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.

Executive assistants are the unsung heroes of many organizations, but hiring amazing support is often a challenge. We have found the secret ingredient is discretionary effort and we have an approach to interview for that skill.

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

If HR is responsible for managing under-performers in the organization, what happens when the head of HR is the under-performer?

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.

The decision to hire someone with a different work style and approach is the easy part. The harder part is flexing your style as a manager to allow someone with a different work style than yours to be themselves and excel. Too often we try to change people to fit in to an organizations culture. The best companies leverage diversity as a strength. They try to hire people with diverse work styles, and backgrounds and most importantly they create space within the organization for people to play to their personal strengths.
 

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.