Transform Culture

Most of us think we know the best way to hire someone, and it looks roughly like this: First, you post a job opening with a brief description of responsibilities and expected level of experience, and then you sift through paper resumes and cover letters to prioritize the candidates (LinkedIn is probably involved these days), […]

Millennial. It’s a term we hear everywhere from the evening news to our HR director. Just mentioning it makes me feel as though I’ve spoken a dirty word. The lazy, tech-obsessed, entitled generation only good for living in their parents’ basements and playing with their latest gadget while changing jobs every six months. Or so […]

I hear a lot of leaders concerned about their new millennial employees who don’t seem to stay around very long. They’re “job-hoppers.” We invest in them, and then they leave. While I understand the concern, there are a couple of really important flaws with this kind of thinking. First of all, the millennial “job hopping” […]

I think we can all agree the hiring process can be frustrating. For the employer, the pressure is on to find the “best talent,” but it’s flat-out hard to tell who’s the best during interviews. Even then, there’s the risk that those “best” people won’t like our culture and leave quite quickly, and that’s expensive […]

Many people often support the idea of transparency in organizations — but not as much when it comes to financial information. We don’t want to share salary levels, or we don’t want to share our budget information with other departments. For some reason, when it comes to money, we tend to get very traditional in […]

Most internal staff or team meetings follow a similar pattern that includes one basic element: Each person reports what they’ve been working on to update the rest of the group. We take this for granted as a good thing. After all, what could be wrong with people sharing information with each other? Well, let’s dig […]

I have always been a student of organizational culture. I’m intrigued by how groups of people operate together and curious about how different leadership styles and management techniques can produce dramatically different outcomes from the same group of people. You’ve probably heard the old adage attributed to nonprofit management guru Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy […]

Organizational transparency isn’t a very new idea in the business world. Whole Foods, for example, shares all of its salary and bonus data internally with everyone. Yes, everybody knows what everyone else makes. When I tell people this, they usually freak out. Don’t worry — you don’t have to share your salary if you don’t […]

I know it would be hard to just get rid of performance reviews, as I’ve suggested in an earlier post. In the back of our collective minds, we’re still thinking “yeah, but the truth is I want to make sure the individuals in this organization are doing the right things and doing them well, so […]

I ended up a career in associations the same way everyone I’ve met did: By happy accident. I worked for a large advertising company right out of college and went back to my alma mater, the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP), and visited its alumni website to look for new opportunities. I knew I […]