If you’ve had a job for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly set a SMART Goal (most commonly defined as Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound). But while everyone knows how to set a SMART Goal, what most people don’t know is that they could really be hurting how they feel about their job.
I recently conducted a study called The Risks Of Ignoring Employee Feedback that involved 27,048 executives, managers and employees. And what I discovered, among other things, is that very few leaders encourage, or are open to hearing, suggestions for improvement from their employees.
One of our recent studies asked more than 30,000 employees to rate the statement “I know whether my performance is where it should be.” In an ideal world, every person in every job would say ‘I always know!’ But that’s not what I found. Just look at this chart...
Every company faces challenges, from competitors, industry changes, regulations, staffing shortages and more. But whether those changes are serious or minor, companies are doing a terrible job keeping employees in the loop. And while many leaders think that ignorance is bliss, when employees don’t feel like the company is being honest about the challenges facing it, employees get irritated very quickly.
Introduction
If you want to cost yourself a job interview, just use words like “you”, “they”, “always” and “can’t”. New research from Leadership IQ finds that interview answers rated poorly by hiring managers contain very different words than interview answers rated highly.
The terms ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ entered the lexicon during the 2016 presidential election. And now the impact of these terms are being felt in the American workplace.
During May-June 2017, Leadership IQ surveyed 3,272 leaders and professionals from the United States and discovered the following:
Nine out of ten people have heard the term ‘fake news’ and eight out of ten have heard of ‘alternative facts
There’s a common assumption that middle performers are universally maxed out, already operating at peak efficiency, and with no hope of improvement. It’s a big reason why so many middle performers (who often make up roughly 70% of the workforce) get the least amount of performance coaching from leaders. But only a scant 10% of middle performers actually fall into the maxed out/no hope category. 
When the extent to which employees trust their direct boss increases, their desire to spend their career at their current organization increases. The results of this study suggest that approximately 32% of a worker’s desire to stay or go is the result of feeling (or not feeling) trust towards their boss.While trust is a significant driver of employee loyalty, there’s still room to improve the overall levels of trust in today’s organizations. Only 20% of people strongly trust the top management of their organization. 36% moderately trust their top management, while the remaining 44% range from not trusting to strongly distrusting their top management.
Do you regularly have to ‘fake’ having a good attitude at work? Do you have to consciously “act” or “put on a show” to display appropriate emotions at work? If you do, you’re probably a lot less happy with your job than those that don’t have to put on a show.
