their commitment, and put the “spark” back in your culture.

After studying more than 100 organizations that have turned tough times into reinvigorated and passionate cultures, we’ve distilled the best practices for your entire leadership team. This 60-minute Teleconference & Webinar shows you how to “put the spark back in your culture” and gives you the specific tools and tactics you need to start this year off right (and remember, you only get one chance to start a new year so don’t miss your opportunity).

This 60-minute session called “Put the Spark Back in Your Culture” will show you:

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in on a single phone line via speakerphone. You will also get slides to download before the session.

DATE & TIME:
This 60 Minute LIVE Teleconference is being held on Wednesday, February 17th at 12:00 Eastern Time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 3 bestselling books, including Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

That mindset may buy you a long lease on the status quo, which may feel safe at the moment.  But when was the last time the status quo produced something exceptional?  Something like the iPad, iPod, X-Box, Amazon Kindle, Google or the Human Genome Project.  All great successes that arrived on the coat tails of some element of risk.  Or consider the successes of some of the more famous risk takers: Bill Gates who dropped out of college to start Microsoft.  Or Jeff Bezos, who quit a high-paying job to start up Amazon.com.  Both of who chose to push the edge on their potential rather than settle for the status quo.

We’re not all quite as naturally gutsy as Gates and Bezos, though. Sometimes even the most talented folks need a push from a strong leader to make them take the leap and go beyond self-imposed limitations—past the lure of being just good enough.  Assigning employees truly challenging or HARD goals (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult) is one way 100% Leaders encourage this kind of innovation. 

It’s your goal, and that means you’re in charge and your fingers are firmly on the controls.  But by lifting the often stifling restrictions found in the typical goal (namely a requirement that it be achievable and realistic), you open your people up to a world of previously unexplored possibilities.  A world where taking an element of risk can provide a big pay off. Instead of issuing a warning that says, “Hold on, don’t take too big a bite, stay within your limitations,” HARD goals send the message of, “What I propose is going to be a challenge, and I don’t have all the answers.  I’m depending on your knowledge and innovation to get us there.”

Get your people feeling safe to step up to the HARD goal plate by openly rewarding employees who show incentive to take a risk: even when the result of that risk is only partial success or failure.   Of course, I don’t mean foolish and wild risk.  But rather real and valuable risk, where someone pushed past the status quo and tested his or her limits to try and effect something great.  Create enviable heroes, workplace celebrities that people want to emulate, whenever anyone goes beyond doing what’s easy— to do what’s right.

In response to this, many organizations go ahead and ask their people, “What do you want?” Most often in the form of employee surveys that ask direct questions like, “Do you have a friend at work?” or “Do you trust your boss?”  Here’s the thing, every survey question asked implies a promise that something positive will be done with the answer given.   

Granted, you may get some responses like, “Everything’s fine, I just want a new coffee pot in the break room.”  That’s the easy stuff.  But it gets more difficult when you’re told, “No, I don’t have any friends here.  What are you going to do about it?” or, “No, I don’t trust my boss one bit. In fact, I’ve already got one foot out the door because of it.”  That’s heavy stuff that can’t be ignored.  Bottom line; if you don’t know how to fix a situation, don’t risk destroying employee trust by asking about it until you do. 

We conducted a survey on what influences employees to trust the boss (one of the largest studies on this ever done).  Honesty and truthfulness, while important, did not top the list on what drives employee trust.  Rather, it was the extent to which leaders respond constructively to employees who bring them work-related problems. 

And yet, in many organizations, a solo ground rule exists: Trust is the result of honesty.  Not that’s there’s anything wrong with honesty.  I’m personally a big fan of it.  But it’s going to take affirmative action—as well as honesty—in order for your team to keep believing you’ll make good on your promises.  Then, even in situations where a promise does take a little longer than expected to materialize, your support system will remain strong against the resistance of the few folks who still might try to bring you down.

Where to start?  Look at each of your current employee survey questions and ask yourself:  Can I absolutely fix this if someone says, “I’m unhappy with this.  Do something”?  And, it’s not okay to sorta know what you might do or to take a guess.  I’m talking definitive fix here.  The step after that is to replace faulty employee survey questions with questions that relate to what it takes to feel passionate about giving 100 % in your organization.  And that’s fodder for a whole other blog.

Organize each of today’s incoming emails into one of the following 5 categories:

 1. Necessary for you right at this very moment.

2. Necessary for you, but at a later time.

3. Waste of time for you; perhaps useful for others.

4. Waste of time for everybody.

5. Beyond wasteful; actually created a problem

It’s typical to find only a very few emails that fit category one—which are the emails that truly justify the time spent reading them.

Now take the same five categories and assess the emails you sent out today. How many of them addressed something that was necessary for the reader right at that very moment? And how many could have waited an hour, two hours, or even until the end of the day to be sent? Maybe in an “FYI” collaboration of points that while important, are not so critical that they require someone to abort whatever they they’re doing to focus on an email. Most people stop whatever they’re doing to read incoming email. That means they have to refocus in order to continue with their work. A substantial time suck that can easily be avoided.

There are a number of factors leaders need to address in cutting down the email usage in an organization. However, there is a foundational question, which if you can inspire your folks to consider before hitting the Send button, will immediately start to eliminate unnecessary emails. The question is: What is the purpose of this email?

In it’s most constructive form, an email is a medium for gathering information and/or creating action on the part of the reader. If the message being sent does not request action or information (i.e. call a client, read a report, provide statistics from a recent survey) from the person to whom the email is addressed, the question must be asked, does this email really need to be sent?

The fact is, most leaders don’t focus on what their people are thinking about as they hit the Send button. Consequently, in boxes are stuffed to the gills.  This typically creates one of the following three reactions: defer the email (stick it in a subfolder and let it sit for eternity), delete the email without reading it (admit it, you do it too), or let the email linger (sitting indefinitely ignored in an inbox). These are all reactions that will go a long way in making sure the folks from whom you need information or action never even read your critical emails.

Stop the email madness.  Make it an organizational rule: if the message in an email doesn’t contain an urgent request for information or action, stop and ask if it really needs to be sent.