When it comes to Family Businesses, this is one of the thorniest problems to deal with, but there are ways to nip it in the bud. In family businesses, leaders sometimes make hiring and staffing decisions based on relationship and obligation as much as on competence and experience, if not more. After all, one purpose …
Toxic Employees
One of the recurrent themes and situations business leaders talk to me about is how to handle toxic employees. The tell tale signs of a toxic employee are very common - they never have anything positive to say, they irritate other team members and make working life miserable for all. The main issue with toxic …
When are you “at work”?
After nearly a year and a half from the advent of the pandemic, I believe we must redefine what it means to be “at work.” While digital technologies like email and smartphones have always blurred the distinction between being at work and being out of the office, for many white-collar workers, the pandemic has eliminated …
On what basis do you take your decisions?
I am still amazed when I see how business owners or leaders take their decisions. Many just tell me they take such decisions based on their experience....this is when I normally reply that their experience is a filtered understanding based on circumstances that are surely different from today's turbulence. So is your experience a real …
When Family Hurts the Family Business
Results from an analysis that combined 204 academic studies covering 3,880,267 businesses across 30 countries was recently published. When it comes to family businesses these were distinguished based on family’s involvement as owners, managers or both. This is an important distinction. Various studies have shown that family owners, on average, improve the performance of the …
Teamwork
The dust has now settled on Euro 2020. The winning team has shown that although they do not have the likes of Ronaldo or Pogba in their ranks, they still managed to win based on great teamwork, which resulted in a very high-performance team that managed to achieve something that many thought would be impossible. …
Change to Grow
It will be quite some time before we understand the full impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the history of such shocks tells us two things. First, even in severe economic downturns and recessions, some companies are able to gain advantage. Second, crises produce not just a plethora of temporary changes but also some lasting …
Are family business owners an asset or a liability?
Freud observed that the intensity of family and work relationships is created by the conflicts between ‘lieben und arbeiten’ (love and work). He suggested that love and work are the main sources of self-esteem and pleasure in life and only when both are balanced do we achieve satisfaction. So what does this tell us on …
Continue reading Are family business owners an asset or a liability?
What’s the future of the office?
This debate is still making the rounds. Some businesses remain uncertain as to whether they will ever return to their pre-Covid office routines. I was recently reading an article which outlined that data from Google that indicate that workplace activity in cities like London, New York and San Francisco are running at half what they …
Vaccination Policy
This is likely to be a difficult subject. However I see various employers struggling with this - on whether to require their employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Some lawsuits from employees who feel "coerced" to take the vaccine have been filed around the world (click HERE and HERE), but so far it seems that …
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