How To Help Your Employees Grow And Develop Their Careers

Author Paul Falcone offers the following great advice for how to become a stronger career mentor and coach by helping your employees grow and develop in their own careers.

Encourage others to engage in random acts of kindness.
Find creative ways of surprising your customers.
Focus on making bad relationships good and good relationships better.
Look for new ways of reinventing the workflow in light of your company's changing needs.
Think relationship first, transaction second.
Realize that people can tell more about you by the depth of your questions than by the quality of your statements.
Separate the people from the problem.
Always provide two solutions for each question you ask or suggestion you raise.
Employ right-brain imagination, artistry, and intuition plus left-brain logic and planning.

And, one of my favorite pieces of advice from Falcone:

Convert "yes...but:" to "yes...and" statements to acknowledge the speaker's point of view and to share additional insights.

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Effective Listening: Do's And Don'ts

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Resolve To Find A Mentor In 2025

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Top Five Factors That Drive Employee Loyalty

A 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management shows that job security is what matters most to employees. And, having that job security helps to keep employees loyal. Okay, that's really not too surprising during these times of high unemployment. Next on the list is benefits . The unstable economy, coupled with rising health care costs, make employer offered benefits more important than ever. Third on the top five list is an employee's opportunity to use his/her skills . When employees feel good about their jobs and their abilities, and clearly know they are contributing to their organization they remain engaged and loyal. In fourth place is an organization's financial stability . Compensation came in fifth on the top five list. Employee pay often is not the most important driver for employee retention. Despite study after study that shows pay is not the top reason employees stay with a company, research results like these often surpris...

Ask Your Customers To Help You Write Your Strategic Plan

Mike Brown, the founder of the Kansas City company called, The Brainzooming Group, encourages business leaders to solicit feedback from their customers when creating a strategic plan. Brown recently wrote in Smart Companies Thinking Bigger magazine, that you should “ask a group of current, former and potential customers the following questions:" If you’re a current or former customer, why did you start using us? What have we done in the past to make your biggest challenges more difficult? If you still use us, why do you continue to do so? If you don’t use us currently, what are some of the reasons why you don’t? “These questions are designed to allow your customers to share their perspectives and opinions openly, not rate performance on a numerical scale,” explained Brown. He explained that the answers to the questions will provide you valuable insight into : Your current strengths and weaknesses Opportunities to more successfully help your customers Potential challen...

Do You Really Need To Read Leadership Books?

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3 Coaching And Mentoring Tips

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How To Improve Your Internal Communication Skills

Here is this week's book recommendation. It's a quick read, yet power-packed with useful tips for communicating effectively -- tips you can start to use tomorrow. And, the eBook is free! As author David Grossman says, "good internal communication gets the message out, but great internal communication helps employees connect the dots between overarching business strategy and their role. When it’s good, it informs; when it’s great, it engages employees and moves them to action. Quite simply, it helps people and organizations be even better." I really found this book useful.

Eric Jacobson On Management And Leadership

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