By Michael Holland Team engagement and motivation can wane over time. Here are five steps you can take to awaken your team. Play a Game – At the start of a team meeting or in the middle of the day play a quick round of “minute to win it” games. Utilize the energy [...]
by Michael Holland Michael Phelps won the 200 meter butterfly in the 2008 Olympics by seven-tenths of a second – and set a world record – while swimming blind the last 100 meters as his goggles filled with water. He had practiced his race so many times in his mind seeing every action, every movement, [...]
by Michael Holland Are you investing 13 minutes a day planning your work? How about your employees? Productivity increases significantly when we make conscious decisions about what to work on and for how long. Planning allows us to be proactive rather than reactive and to work for results rather than filling time fighting fires or [...]
By Michael Holland Question to Ponder: Why have organizations invested such large sums of money to fund supervisors, team leaders, managers, project managers, regional managers, associate directors, directors, senior directors, VPs, senior VPs, CFOs, CAOs, CIOs, COOs, and CEOs? A very intriguing theme from the book The Smart Swarm: How to Work Efficiently, Communicate Effectively, and [...]
by Michael Holland The departure of a high level leader from an organization creates a vacuum of leadership. In rare circumstances a company actually has an up-to-date and implementable succession plan. But for most companies, the succession plan notebook sits right next to the dust covered copy of the strategic plan on the middle shelf [...]
by Michael Holland You’ve just finished a tough business call with a very rude, obnoxious person. Now you are off to attend your team meeting. Any guess as to the climate you’ll help create for that meeting? Well social psychologists know very well what will likely happen. A team, like an individual, will follow the [...]
by Michael Holland The interesting thing about people coming together in organizations is that they tend to create a mini-society and this society will have its own personality, rules, values and behaviors. Leaders may tend to underestimate the ingrained culture within these mini-societies and overestimate their ability to change these mini-societies with simple [...]
by Michael Holland How many emails do you receive on any given day? Formal and informal studies differ on a solid average but the range runs from 48 to 75. The addiction to email is real. You need to immediately respond to the ding or ring indicating a message has arrived. For leaders today, the [...]
by Michael Holland I imagine that most employees can recite the general wording of the mission statement or vision statement or whatever statement is posted around their work environment. In our own lives we all have statements we’ve memorized: the Pledge of Allegiance, scouting pledges, the Lord’s Prayer, the first few phrases of Lincoln’s Gettysburg [...]
by Michael Holland Assessing the impact of an organization’s leadership reveals an odd, almost indescribable foggy, murky blob of an answer. We can plot out a nifty graph that shows the maturity of leaders based on facts about time in the role, education, depth and breadth of assignments, success of attaining metrics, employee retention, performance, [...]
