A study looked at the early lives of 300 exemplary people who left indelible marks on the world. These were 300 world changers like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, and Clara Barton. They contributed in various ways across various times and in various industries but held some things in common. What did the study find?

Among these 300 exemplary people:

• 75% were troubled by poverty, broken home or difficult parents
• 74 of 85 fiction writers and 16 of 20 poets saw...

In our last post, we answered, “What is Psychological Safety?” and we followed it up with a webinar on the topic. During the webinar, we asked attendees to rate their current level of psychological safety at their workplace from 1-5 with 5 being the highest.

What would you say about yours?

For our webinar attendees, the average response was 3. If this was a test, the score would be 60%, a grade of D.

One of the definitions we highlighted comes from Dr. Timothy R. Clark, who says ...

How open do you feel to take a risk at work? Are you afraid that if you make a mistake you’ll be embarrassed or rejected? How much do you trust the members of your team?

According to experts, questions like these help to measure a critical aspect of a healthy workplace—psychological safety. But what is psychological safety? Let’s look at what two experts say.

In 2012, Google was curious about what made a successful team, so they created “Project Aristotle” to...

With increased stress to employees, remote working conditions, and societal pressures, making employees feel recognized and appreciated is more important than ever.

Aside from the human relations side, the business benefits of employee recognition are numerous. Studies published by Forbes and GetHppy show that employee recognition improves engagement, customer satisfaction, employee retention, employee experience, and performance.

Actually, “Praise and commendation from managers was...

The Coronavirus is affecting everyone, and with it brings stress: concern for health and safety, loss of work, shift in school, change of routine, uncertainty about the future, grief in relationships…I don’t have to go on. How do you deal with stress? In this blog post, we’ll lay out four suggestions for how to effectively manage stress.

This is an important skill to have, not only in these days of pandemic, but for everyday stress as well. Let's look at four...

We all hear that strong employee engagement is good for your organization, but is it really? Are engagement consultants and workplace improvement organizations just trumping up the value of engagement so they can sell their services to you? Are they telling you how bad your engagement is so they can show you how good their solution is?

Maybe. But how is employee engagement good for your bottom line? Before we consider that, let’s review what employee engagement is.

There are different...

As the head of Human Resources for our company, I have a vision for our employees. It comes down to five words. We want to be:

• Person-centric
• Performance-minded
• Strengths-based
• Engagement-focused
• Self-aware

Here’s what I mean.

In Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, he writes about the three causes of job misery.

Job Misery

One of them is anonymity—the sense that at work, you are unknown as a person. What a sad thing! Being unknown at work makes...

The other day I was coaching a supervisor whose team members weren’t as engaged as she wanted them to be. We talked about the reasons for that and brainstormed possible solutions. After coming up with five or six possibilities, she highlighted two that seemed doable for her, and decided to try them. I’m looking forward to hearing the results.

Myth: Sometimes supervisors get the idea that producing highly engaged employees is all their responsibility.

And so, they don’t want...

I’m on a kick to read books on employee engagement. My reading list for the New Year is full of them. As the head of our company’s human resources function, my role is help drive employee engagement. The reason is simple—when employees are engaged, everyone wins.

So how do we drive engagement?

In his book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, Patrick Lencioni shares three causes of “job misery” (what a wonderful, yet terrible term). If you’ve ever been...

Last time we talked about the benefits of creating a role and outcome statement for employees. Now let's talk about how to do it. Only 60% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work, which leaves 40% guessing and the engagement level plummeting.

At my day job at EnergyCAP, Inc., we’ve created role and outcome statements for every employee, which are accessible to the entire company. Like I said, doing so has yielded big benefits for our employees,...