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Most senior executives and business owners have some level of preoccupation with catalysing their culture to higher levels of performance and/or excellence. In a world characterised by exacting deadlines, relentless competition, limited resources, globalisation and unwavering expectations from customers, shareholders and employees alike, “culture” seems to be so much more important these days and must be recognised as a significant....

In my last article entitled “Improving leadership potential” I wrote about the need to have clarity about expectation and current state. The diagnostic phase… Having undertaken rigorous diagnosis, attention now moves to the process of ‘shifting the needle’… One of my best friends and a genuine mentor for many years, Glenn Dobson, owns the KONA Group. One of its core offerings is in salesforce capab....

There can be no doubt that choosing the right people for the right jobs is one of the most important contributors to organisational effectiveness. However, in many organisations, rather than being systematic and using sound, objective evidence, the recruitment selection process is a relatively unstructured, intuitive and gut-feel process. The problem with this approach is that a range of emotional responses prevent an objective assessm....

We have Australian politicians that are more preoccupied with being right and always disagreeing with the opposing party, than they are with improving the lives of all Australians. Just once I would like to hear a politician say that someone on the opposing side had a great idea and that it would be supported. Just once I would like to see political courage, the courage to do something that is not “political” but is in the best int....

One of the greatest challenges that business owners and managers face is the employee selection process, with most approaching it with trepidation and sometimes outright fear. Unfortunately this fear is well founded as the traditional recruitment process of resume, interview and reference checking only delivers a future high performing employee 26% of the time. However, you can dramatically improve your odds of selecting high performer....

 One of the fastest-growing recruiting trends in recent years has been social recruiting—searching and scouting people on social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—to fill open positions. With billions of people using social networks, it’s no wonder that recruiters are turning to them to find potential candidates. If you’ve never done social recruiting or implemented a social recruiting ....

As many of you will have seen on LinkedIn we recently announced our partnership with NFP Good360 Australia. We’ll be providing a range of people capital services to them, assisting them to attract, select, develop and retain high-performers, all pro-bono. Good360 connects charities with businesses looking to donate excess non-perishable stock (kitchenware, clothing, furniture, Manchester, stationery etc) and was set up in Austral....

(an analogy that will make you rethink your current employee selection processes) Australian managers rate about one quarter of their employees as high performers, about 50% as being adequate to very good and the final one quarter as being not-yet-competent (sub-standard). Which beggars the question:   WHY??? Why do business owners and managers accept such poor outcomes and, even worse, are content to kee....

I guess that I have your attention now!   The full quote from Warren is:   “There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up ....

Recently the ABC’s “WorkLife” Program conducted a very insightful podcast with Laszlo Bock and others on “Let’s improve the way we hire people” (listen).   The key message through this podcast is that the vast majority of employers are not very successful at selecting future high performers because their selection processes are less than adequate. I thought that Laszlo made some very ins....