John S. Barry staked his entire claim on WD-40 and the motto of keeping it simple. When he took over his father-in-law's small company—$1 million in annual...
Here’s a potential electronic communications problem you may not have considered. An employee who forwards e-mail from a company computer and e-mail account to his...
Legendary football coach Bill Walsh remembers that quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young came to the San Francisco 49ers with supremely high expectations of...
Say you manage Kevin, a 55-year-old employee whose productivity drops over the year. Instead of citing specific, measurable examples of this decline in his performance...
Good communication skills are more valuable than knowing PowerPoint inside and out, according to a new survey, in which 67% of human resources managers said they would...
In a much-watched case, the Texas Supreme Court has refused to expand employer liability for employee off-duty conduct. That’s good news for employers, which faced...
We’re updating our employee handbook and we would like to include a policy limiting employees’ use of the phones for personal business. We want to allow...
Here's a collection of creative employee benefits programs, excerpted from our Compensation & Benefits newsletter: 1. Expectant and new moms get help from co-worker...
While investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, physicist Richard Feynman pondered what had caused a disconnect between managers and leaders that...
Question: “I am a fairly new manager. One of my employees thinks he knows everything and frequently talks back to me. Every morning, I have a short staff meeting,...
Q. We have two employees who have the same job title, job description and functions. We pay one a flat salary ($120,000). We pay the other a base salary plus a fixed...
The hallmark of a good leadership story? Inspiring, motivational, memorable and short—like, two minutes short. In the age of Twitter, people don’t have time...
Many leaders at larger companies fancy themselves too busy or important to do the messy work of managing, says Henry Mintzberg, management professor at McGill....
It happens to every manager: You sit down to prepare a staff member's review and realize you can remember only what the person has done the past few weeks. Supervisors...
A progressive discipline system is a way to deal with employee performance problems. It's also the most reliable way to avoid wrongful termination charges.
Insight is so central to invention that legend has Archimedes, who suddenly realized how to calculate density and volume, jumping from his bath and running naked through...
A bad attitude can manifest itself in everything from quiet disobedience to outright insubordination. Here's how to handle employees with bad attitudes.
Employees who want a promotion sometimes get upset when they aren’t selected, especially if the job winds up going to someone they perceive as less skilled or...
