Striking the right balance between praise and punishment with employees is a challenge for most leaders. The term to sharpen your carrots is Groove Management’s way of helping leaders to remember to strike the right balance.

If you want employees to return to the office are you framing the ask properly? CNBC has been calling Wall Street CEOs Office Monsters. What if they referred to them as Culture Crusaders instead and focused on the positives? Would that change the dialogue?

Churnover is a repetitive turnover issue with the same position. There is usually a root cause to the same position turning over multiple times.

With the great resignation challenging businesses, now is the ideal time to forwardfill open roles in your organization.

Do you refer to your work team as a family? What are the pros and cons of doing so? How do scaling organizations maintain a soul? These are some of the questions explored in this blogpost.

Covid has disrupted the way that individuals and teams communicate. Would you rather see my body or my face? These are the pros in cons of an in person masked meeting versus a maskless video meeting.

Making work from home work for your organization.

Honest is a rare thing in this day and age. When you come across someone with high integrity it makes you take notice.

My Chance encounter with Herb Kelleher from Southwest airlines

Tough times are actually the most important times to invest in team building, but few leadership teams understand that.

Five Charlotte are team building activities that Groove Management can help you organize and facilitate.

Know it alls make the worst leaders.  The best leaders ask great questions.

Unlike in sports where the competitions are scheduled, in business the competition never stops, unless your team calls a TIMEOUT.  When was the last time your team called a timeout.

I have worked for three companies in my career that had Ping-Pong (Table Tennis) tables in the offices.  The Motley Fool,Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner operation and Doosan Infracore International.  The existence of a Ping-Pong table in each of those environments was very telling about the type of culture that each company wanted to foster.

As a former leader that I worked with always said using the military term, you want “Fewer soldiers, better fed”.  A headcount freeze is an opportunity to increase hiring not freeze it.  The problem is that too many organizations mix up the intent versus the impact.  It is important to be very clear on the goal.  If the goal is to freeze employee expenses (salaries and benefits) at their current level, then a headcount freeze can achieve the same result as a hiring freeze, but in a much more effective manner. 

One of the biggest issues facing many our Groove Management’s clients is employee retention.  Turnover is up across the board.  Voluntary attrition rates continue to climb because the job market has heated up.  Employees are recognizing that there are a lot more opportunities in the marketplace than have existed during the past eight years.  With the aid of LinkedIn and other socialrecruiting tools, recruiters are doing a better job of identifying passive job seekers.  The end result is that companies are struggling to hold onto their top talent.

Similar to starting a new job or a new school, the Panthers entered the 2014 season feeling good about themselves.  They had completed a winning season the year before despite being eliminated in the first playoff game.  This season got off to a decent start with a 2-0 record.  The fans were on board and everyone had high hopes.  Then the Panthers hit a wall.  It was as if someone had cast a spell over them.  They won only one of their next nine games; well they did have a tie in there.  Entering December with a record of 3-8-1, the fans and everyone else had counted them out.  Maybe next year they would get their act together. 

Action learning programs exercise the strategic muscles of an organization, build leadership capability, drive employee engagement and improve business results.  Why not trust your strategy projects to your high potentials?

A few employment branding ideas,  each one serves the purpose of building a stronger employment brand.  The products connect your employees to your brand in a unique and fun way.  Even more importantly they connect your employees family to your company and your brand.

By providing a daily visual, the leaders could see that they were being measured against their colleagues.  This graphical view of response rates translated into a 97% response rate for one business unit and helped push the enterprise response rate over 90%.