Management is the bully on the playground. At least it is for too many managers in too many workplaces. Management has become captive to its disciplines of monitoring, evaluating, planning and controlling.

Management has become a dirty word. It’s ubiquitous with bureaucracy. It’s an art becoming devoid of meaning. It’s been bandied about in ethics scandals and cloaked under the guise of “doing what’s right.”

Leadership Lessons. A third of U.S. employees feel chronically overworked. 52% of U.S. families say work interferes with their family or home responsibilities. More than 54% of U.S. Americans say they will look for a better job once the economy improves. I could prattle on with statistics like the above.

Managers cannot make work meaningful for employees. Managers, however, can shape the workplace environment to let meaningful work become possible for employees. With a context set to let meaning be experienced, employees can leverage the environment to derive meaning from their work. Meaningful work is vague. What exactly is it?

Wheezing from exhaustion is the outdated view that people are resources. The prevailing view of people is one rooted in finances. Resources – money, stocks and other assets – are finite and have an expiration date. People’s capabilities and ideas, however, are infinite. And by the prevailing use of the term resources in business, people are not resources.

The prevailing thought that business competes on price and products is outdated. The paradigm from previous centuries in business was to outmaneuver the competition by competing on lowest price or best price or not price at all, but on product. Both of which is a race to the bottom. Competing on price and product is [...]

In a recent post I mention the need for employee happiness in the workplace. The post prompted two insightful, yet separate conversations about the steadiness and the place of happiness at work. The steadiness referred to the plausibility of feeling or having a sense happiness all the time throughout the organization. The other conversation centered [...]

Do you punch the clock or do you arrive at work to do your best? Do you complain about your workplace or do you seek to be part of a solution? And if there is no solution, do you find one – perhaps by leaving? I’ll stop dancing around the point: is it possible to flourish at work?

Leadership is not an accomplishment you check off your daily to-dos. At the heart of leadership is the omnipresent, bold belief that influence, relationships, dialogue and faith in people call forward our best leadership abilities. Leadership is inspiring others to give their best effort despite what they believe to get things done. Yet, there are [...]