The following is a guest post by Darcy Eikenberg.

“We’ve cut back on our training—nothing I can do about that.”

“Our conference budgets have been cut, so it’ll be hard for me to stay current.”

“My manager doesn’t know any more than I do—how am I going to grow?”

Heard those comments in your workplace lately? If so, you’re not alone. One of the biggest laments uncovered in survey after survey is that the current lack of learning and development programs is a strong contributor to disengagement.

Makes sense, right? After all, you’re human. You want to learn, grow, and increase your professional contribution—not sit there like a lump. You want to feel you’re making a difference, using all of your abilities and talents. You want to be prepared for the future world of work—whatever that will be.

So why are you waiting for permission to grow?

It’s a losing game to wait for your boss/your CEO/your organization to change in order to accelerate your own learning and development. Sure, it would be great if all leaders recognized that coaching, teaching and training are investments, not expenses, but until then, it’s time for you to take control.

Here are three simple actions you can take right now. Try one and create dramatic changes in your career and your overall growth. Click here to continue reading »”Are You Waiting For Permission to Grow?”

As more organizations continue to shift their approach from recovery to growth, there’s naturally a growing concern developing about the potential risk of losing their key talent to competitors, as well as how to attract the talent they need to help their organization strengthen their competitive edge.

In most cases, these discussions tend to focus either on discovering key talent within your organization or how to attract the talent you need to join your team. Unfortunately, these strategies tend to be limited in scope and can cause leaders to overlook the advantages of developing their employees to meet the evolving needs of their organization.

One of the most effective ways to do this – with the added bonus of increasing employee retention – is by offering training programs. By offering such programs, employees are given the opportunity to not only refine and develop their skills in order to be more effective in their roles, but it also encourages them to take the time to evaluate their career goals and come up with ideas of how their organization can help them to achieve them.

Granted, one of the reasons why most employers are reluctant to provide employee training is because they fear that they will lose the investment made through such efforts if their employees leave the organization to work elsewhere. However, such fears don’t Click here to continue reading »”Are You Employing This Tool To Fuel Your Organization’s Growth?”

The following is a guest post by Jason Monaghan.

Doritos and effective leadership. Not an easy combination to draw a lesson from, right?

You might be surprised.

If you watched the Doritos commercial during the Super Bowl then you realize that their ingenious use of language and video led you to an engaging conclusion: that Doritos are better than, well, most things. We can learn a valuable lesson about effective leadership through their messaging and how it translates to everyday life.

Leadership is much like the techniques used in Doritos’ Super Bowl commercial. Effective leadership is the process of developing a space where people can use their creativity to fill in the blanks and develop new products and services for the market. You provide the vision and the team collaborates to drive that vision home. The Doritos Ad campaign accomplished this in the following three ways: Click here to continue reading »”How Is Leadership Like The Doritos Super Bowl Ad?”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the importance of leaders taking time off work and going on vacation, a piece which I’m happy to share has been picked up by the American Management Association (AMA) and is now featured on their website. Since publishing that piece, I’ve received a number of emails from my readers and had conversations with various friends and acquaintances where they shared how vacation time is viewed by their bosses and their organizations.

While these discussions have inspired some future posts I’ll be writing for my blog, they also got me thinking about the other side of this vacation time equation. Namely, how leaders and their organizations can benefit from the downtime that inevitably arises when employees are away on vacation.

When members of your team go away on vacation, it’s only natural to feel some concern over how their time away from work might slow down certain efforts or limit the number of people available to address an unexpected problem or failure. Given today’s current work environment where Click here to continue reading »”How Leaders Can Take Advantage of the Summer Downtime”