One of the important insights from the financial fiascos of the last few years is that senior managers and their company can’t always be trusted to act openly or ethically. The consequence of that is writ large: a huge number of people lost their jobs. Indeed, on several occasions, employees who lost their jobs have expressed their frustrations to me about their firm’s practice, telling me that they would never have guessed that of their firm’s leaders.

But then, as the conversation went on, they emphasized that a person at their level couldn’t possibly know what’s going on behind closed doors. Duhhhh. Sometimes we have to be shocked to see what was there all along.

The status of a firm and its managers is not nearly as obscure as many employees think. Furthermore, there are a number of clues to various kinds of financial difficulty or hanky panky that employees at any level can pick up.

Bankruptcy?
Here’s how I got educated on potential corporate bankruptcy. Back in the early ‘nineties, I had a number of long-term, development projects at Sunbeam in Boca Raton. Since a part of my development program involved 360 interviews, I ...

Tucked away in Monday’s NYTimes business section is a highly significant—no, immensely practical—recommendation. The article by Nick Bilton initially describes the work practices of Robin Sloan, a former media manager at Twitter. As you can imagine, Sloan once taught news outlets how to use the hottest social media tools. But does Mr. Sloan follow his own recommendations? NOPE! He owns an old Nokia phone with just one application: making phone calls. He also takes notes with pen, paper and notepad. And—he reads books printed on paper—not the Kindle or the IPad.

It may be technical heresy, but it’s a very smart way of living your work life. Sloan found that his IPhone and other technologies were getting in the way of his book writing, so he simply got rid of them. I found it was more important and more productive for me to be daydreaming and jotting down notes. I needed my idle minutes to contribute to the story I was doing, not checking my e-mail , or checking tweets.

So I asked my Millennial protégé, a highly responsible project manager, about his use of gadgets. “I use my phone for talking and ...

For years, workplace psychology was all about correcting things that were wrong. How can we fix people? How can we improve human capital metrics? How can we just do better? It was a reactive approach, where we focused on things that we thought needed solving, like turnover or poor morale.

Then Professor Martin Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association.

Seligman is the founder of ‘positive psychology’, a field of academic study that examines healthy states, such as happiness, strength of character and optimism. He looked at psychology through a different lens; rather than concentrating on pathology, he urged that we proactively identify and build on things that are going right.

In other words, what if we stop focusing so much on unhappy people and what isn’t working, asked Seligman, and instead we amplify happy people and what is working? By figuring out how to replicate that success, we can move the needle on human metrics like happiness, satisfaction, productivity and engagement.

According to Seligman, positive psychology “is about identifying and nurturing [people’s] strongest qualities, what they own and are best ...

There are plenty of ways to get an employee appraisal meeting “right,” all of which leave the employee walking out the door feeling driven and excited to get back to work. Good employee appraisal meetings end with each party feeling a renewed sense of respect and appreciation for the other, and great ones end with the employee racing back to her station, determined to make the upcoming year twice as successful as the last.

On the other hand, terrible employee appraisal meetings have the opposite impact. They leave employees feeling drained, belittled, and disconnected. And in the worst case scenario, the employee races back to her desk…so she can get to work polishing her resume. To avoid this scene, watch out for these damaging moves and do whatever you can to remove them from your appraisal process.

1. Focusing only on recent accomplishments, or worse, recent failures and mistakes. It’s natural to do this, since our memories are wired to focus on the short term. But lambasting a strong employee for a minor mistake simply because the mistake happened a week ago won’t do much to keep turnover down.
2. Giving feedback that would have really ...

Turn to almost any organization in the country and a familiar thread is going to be heard - What is the ROI (Return on Investment) for this project? Human Resources is no different. Through the works of Bersin & Associates, who in their 2011 report "The Best Practices for the High Impact HR Organization" determined that the top challenge for HR Management was the ability to measure HR programs in financial terms and the work of Jac Fit-Enz and Wayne Cascio who each showed us how to measure HR management we have an idea on how to quantify the ROI of HR. The problem is that this view is concentrated in the metrics of hiring our human capital assets.

However regardless of how defining the ROI measurements are for the above efforts, we seem to be missing a whole other metric of HR ROI. I refer to it as the return of decisions. We complain that our human capital assets are no longer engaged with our organizations but then either knowingly or unknowingly allow our organizations to make very dump mistakes in treating those assets as valuable parts of the organization. Consider these recent enforcement activities:

1. On May 1, a federal district court handed down ...