Category: Management, Supervision & Leadership

We often think of New Year’s resolutions in personal terms – thinking about and writing down goals or activities we would like to achieve and do in the coming months and year.  It is also a good time for organizations to engage in developing or refining organizational goals, either to mark the start of the new year or a new quarter.

Good leaders and managers know you can’t lead others until you know and can effectively lead yourself.  Understanding your own strengths and development needs helps you both respect yourself, and lead others.  This article focuses both on leadership and developing a culture of respect as we close out the year and look towards new beginnings.

In a separate article, we focused on what Global Diversity Awareness month is and why and how organizations can use it to strategically initiate or reevaluate Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. In this article, we focus on concrete and practical activities that any team, organization or individual can implement to jumpstart this work and celebrate the month.

There are many diversity-focused weeks and months throughout the year – many focusing on the uniqueness of a specific group or characteristic, or a different source of diversity.  In October, we celebrate Global Diversity Awareness Month.

Microlearning is training that delivers bite-sized pieces of information to learners.  Together, several microlearning courses can be combined to create a larger training program – but each should be able to stand on its own as well. 

National Coffee Day is in September, and the event raises an interesting question: What could you teach someone in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee?  This is not just a theoretical question – for learning and development professionals, that question is at a heart of a new training approach: microlearning.

When talking about leading a team, many focus on long-term intact teams. These may be organizational support teams, sales teams or service teams – regardless of mission, they are designed to stay together for a long time. 

Let’s be clear: teamwork is really hard. For every blog article proclaiming how beneficial teamwork is, there is a manager struggling to make it happen in the real world. In this article, we’ll look at five critical steps that help these managers lead a team to success.

Employees want to feel like their organization is focused on a clear mission with compelling goals that they are personally aligned with.  Engagement with the organization does not just come from eating ice cream – it comes from being fully bought in to the concept of the store itself.

  In the United States, July marks the heat of summer, with camps and vacations – a perfect time for a cold treat.  Ice cream can be a unifying and shared event at work too.  For team members working their way through the summer, an ice cream focused event offers a nice employee engagement break!