Leadership – Page 2

41 years later, what did University really teach me?

October 9, 2020

I recently read Dave McKay’s (President & CEO at RBC) post on “Why IBM’s Ginni Rometty has me thinking about the future of post-secondary learning”. In the post, “Ginni says the half-life of most specialized skills nowadays lasts just five years.” I recall being told a similar statement when I graduated engineering in 1979, that ...

COVID-19 Realities

September 17, 2020

Like many, I am trying to follow COVID guidelines to limit physical business and social interactions, keep my bubble small, wear a mask when out and about, hand wash and sanitize frequently, but I must admit that it is getting harder to stay as diligent as I was in the early months of the pandemic. ...

Working post-COVID… for the times, they are a-changin’

May 4, 2020

You may have seen the headline “OpenText won’t reopen half of its physical offices post COVID-19 pandemic”. In the article, the writer says Opentext’s CEO Mark Barrenechea “is saying out loud what a lot of C-level executives are thinking. The new normal will require less commercial real estate as the capital expenses required can be deployed ...

Managing the Attrition Bubble during the COVID Downturn

April 9, 2020

If you are not managing your “Attrition Bubble” now, expect it to impact your ability to grow once a recovery starts. If you don’t know what an Attrition Bubble is, read on… In every business, there is a natural employee attrition of departing people that takes place every year. Generally, attrition is measured in two ...

Leading and Managing through the COVID Downturn

March 29, 2020

Thank you all for your likes, comments and shares of my previous post, “What do Covid-19 and Y2K have in common”. As I read your comments, it struck me that it may be valuable to some share some of my learnings from other downturns. I have now been through six significant downturns or economic crises: the recession ...

A middle manager’s guide to managing in an economic downturn

March 26, 2020

You are a manager or director in a small or medium sized company. This is your first or second management role and you have never experienced the business turmoil of the past two weeks. What should you do now and what should you be doing next? The answer to the first question is likely more ...

Crying

November 11, 2019

Spoiler Alert…rant ahead I don’t get it. As employers, we ask our employees to bring 100% of themselves to work… be who you are… yet it is okay to have a stress cry at home, but it is not okay to cry at work. Why is it okay for a person to get stressed at ...

Managing Performance

June 10, 2019

About a decade ago, the Toronto based company Rypple (acquired by Salesforce in 2012) popped onto the tech scene and made a lot of noise with their very loud marketing strategy that claimed Employee Performance Management systems are broken. Their argument was that current performance management systems and processes as practiced in most companies don’t ...

Diversity and work-life balance

June 2, 2019

Most companies aspire and strive to become a high-performance company and believe high-performance leaders are needed to drive a high-performance culture, but what does that mean? Growing up through my career during the eighties, nineties and into the new millennium, it was commonly accepted that for someone to become a senior leader, it meant long ...

When hiring, do you do your own reference checks? You should!

July 17, 2018

I continually meet with leaders who have hired an employee, only to terminate them within months of recruiting them. When I ask why, they reveal that they were surprised by a behaviour or absence of a critical skill set that didn’t surface during the interview process. When I ask whether they personally did reference checks, ...

Category: Leadership