As I have written before, during the Mad Men era a significant portion of employees spent their careers working for a single employer and retiring with gold watches and lifetime pensions. This isn’t to say that people didn’t lose their jobs – we still had a general doctrine of employment at will – it was more that decent performance in a stable company generally led to a lifetime with your employer. And employees responded to that sense of stability with a sense of trust in and commitment to their employer. (more…)

I’ve written before on my work with corporate culture change.  In particular, I wrote about how culture is unconscious and works at the implicit level. So the strategy to change it needs to make the unconscious and implicit more conscious and explicit.  So we identified and labelled behaviors that we felt were the critical few that needed to be addressed and then defined the new behaviors that we desired and recognized and reinforced those.

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Neuroscience and the workplace is a relatively recent topic. It is kind of one of those topics that naturally lends itself to tweets, magazine cover articles, books and media appearances. Add the fact that it has a compelling speaker like David Rock as one of its key proponents and it has all the makings of a trendy topic.   Most of the applied work in this area traces back to David Rock, so let’s look at his perspective.

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This is a long and (somewhat) meandering post that I first wrote about a year ago and just updated with some new links on pay equity.

I’ve never considered myself a feminist and a “Women’s History Month” post wasn’t on a list of my top ten posts to write in March 2015, but there was a lot of good, vigorous debate and conversation about all things “women” going on around that time.  Here’s a recap of a ten-day period in March 2015. (more…)

I just read two fairly lengthy articles – each coming to nearly opposite conclusions about the motivational power of pay. One by Herman Aguinis, Harry Joo and Ryan K Gottfredson essentially argued that the research on how well pay motivates hasn’t yet made it to the business world. Or to quote the authors directly …. “There is an important body of scholarly research ….. this research does not seem to have reached many managers and organizational decision-makers.” Since I consider myself a practitioner that is current with the research and still not fond of pay as a motivator, this statement got my dander up a bit.  (more…)

As you may have noticed, I have a fairly consistent 26-27 replies to my blog posts. And as my husband figured out (he was moderately impressed with my “following” before he did), they are students in the Advanced Topics in Workforce Management course that I am teaching in UB’s MS Accounting Program. This post represents the last to which they have to reply. I’ll miss reading their posts here, but I will also miss seeing them in class every week as our time together runs out in 3 more classes.

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I started my professional career in the legal industry and in 9+ years as a law clerk and an attorney, in at least two law firms and in a clerkship, in I don’t ever remember having an official “performance” evaluation. But I also don’t recall ever feeling like I didn’t know what was expected or how I was doing.

When I switched careers to Human Resources, my first two jobs were in healthcare where there are accreditation standards that require formal, documented performance evaluations. And yet, I still can’t recall having a performance evaluation either as an employee or as a manager.   Maybe I blocked it out.

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An oft-cited statistic is that 70% of development actions should come from experience, 20% from relationships/feedback and 10% from education/training. The source is often listed as CCL and Lombardo and Eichinger. It has been cited so often that is has become gospel. But recently, there has been a spate of articles raising an issue of whether this statistic may be receiving more weight than is justified by the research behind it.

Here’s the research, according to TDMagazine.  It comes from 191 executives looking back on their careers and listing what things made the difference in how they now manage.  The lessons learned followed this 70:20:10 breakdown. (more…)