I’ve just been reading about the frustrations of a Human Resources manager. He’s tired of having to answer the same questions about benefits over and over again. I understand that, having been on both sides of the issue, both as a consumer of benefits and in communicating about them on behalf of corporate clients. Benefits can be the slippery eels of internal communication. But, to put the issue into context, this is another case of complex communication. In this case, a large volume of information that’s not easy to understand. Descriptions of benefits typically involve a high...

Not long ago I was asked to come out and take a look at a business that had been around for about 10 years… but the owner was frustrated with the amount of money he was making. Here is the story of a natural food retail store located in New York State. The business itself is located in western New York State, within a small village. It sits upon one of the main drags going through the village and probably sees as much car & foot traffic as any other business in the limited downtown area. Im going to approach this as an outside-inside project. In other words, Im going to look at the...

Every business must strive to provide quality products and services to customers. To achieve that objective the company must draw well thought out policies and procedures to ensure 100% achievement of the targets. Here are some tips to ensure that your business attains and enhance quality: Document Quality Objectives and Procedures Quality management objectives, policies and guidelines must be set and published in manuals, in the business newsletter, on the notice board and wherever appropriate. This is to educate and remind employees and management and serve as guidelines. Even suppliers and customers...

Child custody? How’d that get to be an employer’s concern? When an employee faces child custody litigation, it will effect their ability to do their job. And it often causes legal consequences for their employers as well. Unless you know where to draw the lines regarding your legal obligations and exposure, you could find your employee’s custody difficulties costing the company in a variety of ways. Custody problems have a major impact in the workplace, where they effect other employees, as well as hurting the bottom line. Worse yet, they can be disruptive in the workplace for...

You may have the MBA but if an internal critic constantly berates you, or you have feelings of self-doubt, low self-confidence, fears of rejection or other negative emotions your chances of success may be quite limited. More and more executives are beginning to realize that the next frontier in maximizing their chances for success is to start focusing on building personal internal skills that go beyond the business training that they have already received. To drive the point home, a metaphor to describe how negative emotions adversely affect personal and career performance is in order. As you know,...

A major problem impairing an executive’s performance is his Emotional Blind Spots. Emotions, whether we like them or not, have a significant impact on one’s decisions. An example is the Enron case where executives ran into severe ethical and legal consequences after falling prey to the destructive negative emotions of greed and self-interest. It is perplexing how many success driven executives, choose to fear addressing the impact of negative emotions on personal and organizational performance. Helping executives become aware of the Emotional Blind Spots that cause them to steer into...