Articles by Mark Lukens

Reach For Greatness – Developing Development

Continuous improvement is one of the key phrases of our age, and it applies as much to employees as to processes. We want our staff to keep developing themselves, to take on new skills and refine their existing ones, to absorb the values and priorities of the organization even as those shift over time. But […]

Gaining Strength Through Diversity and Inclusion

Corporate culture is all about the attitude a company takes. Nowhere do you define your business more clearly and publicly than in your attitude toward diversity and inclusion. It’s not just a matter of taking a public stance, though that helps. It’s about the way you engage with and motivate both employees and customers. A […]

Engaging Employees From the Word Go

Ask any teacher or counselor and they’ll tell you, fixing damaged relationships and warped behavior is far harder work than building new patterns from scratch. As such, the arrival of each new employee presents you with a great opportunity, a chance to shape their relationship with the business and their behavior within it. This is […]

Getting Passionate: Employee Engagement

Employee engagement was one of the most discussed topics of 2014 and the first half of 2015, as leaders looked for ways to get the most out of their employees. Engagement was discussed so much that it risked becoming just one more hollow buzzword, trotted out to justify whatever the speaker was looking to do. […]

Improving The Workplace Culture In Your Value Stream

  We talk a lot about improving workplace culture. But it isn’t just the culture that influences your business and the outcomes for your customers. Every business in your value stream has its own culture, as does the value stream itself, the ways that those organizations interact up and down the value chain. The same […]

Are You Ready for the Millennials to Grow Up?

We’re used to talking about the millennial generation as the fresh young things whose exciting outlook is shaking up the world of business. But the reality is that a decade and a half has passed since we watched all those zeroes line up on our calendars, and the millennial generation is growing up. Millennials generation […]

Forging a Unique Workplace Culture

Trying to forge a workplace culture for your business can easily go wrong. A culture imposed from the top down can create resistance and disengagement as people feel that it has nothing to do with them. This is in part because such an approach misses the point of any culture. A culture comes from its […]

Three Principles Of Good Communication

Communication is the bedrock of all relationships, whether professional or personal. Getting it right can be particularly hard in the workplace, where people with wildly different ways of thinking and talking are all heavily invested in the topics under discussion. We risk causing offence or difficulties, and fear of that risk can be just as […]

Better Communication: Sharing Yourself

There’s a repression that still runs deep in the way we communicate, even in our relatively open and liberated age. We fear that what we think doesn’t matter; that we are less right or less valuable in our opinions than the other people around us. But this isn’t humility. It isn’t a careful, diplomatic silence […]

Unleash The Power Of Social Media Recruitment

Social media is everywhere in the modern world. Its ability to improve communication and to compel our attention makes it one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century. This makes it incredibly useful to recruiters, but many have yet to unleash that power. So how can you get the most out of social […]

Reversing The Polarity Of Recruitment

We’ve all seen it in the cinema or on TV. That moment when the beleaguered starship engineer, asked to achieve things his machines were never designed for, declares that he’s going to ‘reverse the polarity!’ None of us, not even the writers who put the words into that character’s mouth, know what this means in […]

Branding On The Inside

There are many lessons that can be taken from marketing and applied to HR. From the obvious point of how best to advertise a job to ways of spreading messages and training through an organization, marketing has been a source of useful innovation for HR for years. One of the most powerful tools, and one […]

Purple Recruit: Applying Seth Godin’s Branding Ideas To HR

Brand marketing is a field that contains many innovators and sharp thinkers. Nowhere is this more visible than in the work of Seth Godin, author of books such as Linchpin and Purple Cow, has turned old mass marketing practices upside down, showing a more personal, more human and vastly more effective way of marketing. But […]

‘Recognize’ For Better Employee Engagement

Statistics show that 88% of employees don’t feel passionate about their work, and that this level of employee disengagement is costing the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Employee disengagement is a huge problem for businesses looking to get the most out of their employees and to retain them in the long […]

Rise To The Challenge: Live Your Impact

How much difference did you make today? If you were to step back and look at that work, would you feel like you added real value to the world, or just kept things ticking over? It’s easy to slip into doing the same old thing with your work, to take the safe options rather than […]

Looking Beyond HR

Some business improvement professionals believe the goal of their work is to make themselves redundant, to take their company to the point where improvement is self-sustaining and they are no longer needed. Is it time for us, as HR professionals, to look at our jobs the same way? To ask whether the benefits we bring […]

The Power To Lead Organizational Change

We all have the power within us to create real and lasting change. To transform the place we work into something finer and more efficient, no matter how good a position it started from. Change gives us the potential to be not just good but great, to continually aspire to more. Somebody has to lead […]

Social Recruitment’s Present And Future

Social media has entered every corner of our lives. Facebook alone has more than a billion users, each averaging 15 minutes a day on the site. From the accumulated star ratings on websites to jobs found through LinkedIn and sharing holiday photos through Facebook, this crowded, chaotic world of human interaction is everywhere. Like any […]

Matching Book Smarts And People Smarts

We all know that there’s more to succeeding in life than having book smarts. People skills, whether it’s understanding ourselves or working well with others, are equally important. But there’s a gap between this common understanding and the way we educate people for the world of work. So where does that gap come from, and […]

Beyond Work-Life Balance – Finding Your Passion

What do you want to do with your life? I mean really want to do, not just what you’ve accepted to get by? Many of us believe in following our passions, but few actually do this. Following your passion — whether it’s the job you always dreamed of or something you stumbled upon unexpectedly — […]

Three Steps To Better Staff Development

Staff development is vital to a healthy business. Yet the way we approach it is still rooted in the models of fifty years ago. Despite a world of rapid change we expect objectives to be relevant for a year, when many will be out of date within months. Millenials used to swift, relevant feedback from […]

How Education Is Failing To Serve Business’ Needs

Education is one of the triumphs of modern civilization. According to census data, over 40% of the U.S. population has an associate degree or higher. With higher education attendance continuing to rise, it’s only a matter of time before half the population has degrees. But is all of this education really serving our needs, either […]

Career Inspiration: Strive To Be These 3 Things

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt We live in an age when we allow ourselves to be ruled by our fears. The more we have the more we curl in on ourselves to defend it, clinging to our past achievements rather than reaching forward for more. But […]

How To Find Employees With The Right Attitude

Attitude over aptitude is the rallying cry for many in modern recruitment. All our fancy personality tests and scouring of resumes has given us a fair imitation of the recruits that we wanted in the past, but it’s never provider a reliable indicator that they would fit in well with a team or company. Employment […]

The Biggest Nail In Workplace Culture

Some people say that the nail that stands out will get hammered down. These are the people who want you to keep your head down and not make a fuss, just do your hours at your desk and then head home. These people fear being the nail that stands out, and they’ll share that fear. […]