The airplane safety row standards are an effective test to apply to your work team members. Are they willing and able to meet your job requirements?

When a friend or loved one loses their job, you must shift into CEO mode. That means your role is to be their Chief Encouragement Officer.

Investing in employee development is critical to the long term success of any organization. Professional services firms recognize that their employees are either billable or buildable.

For the past several years Groove Management’s founder, Brian Formato has been a columnist for HR Insights Magazine. This is a compilation of his articles.

Too many organizations focus on employee retention when the goal should be employee engagement.

Leadership and entrepreneurial insights from Tom Hill, founder of Fuzion Force Entertainment Academy.

Keep your ego out of the sales process and focus on the product or service.  A lesson that many real estate brokers still have not learned.

Lay offs stink, but if you get laid off there is a right and wrong way to deal with the job loss.  First and foremost maintain your dignity.  This post tells the story of a loyal employee who lost his job after fifteen years.  How he left sets a great example for others.

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

Roy Mauer from the Society for Human Resource Management interviews Groove Management's Brian Formato on the concept of Forwardfilling jobs.

Companies and their needs evolve, they get acquired, they move their offices, they shift their business models and all too often their employees end up as casualties.  Career transition is nothing to be ashamed of.  It has become incredibly commonplace. 
 

Growing an organization in these turbulent times is challenging.   Having a long-range plan is an important tool for achieving growth over the long term.  The short-term focus that has captivated so many companies creates opportunities for those that are patient and willing to invest in the future.  The best way to invest in the future is to get your organization talking about it today.  No better time than the current to begin working on your 2020 Vision.

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.
 

As your organization scrambles to complete year-end performance reviews, ask the question “Why are we doing this at the busiest time of the year and who benefits from this approach?”  What you may find is that your process is not serving your organization and your employees very well. It might be time to rethink your approach to performance management. 

One of the most difficult tasks of a leader is to maintain a team of A players.  Steve Jobs once famously said “A players hire A players and B players hire C players.”  Research has shown that A players outperform B players 2x on essential tasks and 10x on creative tasks.  So why do so many leaders live with mediocre talent on their teams?  

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. 

Valuing talent is the key to achieving sustainable results. With the right team in place an organization’s opportunities can be boundless. A focus on talent must start with the CEO, as she or he needs to show their commitment to hiring, retaining and developing their people even in the face of market headwinds.

 One helpful activity I ask my clients to do is to create a visual career timeline.  On the X axis I have them create a timeline listing years from the time they graduated from high school to the present.  On the Y axis I have them create a legend for career growth.  The next step is to plot points on the graph that show each job or pivotal career cross-roads that they have faced. 

The toughest interview question I ever faced was frustrating at the time, but turned into one of my greatest career learnings.  

Whether you are looking for a new job, driving sales for your organization, building your business or looking for love try leveraging your connections for introductions to their connections.