When we were together at #HREvolution in Chicago this Spring, Paul Hebert, @incentintel, led a session with Jason Seiden with the objective of discussing how to influence people.  I found an interesting twist to the conversation that I have not been able to get out of my head for the last couple of months.  So, I have been reading and thinking and watching with this topic in mind.  I feel that my thoughts might be helpful for some.

The topic about influencing continually moved to compensation and incentives.  I believe some in the group had a very different perspective of these terms then I did. And, if I am going to develop myself and my managers as good leaders at Aquire, I need to figure out why!   More »

I listened to a client’s story of doing a reorg for a department of a few hundred people.  It was painful to hear about the departments represented by pieces of paper, people represented by post-it notes, lists on spreadsheets to make sure nobody got left out, and meetings that lasted way into the night.  It is hard enough to go through the organizational design process of the changes needed for a reorg – you don’t want to have to fight the visualization and automation process too. More »

More workers quit their jobs than were laid off in March. Wow. I was a little surprised when I first heard this statistic. Then I thought about it and realized what this means for talent management and workforce planning – it’s no time to be on auto-pilot. We’d better be working on strategies to keep the talent we already have as companies begin to hire again giving employees more choices in employers.

Let’s admit it – there’s been a buyer’s market for talent the past two years (when there’s been any hiring at all) resulting in a class of “underemployed” – laid-off overqualified types who were willing to trade in a title or a bit of salary in exchange for benefits. Even tenured employees who have been denied promotions or raises during hiring freezes and layoffs can be counted as underemployed. I recently More »

Written by President and COO of Aquire, Tom McKeown

Athletics can be great training for youths, as they mature into adulthood by providing vital lessons in discipline and hard work.  But, there are different types of sports that require different types of coaching and involvement.  There are individual sports such as track and wrestling, where the participant need only be concerned with maximum achievement in his or her own event and that result is grouped into a total score.  On the other hand there are team sports such as football and basketball where participants play different roles in order to achieve one common result.  The same can be said for departments within companies, consider sales and marketing. More »

Bring up the subject of succession planning and most HR and other executives shudder. These highly intelligent, capable people often labor under the impression that succession planning is such a complicated, multi-step process that they are already too far behind to even begin. More »