As companies look ahead to a recovering economy and expanding job opportunities, many leaders have asked me how they can “restore trust.” How can they dissipate the cloud of fear and resentment that hangs over many employees, still tender from years of layoffs, salary freezes, pay cuts, and furloughs. How can leaders recreate an atmosphere of trust in the organization?

Here’s the equation I believe will form the basis of trust between corporations and workers for the decades ahead: The organization will provide interesting and challenging work. The individual will invest discretionary effort in the task and produce relevant results. When one or both sides of this equation are no longer possible (for whatever reasons) the relationship will end. So if the organization no longer has interesting or challenging work for the individual to do, or if the individual is no longer willing or able to engage in the work — to invest the levels of discretionary effort required for excellent results — it is in everyone’s best interest to part ways. Read more at blogs.hbr.org

if offered correctly and thoughtfully, your insight can not only help your boss, but also improve your working relationship.

The relationship comes first The ability to give and receive upward feedback, like any form of feedback, is dependent on the relationship between you and your boss. Without trust, the feedback will be impossible to receiveRead more at blogs.hbr.org

The common mantra these days is, “engaged employees are productive employees.”  Employees who think you have no idea or empathy for them are not going to be engaged. Read more at www.fastcompany.com

The head of a large hospital brought together her direct reports and asked them to create a separate card for each major project or initiative underway. They then placed all of these cards on the wall and realized that, between the ten of them, they had over 150 active projects, many of which were drawing upon the same resources or impacting the same groups. It was no wonder, the team realized, that they were behind schedule and that their people felt overloaded.

But if everything is called a priority, then nothing is. In fact, what’s worse is that people at lower levels, faced with the impossible task of trying to respond to everything, end up deciding what is important based on their more limited sense of the company’s strategy and their ability to get things done. By not clarifying the few key priorities, leadership teams unintentionally delegate priority-setting to their people. And then they wonder why everyone isn’t on the same page. Read more at blogs.hbr.org

managers would do well to ask themselves four questions about their data process as a way of improving the return on what is often a substantial (but not always visible) investment: Are we asking the right questions? Many companies collect the data that is available, rather than the data that is needed to help make decisions and run the business. Read more at blogs.hbr.org

Feedback is best when provided as close to the moment of performance as possible, as shown in studies involving everyone from medical students to athletes. A Corporate Leadership Council performance management study found that frequent, fair and accurate informal feedback could impact individual performance by 39%.

But lengthy feedback forms discourage frequent and immediate responses. Read more at blogs.hbr.org

In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, support for making progress, and clear goals. “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” came out number one. Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.

On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest. Read more at hbr.org

The Problem of Forced Fun

Our culture cares increasingly about authenticity. Indeed, thanks to the work of Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, authenticity has become a watchword in the world of marketing. In this new cultural convention, being really excited all the time is patently inauthentic, not least because we know that peak moments of emotion are by their nature occasional. So when we ask our staff to roll out the bonhomie, some employees now believe they are being asked to be inauthentic. Read more at blogs.hbr.org

You can learn a great deal about customers by studying the broader context in which they use your product or service. To do this, ask what your customer is doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after he uses your product or service.Read more at blogs.hbr.org

Do You Learn More from Working for a Bad Boss than a Good Boss?

I also think people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine.

There are several elements of this comment that made me stop and think. The first follows from my post on not noticing, as the implication is that when things are going great, you don’t engage in very deep cognition about them, because little is happening to give you pause or upset you. In fact, this point is consistent with research on cognition and emotion suggesting that people in good moods do not engage in as much mindfulness,deep thought, or self-doubt as people in bad moods.

that you should escape as soon as you possibly can.Read more at bobsutton.typepad.com