Articles by Deidre Paknad

Good Management Skills: Nature or Nurture?

 Earlier this year, Gallup issued a fascinating study that looked at why great managers are so rare. It concluded that while one of the most important decisions a company can make is whom they select to manage, companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82 percent of the time. […]

An Execution Framework for Achieving Ambitious Goals

While annual planning and performance reviews are very structured processes, most organizations don’t have structured models for managing execution and goal achievement between plan and review. How are your planned outcomes versus actuals monitored week over week and how much does your approach vary over the course of the year? Loosely structured con calls, staff […]

The Truth About What Motivates Millennials at Work

Millennials are the first generation in history to be blessed with instantly-accessible information. An unprecedented one third of those aged 20 to 29 have graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Reading about world catastrophes, Millennials grew up believing in the power of their own volition and mistrusting people in power (only 19% of Gen Y believes […]

Want to Be More Successful? Set Goals.

People with goals achieve more and are more successful — a lot more successful — than peers without them, whether they’re scientists, students, or corporate execs. Organizations whose employees are actively engaged in goal achievement have 3x greater operating margins in any given year than companies with lower engagement levels. If you’re not in the […]

Change Agents: Know Thy Audience

Change agents and their ideas are the life force of organizations. Innovation of all kinds is essential for organizations to grow and thrive; in fact, organizations that can more easily respond to new facts and conditions have a great advantage. In their book Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises, UC Berkeley’s Dr. Homa Bahrami and Carnegie Mellon’s […]

4 Ways to Increase Your Goal Achievement

The formula for achieving goals is straightforward: apply team, time and budget to the specific work needed to reach the right results. Very successful people achieve goals faster and with fewer resources than peers; their execution velocity is high, which raises their career velocity. Their capacity to execute is focused on achieving clear goals so […]

Achieve Your Leadership Aspirations

Ask most executives and managers if they are great leaders and you’ll hear, “No, but I have every intention of becoming one!” Aligning time, skills and effort to the intention to build leadership skill and capacity is not easy, but it is more important than ever. Two startling studies reveal that 87 percent of employees […]

Use OKRs To Achieve Bold Goals

Objectives and Key Results or OKRs have helped hyper-growth Internet companies like Google achieve phenomenal success. They combine ambitious, qualitative goals and quantitative success measures with weekly execution and accountability cadence. When teams institutionalize OKRs, they enjoy clarity of purpose, fast-paced progress, and can achieve game-changing results. Use OKRs to embolden your goals, define how […]

Learn to Love Your Customers

On its face, this is a ridiculously high standard, but in practice it’s the most rewarding and resilient way to build a business. Working with and for customers that love your company — rather than hate it or couldn’t care less — is simply a more satisfying way to spend the 60% of your adult […]

5 Ways to Manage Stress on the Job

Work can push all our stress buttons: the need to achieve, fear of failing, reliance on others for our own success, overload, self-doubt and more. Ironically, how we respond to these stressors has a direct impact on our success and failure. When we react reflexively, the impact of our actions is often worse than the […]

Invest Your Intelligence Where It Matters

In a particularly creative working session with a young product designer, we arrived at what seemed like a terrific idea with a novel implementation. We’d had one of those brainstorms where ideas built naturally on each other and with them, momentum to a conclusion. We quickly “locked and loaded” on our result and she set […]

4 Steps to Less Work Stress

Work stresses people out — fear of failing, pressure to achieve, having to reply on others for our own success, overload, self-doubt and more… In fact, one million Americans call in sick over stress every day and 25% say work is the most stressful thing in their lives. These 4 tips can help you achieve […]

Goal Alignment: Job One for Managers

Two days before Yolanda’s performance review, she sent a 26-page PowerPoint deck intended to summarize her accomplishments for the year. She’d clearly spent hours on the deck, perhaps more than a day packaging and positioning accomplishments. She’d even asked four colleagues to write emails lobbying for her promotion. Although she’d only been on my marketing […]

The Difference Between Dreamers and Doers

In many ways, setting goals is similar to dreaming of success – goals are desired outcomes. [easy-tweet tweet=”Goals are desired outcomes” user=”@workboardinc” hashtags=”#goals “]But achieving goals (and with them, success) is infinitely harder and more complex. While many things on the road to success like Estée Lauder’s are beyond your control, how you apply your […]

Where Your Time Goes, So Goes Your Impact

Stephanie Leffler, the dynamic, mission-driven CEO of CrowdSource, carefully controls where her time goes. For years, she’s kept a thorough action item list against her goals and priorities and keeps her old lists — in fact, she looks back at them to see where she spent her time and assess whether time spent produced value […]

Help Managers Be More Effective Leaders

There is a tremendous engagement and execution gap in companies today. According toGallup, only 13% of employees are actively engaged in their work ; 60% of employees don’t understand their organization’s goals and priorities and just 10% of executives sustainably achieve those goals according to Bain & Company’s Chris Zook. In fact, disengaged employees may […]

The 5 Dynamics of Low Performing Teams

High performing teams seem to generate their own energy and elevate everyone on the team to their full potential. Despite achieving more, work on these teams seems less taxing, the workday shorter and less frustrating. Low performing teams are plagued by dysfunction and produce more frustration than progress. What undermines the performance of groups and […]

Dump Corporate Jargon For More Impact

Long before texting brought us LOL, BTW, CU, and TTYL, organizations used acronyms as communication short cuts. Unlike the text substitutes for benign greetings, laughs and sign offs, corporate acronyms tend to substitute for the fundamentals: Names of products, initiatives and departments. The very essence of “who, what and why” in business! Although organizations use […]

The Five Things Great Bosses Do

Study after study has shown that when you’re great at your job it turns into high employee engagement, which in turn leads to higher profits, better customer service, and happier and healthier employees. Great managers make great contributions to the bottom line: The most engaged, motivated teams are 21% more productive and 22% more profitable […]

5 Steps to Stellar Year-End Reviews

It’s mid-year review time and if you’re like many people, you haven’t thought about goals in 5.5 months. Not a great moment for manager or team member, but it’s a common one. Mid-year reviews are a painful reminder of how far apart work and goals can drift and how little traditional performance management helps people […]

Is Your Communication Style A Drag On Your Team’s Productivity?

Our verbal and listening habits have a direct effect on our productivity and our professional outcomes. These engagement habits can lead to wasteful debates over false choices and choke off relevant business facts. When ideas and facts flow easily and teams engage in authentic business-driven discussions, productivity and results soar. “Start with a YES and […]

3 Tips For Managers To Achieve Business Goals

It’s a few weeks into a new quarter of a new year, so now is a great time to self-assess accomplishments on last quarter’s goals and double down for great execution the rest of the year. Beware three behaviors that undermine goal achievement: 1) too many goals to come anywhere close to achievement, 2) too […]

How to Embrace Failure and Make It Work In Your Favor

We all know failure isn’t the end of the world, but it is not easy to embrace. Without clear thinking, fear of failure and failure itself can undermine our leadership styles, performance, judgment and even our happiness. According to one study, workers who feel unsupported not only face higher anxiety, but also experience lower performance. […]