Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

I wrote this post in 2008, midway through the Great Recession (2007-2009), which lowered demand for talent and mitigated the expected people shortage. It took a decade, but the talent shortage is here with a  vengeance — at all levels. Moreover, birth rates have fallen below replacement needs creating a demographic time bomb. One result is that bosses at all level need to become expert at managing a multigenerational workforce — not just managing, but also hiring outside their comfort zone if they want to stay staffed. More on that tomorrow.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Great post by Steve Roesler over at All Things Workplace on How Age Impacts Your View of Life. It focuses on satisfaction and expectations at various stages of life. Click over, it’s well worth reading.

But what I wanted to discuss here today appeared near the end of the post.

“During the past few years we’ve seen the headlines for Talent Wars, Saving Institutional Knowledge and Learning, and Diversity. My experience so far with recent layoffs has been that workers nearing retirement are being offered packages to accelerate their decisions…I wonder if the decision-making maturity and collective knowledge of these newly “retired” workers will be irreplaceable and actually prompt a lengthening of the recovery process.”

Steve’s got a point about the recovery, but what if this mess hadn’t happened?

What if a normal down cycle had occurred? One that didn’t go global with the same vengeance; one that required only spotty realignment as opposed to wholesale layoffs.

Worker demographics have been a global concern for over a decade, but the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and the corresponding skills needed to manage a multigenerational workforce haven’t improved nearly as much as was hoped.

Why? Is there a root to the problem (challenge, if you prefer) that should be addressed, but isn’t?

I have an idea about the root, tell me what you think.

I believe that one large piece of this problem stems from the relationship of parents and children and the difficulty of letting go and changing the paradigms.

Notice that ‘paradigm’ is plural, since there are several going on simultaneously; the major ones are

• older (parent), younger (child);
• peer (siblings/relatives) to peer;
• older (sibling/relative), younger (sibling/relative) and vice versa,

but there are multiple other minor configurations.

What I’ve found is that although there is no family involved, for many people the interaction styles are habitual, unconscious and happen across all ages with no discernible pattern.

If, in fact, this is a root problem how do we fix it? Other than a one-at-a-time approach I have no idea.

What are your thoughts regarding the validity of my hypothesis? What ideas do you have to address it?

Image credit: Wonder Woman

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Last Wednesday I noted with the year three quarters over people were likely to start obsessing and stressing about accomplishing the goals they set last January. I also said I would discuss goals further today.

Topping the list of choosing goals is the need to identify whose goals are — as explained in this post from 2009. Next Monday I’ll share one more bit of insight about goals from way back in 2006.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

This might come as a shock, but there is no Eleventh Commandment stating, “Thou shalt place thy career above all things in thy life and draw all sustenance, mental and spiritual, as well as economic, from it.”

For decades I’ve held (and preached) the career-as-part-of-life MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), as opposed to the reverse.

Life is LARGE; career is but a small part of the whole.  A major problem is created when the adjectives (and, therefore, the attitudes) are reversed.

Steve Roesler has a great post on a better way to look at your work and your life.

“The issue of work-life balance is about what kind of a life you want to have. Work plays a part in that. Decisions that you make about life determine how much work and what kind of work you do. Spending time getting clear about who you are and how you are talented is time well-spent. You may not even like the answer at first. It may conflict with expectations from you, your family, the community, and even society at large.

Maybe that’s the place to start. For those who work best with a label, perhaps Life Integration would offer a better target than Work-Life Balance.”

I like that—Life Integration.

Very few people choose how to die, but too many don’t choose how to live.

They allow the expectations of parents, educators, friends, colleagues, movies, society-in-general and the ever ubiquitous ‘they’ to choose for them.

Most will deny this publicly, but anyone who honestly remembers the power of peer pressure in school will privately admit that it doesn’t cease to exist upon graduation; in fact the pressures increase dramatically while becoming more covert.

Few successful people care to admit that the goals for which they are working and even how they spend their non-work time are more about fitting in than personal desire.

They chase the goals and do the things that ‘everybody’ is doing in the name of being ‘with it’. And that includes “work/life balance” and “having it all right now.”

So the net time you are ready to tear your hair out STOP; stop, take a step back and honestly determine whose goals you are trying to reach.

The answer may surprise you.

Image credit: arkitekt on sxc.hu

In a recent post Steve Roesler asks this question “Is your organization deliberate about identifying–up front–people who have the heart to learn about themselves and the humility to make changes accordingly?” and ends with this summary comment, “A well-bred head lights up a single office. A smart heart lights up the organization.”

I believe that a “smart heart” goes beyond the changes required for personal growth.

Whether you are a manager, aspiring leader or team member a smart heart will advance you in any arena.

It is the quality that draws people to you; it makes people want you on their team; it assures people that you have their best interests in mind; a smart heart goes hand-in-hand with trustworthiness.

Faking a smart heart for an interview might get you hired, but faking isn’t sustainable. People aren’t stupid and the truth will out.

Think about it.

Then go and light up your world.

Image credit: Svadilfari on flickr

A reader called me to get some help with a problem she was having with her team. After dealing with the specific problem (too specific and too sensitive to address here) we talked generally about building and managing teams. She said she had searched ‘team’ on my blog before calling and found the information useful and asked it I could recommend some additional reading. Searching Google returned way too many results, so I promised to send her some links.

Now, it’s always nice when someone else does your work for you and I knew that in this case Becky at LeaderTalk would do mine for me.

I knew because her theme this month was about teams and so I thought I’d share that list with all of you.

First up is a post by Mike Henry, Sr. about the Lead Change group and their efforts to create a team of like-minded people who make a difference through leadership. The post includes a link to the team’s new free e-book.  If you are not familiar with this group, check them out; you can join the group on LinkedIn.

Tom Glover has written some fantastic content about teams at his Reflection Leadership blog. I couldn’t choose only one post to include here, so read them all.

Mary Jo Asmus encourages leaders to examine how their behavior could be affecting team performance in her post, “It’s Not Them, It’s You.”

Kevin Eikenberry shares the secret to improving teams in this post entitled “The Quickest Way to Build Your Team.” As a bonus, check out this post about how to nurture strong teams without allowing them to become divisive silos.

Have you met Siddharta Herdegen? I have enjoyed checking out his blog lately. Here’s a place for you to start, with this new post “Why Leaders Need Teams.”

Miki Saxon encourages team leaders to allow people to express their individuality in this post (it also contains a cool video.) Don’t miss it!

Speaking of building teams, one way to build strong teams, according to Tanmay Vora, is to mentor team members. Read more in his post “Eight Lessons I Learned on Being An Effective Mentor.”

Wally Bock draws lessons from the NBA in this post: “Leadership: Creating Teams that Create Great Results.”

Tanveer Naseer talks about how to use the concepts of employee engagement to increase the effectiveness of teams in his post “Employee Engagement is Not Just For Leaders.”

Here’s a post from last summer at the LeaderTalk blog about how to create alignment on your team.

This post from Steve Roesler is hot off the press, published last night. Be sure to read “What to Look For in Teams” for advice from Steve that is spot-on, as usual.

Mike Myatt is straight-up about an important component of team building in this recent post.

Image credit: HikingArtist on flickr

The first Monday of the month is the signal for another Leadership Development Carnival, but don’t be fooled, it covers management and other associated topics. It is hosted this month by Sharlyn Lauby at HR Bartender and written by some of the most talented folks in the blogsphere.

It’s an extensive selection, enough to keep you going all month.

In putting together today’s carnival, I thought it might be fun to ask how long people have been blogging – their blogging “anniversary” if you will.  It was interesting to hear their answers.  On one hand, blogging has been around for a long time.  Dave Winer, author of Scripting News, has one of the oldest weblogs and it was established in 1997.  But notice the number of posts from bloggers who have been writing two years or less.  It’s very cool to see engagement from people who have been blogging for years along with the excitement of people who have been blogging for months.

10+ YearsEven if you’re not a woman or managing a non-profit, there are some classic management tips in Wild Woman Fundraising’s post Advanced Fundraising: Managing Others.

6 Years

David Zinger shares his insights about engagement in Dear Leader: An Open Employee Engagement Letter.

No, Team Leaders Should Not Behave Differently is the sage advice offered by Denise O’Berry at Intuit’s The QuickBase Blog.

5 Years

Anna Farmery at The Engaging Brand Blog talks about the heart of employee engagement in Are there 3 in your relationship!

Over at Ep!c Living blog, Eric Pennington says It’s Almost Never About You and describes the dangers of making clients second and the importance of leaving “self” behind.

Janna Rust at Purposeful Leadership blog presents her take on productivity in The Productivity Paradox: Slow Down to Speed Up.

4 Years

Wally Bock of Three Star Leadership Blog tells us in his post Strengths, Weaknesses, Your Team, and You that it’s not about individuals or the team.  It’s about both accomplishing the mission and helping team members develop.

If you are looking for practical lessons to initiate changes smoothly, look no further than the post from Steve Roesler at All Things Workplace titled Initiating A Change? Ponder This.

Jason Seiden of Fail Spectacularly fame keeps us grounded in his post, Indispensable? I doubt it. You’re simply not that important.

Companies are looking for people who can help their bottom line.  The Digerati Life gives us seven ways to show the boss what we’re made of in Hoping For a Job Promotion? How to Get Promoted at Work.

In this “relationship economy”, building lasting relationships with your customers is no longer optional.  Tanmay Vora discusses the 3 Lessons in Building Great Relationships with Customers at QAspire Blog.

Miki Saxon at MAPping Company Success explains in her post, Leadership’s Future: To Hire and Hold (Millennials), that if you want a happy workforce, you need to provide the same things that make for a happy family.

At Joe and Wanda on Management, we learn the three most important words in business and how to create and environment of mutual support in the post, Checking Six.

3 Years

Lisa Rosendahl reminds us there’s no place for Chicken Little when it comes to leadership in her post, If Your Sky Falls, It Won’t Be Because of Social Media.

Persistence pays! is the message by Leader Business blog.  Author Karl Marlantes endeavored for 32 years to get his book published.  Blogger Tom Magness asks us how hard we are willing to work toward achieving our goals.

Instead of squeezing more stuff into the day, the Monevator shares with us a new killer method for better time management in the post, Personal Time Management for Fun and Profit.

Music plays a critical role in jumping folk’s spirits.  Check out EzineArticles.com’s Coping with Colleague’s Stress at Work to find out how background music can increase workplace productivity.

2 Years

Our carnival leader, Dan McCarthy, just wrapped up an awesome series titled, The Little Things Make a BIG Difference as a Leader – Part 5: A Pat on the Back.  Be sure to check out the entire series over at Great Leadership blog.

Mary Jo Asmus from Aspire Collaborative Services helps us create organizational change by outlining the steps to move From Resistance to Participation.

The team over at Talented Apps tells us how a diverse social network can help you not be as vulnerable to your subtle, internal biases and blind spots in How Can Your Network Help Your Inner Homer? Doh!

The very dapper host of HR Happy Hour, Steve Boese, shares with us how the best leaders are not afraid to coach and mentor their top performers in The Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy – Part II.  If you didn’t catch Part I of this post, you can check it out here.

The i4cp blog suggests succession planning is not just a flawed term but a flawed paradigm.  They recommend to organizations Don’t Plan Succession, Manage It.

Michael Lee Stallard at E Pluribus Partners explains that task excellence along isn’t enough.  The answer lies in The Science of Employee Engagement.

Forbes said good leaders recognize when patterns change.  Anne Perschel over at Germane Insights Blog writes they were wrong.  Good leaders SEE INTO the FUTURE.

In order to understand ourselves, we need to Explore Life Purpose.  Mike King at Learn This takes us on the journey.

It’s a classic message.  Want to become successful? Raise Your Standard of Excellence from How to Become Successful! blog.

Bob Lieberman talks about organizational survival in his post The Need for Nerve.

Being a good project manager is an important skill for the future.  Take a look at the Project Management Interview Questions and Answers to see if you have what it takes to manage the important task of making sure projects are on-time, within quality standards and at budget.

A key skill for any leader is public speaking.  Matt Eventoff at Communications 3.0 coaches us on effective speeches in Clash of the Titans, Public Speaking and Chris Christie.  Good tips for anyone who presents information.

1 Year

Jennifer V. Miller of The People Equation cautions organizations about encouraging “fearlessness”.  See how leaders can stay on the “light side” of the force in her post the Boundaries of Fearlessness.

Celebrating her one year blogging anniversary is Becky Robinson at Mountain State University’s Leader Talk blog.  Her post titled Are Homogeneous Groups Better? is a must-read.

Also celebrating his one year anniversary is Dr. Bret Simmons.  Be sure to check out his post about Strength-Based, Individual Leadership. How Does it Affect your Team?

Rob Tucker describes the Three Barriers to Owning your Leadership Development at Reading About Leading blog.

Joshua Noerr provides us with three easy steps in Difficult Discussions.  Be sure to check out his blog Personal Development, One Mind at a Time.

Dean L. Forbes discusses the powerful principles of personal growth in his posts Attitude, Aptitude & Altitude and The Natural Law of Awareness.

Over at The Bloom Blog, Lisa Ann Edwards explains leadership in terms such as Gemstones and Spark and shares wonderful stories of people who possess those qualities.

6 Months

Jane Perdue, the one and only HR Goddess, gives us Advice from the Cheshire Puss on Finding Your Purpose at Life, Love & Leadership blog.

Mike Henry at Lead Change Group reminds us that our friends and the people we associate with set the boundaries of our future.  He suggests socializing with high-caliber leaders to become one in his post, Your Friends and Your Future.

Confronting someone is never a favorite task, but sometimes necessary to manage performance.  The Thriving Small Business blog shows us How to Confront Negative Employee Behaviors.

David Burkus from The Leader Lab explains Situational Leadership theory and why you should care about it in the post Path-Goal Theory.

The Zenger Folkman Blog tells a tale in A Monster of a Problem: How to Help Leaders Be More Inspiring.

The editor of Your Best Library shares the answer to What is the number one skill that determines the success or failure in life?

According to The SALT & Pepper Group, there are seven core leadership styles.  In their series wrap up, titled The 8th Leader, they share a specific classification system of leadership.

Timeless?

Some of our contributors have either been blogging so long they’ve forgotten or not long enough to keep track.  Regardless, their posts are worthy of a visit.

Tom Glover at Reflection Leadership tells us the best way to learn is by doing in Leadership Development: Just in Case or Just in Time.

Rodney Johnson provides some key learnings in What We Can Learn From March MADNESS.

Kevin Eikenberry shares The Five Lessons of the Eraser at Leadership & Learning blog.

MSP University’s Managed Services Blog begins an outline of the sales process in Step 1 of the 7-Step Sales Process: Strategic Preparation

And wrapping up the carnival is CMOE Consultants who channeled the wisdom of Dwight Eisenhower in their post Leadership by Leading.

Thursday I wrote Too Busy to Manage, on the idiocy of eliminating not only bonuses, but also positive feedback, and I have more excellent incentive information for you today.

First is a forward-looking article from Wharton about how and why—shocking thought—incentives should focus on the long-term. Wow, I didn’t even know anybody in the US could spell long-term.

Another wild idea from WSJ Online suggests that “the best way to keep them from leaving is to prepare them to do just that.” Check them out, you may be surprised.

Speaking of the long term, check out this overview of how Southwest Air Line has kept its industry lead. If you’re a long-term reader you won’t be surprised that the key has been insane customer focus and a fun culture.

More surprising news courtesy of Steve Roesler. “Men may be more willing than women to sacrifice achievement goals for a romantic relationship. This according to a new study by Catherine Mosher of Duke Medical Center and Sharon Danoff-Burg from the University of Albany.” Actually, ‘surprising’ is a gross understatement.

My last pick was chosen to add some levity to your day. Would you write an advice columnist if your openly part-time hooker co-worker was turning tricks on company time and then brought her other job to the office. “What really got me upset was when my co-worker was having sex with a client in our public restroom.” Read the whole story and tell me if you think it’s for real.

Image credit:  MykReeve on flickr

I do love culture, not pop culture, but the cultures that arise in companies, whether intentionally or not.

Last month I read an article on corporate culture with some surprising comments from John Chambers, Cisco CEO and Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle.

There have been many articles over the years about France’s 35 hour work week and the power of its unions. But all is not roses in the land of wine and baguettes. Read the real story of unhappy employees and a sky high suicide rate and you just may have something else to be thankful for next month.

Finally, follow through with these 4 actions described by Steve Roesler and I’ll guarantee you’ll change the culture of your group, boos productivity and have a much happier team. Just 4 things to wrap your MAP around; now that doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it?

Image credit: MykReeve on flickr

Hopefully you’re not laboring today, at least not at work.

There’s no football, so other than eating what is likely the last BBQ of the season and indulging in too much beer you might be a bit short of entertainment.

Never fear, just click the link and settle in for some great viewpoints on leadership, management, employee interaction and other pertinent subjects at September incarnation of the Leadership Development Carnival.

You’ll not only find my favorites, Wally Bock, Steve Roesler and Jim Stroup, but a host of excellent writers and downright smart people.

It doesn’t matter if you agree with what they say (I often don’t), but agree or not you will learn and that’s the real value—oft times you will learn more from those on a different side of the subject than from those with whom you agree.

Click around the carnival and then come back and share what impressed you most or what set your teeth on edge.

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: kirsche222 on sxc.hu

This might come as a shock, but there is no Eleventh Commandment stating, “Thou shalt place thy career above all things in thy life and draw all sustenance, mental and spiritual as well as economic, from it.”

For decades I’ve held (and preached) the career-as-part-of-life MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) as opposed to the reverse. Life is LARGE; career is but a small part of the whole.  A major problem is created when the adjectives (and, therefore, the attitudes) are reversed.

Steve Roesler has a great post on a better way to look at your work and your life.

“The issue of work-life balance is about what kind of a life you want to have. Work plays a part in that. Decisions that you make about life determine how much work and what kind of work you do. Spending time getting clear about who you are and how you are talented is time well-spent. You may not even like the answer at first. It may conflict with expectations from you, your family, the community, and even society at large.

Maybe that’s the place to start. For those who work best with a label, perhaps Life Integration would offer a better target than Work-Life Balance.”

I like that—Life Integration.

Very few people choose how to die, but too many don’t choose how to live.

They allow the expectations of parents, educators, friends, colleagues, movies, society-in-general and the ever ubiquitous ‘they’ to choose for them.

Most will deny this publicly, but anyone who honestly remembers the power of peer pressure in school will privately admit that it doesn’t cease to exist upon graduation; in fact the pressures increase dramatically while becoming more covert.

Few successful people care to admit that the goals for which they are working and even how they spend their non-work time are more about fitting in than personal desire.

They chase the goals and do the things that ‘everybody’ is doing in the name of being ‘with it’. And that includes “work/life balance” and “having it all right now.”

So the net time you are ready to tear your hair out STOP; stop, take a step back and honestly determine whose goals you are trying to reach.

The answer may surprise you.

Image credit: arkitekt on sxc.hu

The leadership industry dotes on the idea that visions are what make leaders, since they influence people, and that visionaries aren’t like you and me and require special handling.

It’s CEO visions—those rosy predictions, high hopes and self-deluding prophesies—that fill annual reports that sway analysts.

From Business Week: Are stock analysts swayed by an annual report’s CEO letter to stockholders? Yes, concludes a forthcoming study in Organization Science. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University and other schools looked at 367 shareholder letters written by new CEOs from 1990 to 1999—giving each leader a “charismatic vision” score. To assign ratings, they scrutinized the texts for moral, ideological, and emotional characterizations of future plans and past mistakes. They also counted the number of times such words as “believe” and “commitment” appeared—along with team-oriented terms like “we” and “our.” Their finding: the more charismatic the text, defined in this way, the more likely analysts were to issue a “buy” for the company. Such language also led to off-the-mark earnings forecasts from analysts. While the decade studied coincided with the dot-com era, when analysts often said “buy,” Penn State management professor and co-author Vilmos Misangyi believes the findings also apply to the current economy, as uncertainties may prompt a strong reliance on a business leaders’ words. “If anything,” he says, “I would expect stronger effects today.”

Keep that in mind when you invest the paltry amount you have left after the most recent Wall Street vision decimated the economy.

Why is it that we accept as intelligent gospel visions of credit default swaps and derivatives from guys in $3000 suits, but would consider the same ideas as ravings if they came from a smelly guy wearing dirty clothes?

How much of so-called leadership vision is form and how much substance (or the result of a substance)?

And even when the substance is there, what is it worth when it’s left as a vision with no operational plan?

Read this post from Steve Roesler for a great example of vision sans plan.

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: sjtodey on sxc.hu