Blog
Your Team Can’t Manage Itself
One of the most insidious pieces of advice in modern management is to “stay out of your employees’ way” and “let them do their best work”. The intention is to display trust in the people working for you and, perhaps more importantly, avoid the dreaded label of micromanager. Here’s the problem with that. …
The Seven Types of Management Challenges and How to Solve Them
Despite how unique your management challenges may seem, the common denominator is likely unstructured, low-substance, hit-or-miss communication. When things are going wrong in a management relationship, that is usually at least part of the cause. What do the best managers do differently? They build and maintain an ongoing schedule of high-quality one-on-one dialogues with every…
Four ways even good managers waste time
If you’re a manager who feels you are spending so much of your time managing, yet inevitably end up firefighting, something like this may sound familiar: Listen, I spend tons of time communicating with my direct reports. Not to mention my boss, their boss, and counterparts in other workgroups and other departments. Look at Project…
Stop Recruiting Gen Z Like Millennials
Employers eager to attract the best young employees are too often delivering the wrong messages to the wrong people at the wrong times. Because young talent is perpetually in greater demand than supply, employers desperate to fill open positions make the mistake of turning recruiting into an elaborate sales pitch. The problem is that prospective…
Post-pandemic work: What each generation needs for success
If ever there was a generation-defining ‘accident of history’, the Covid-19 pandemic is it. Compared to other recent accidents of history—the 2008 recession, 9/11, ongoing war—Covid-19 has directly impacted far more people, of all ages, on a global scale. Quite literally, everyone is going through this together. We are currently experiencing a classic example of…
The Top Causes of Employee Turnover
After huge recent fluctuations in the job market—and despite ongoing downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering—unemployment is at record lows and employers are facing more severe talent shortages than any time since we at RainmakerThinking began our workplace research in 1993. Not only must organizations fill the gaps with new hires, they must also ensure their best…
What Gen Z Signals for Generational Change in the Workplace
Most people think of generational change in the workplace as a diversity issue. Some experts will give employers a checklist or cheat sheet for each generation, outlining how to attract, hire, retain, and manage people based on birthdate. That’s misguided. Imagine being told to manage people this way based on any other measure of…
Future-Proof Your Staffing, Whether It’s Boom or Bust
With all the economic fluctuations in this era of uncertainty, one business truth is not going to change: Talent is the number one asset of every organization in every industry. In good times and bad alike, leaders must get more work out of fewer people, and that means the best people are always in…
Two Strategies Hiring Managers Miss When Sourcing Young Candidates
Whether you are hiring young people on the high end or the lower end of the talent spectrum, my guess is that you need to increase your supply of new job applicants. How can you do that? The first places most managers and organizations go to look for new applicants are the very same…
14 Tired Myths About Gen Z for Managers to Replace
These are some of the things that today’s young people are telling us in interviews: “They act like their power is unquestionable, but anyone can be cancelled overnight.” “My boss doesn’t fully trust me to work from home. What? Like I’m going to pretend to work? I could pretend to work just as easily if…