RFL: Strategic HR: Calgary: Marcus Buckingham!

Check out this AMAZING Strategic Human Resources Event featuring Marcus Buckingham!

I've agreed to post content to help build awareness and generate interest for an amazing HR event being held in June in Calgary, Alberta. A Fresh Approach will feature presentations by Marcus Buckingham, best selling author of First, Break All The Rules, Ann Rhoades, former VP of HR at Southwest Airlines, and Cameron Herald, former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

I am truly very excited about this event and appreciate the opportunity to help promote it. The following is an excerpt of a blog post from the Fresh Approach website. It's a very good read, please enjoy:

6 Secrets Everyone Knows but Always Forgets

Published

by

roger

on January 19, 2009

in Human Resources

. 1 Comment

The world is in a state of flux. That’s a given.

Business is driving this change. That’s news to some people, old hat to others. And while the Harvard MBAs drone on about business models and healthy bottom lines, the savvy business owner knows one thing for certain.

Business is about people.

And the most important people in any business are the ones who collect a paycheck from your HR department every month.

Your employees.

So how do you find good ones? How do you keep them? Simple questions, but if the answers were easy, every business would have energized worker bees, competent managers and brilliant leaders. Success would be all but assured.

But that doesn’t happen. Here’s six reasons why, and what to do about it.

Not-so-secret #1 – Employees are little gold nuggets

Employers love to pan for gold, to look for the next Warren Buffet for sixty grand a year, but what they consistently forget is that their pans are already loaded with nuggets. Stop looking at the rocks in the riverbed and check what you have in-house.

There was a reason why you hired your staff. Most of the time, it was a pretty good reason. They were qualified. Still are. And when they started, there was a deep desire to find real value in their job. To connect.

So what happened? Did they build a solid foundation in your company? With other staff, managers, and clients? How were they motivated to accomplish this? By command and control, or by encouragement and team-building. Big difference.

Cherish those little nuggets. They truly are gold.

Not-so-secret #2 – Knowledge breeds knowledge

Your employees are all experts at something inside your business. That has come with tenure on the job. The key is to have them share what they know. The result is a workforce with a greater understanding of the big picture. Once they see that every position is an important cog in an ever-moving wheel, trust and appreciation are not far off. And that appreciation isn’t confined to other employees – it extends to the company itself. The giant becomes a benevolent one.

The greater their respect for the place they work and the purpose it serves in society, the more they want to share what they know. And learn what the person in the next office is up to. Sometimes, chatting at work can be a really good thing.

Not-so-secret #3 – The well is bottomless

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