Today’s hard-working employees often struggle, they have real pain at times on the job, and most of them are working their butts off to succeed. As leaders, it’s our job to help them power through it all and to stay highly engaged. 

If we want employees that give 100% effort at work, and who then go home and shout from the rooftops, “My Company is a great place to work,” we need to do a better job of listening to our people. Unfortunately, not everything we hear has equal importance. Drilling down to the core of what our people really need to succeed is a big job, and it’s why so many companies invest in employee engagement studies each year. The problem is, too many of these studies trivialize our people’s careers and struggles.

The quality of our lives has a lot to do with the quality of our relationships.  I am not referring to the number of people we know but to the depth and solidity of the ties we establish.

As human beings we have a series of needs that we have to meet in order to achieve a sense of balance.  We strive to feel valued and we also need to know that we belong to a group that accepts us and makes us feel important.  In addition we have to have the sensation that we are contributing to a project that has value, a project that makes sense for us.

With a charisma and energy that kept the audience smiling and on the edge of their seats throughout the entire session, the Vice President of Latin American Division Training at a Great Place to Work Institute® Raciel Sosa gave a panoramic view of the current work scenario: environments where four generations coexist with differences and conflicts. How to successfully lead such diverse groups? It comes from within the organization, and particularly from the people who make it up.

From Baby Boomers to Generation Z, discover the characteristics of each generation and how businesses, leaders and collaborators can work together to coexist, unleash potential and achieve a better place to work.

How much would you pay for an advisor that permits you to get to know yourself better, that helps you discover the resources that live within you and that shows you the obstacles that are preventing you from moving forward?

Within every one of us there exists an ability that we do not use most of the time,  because most of us do not know that we have it. Discovering this ability and learning to utilize it can be one of the most important things we can do in our lives. Though this process, we get to know ourselves better and arrive at an ability to see through moments of darkness.

The Papacy is a singular, unique position, one that can’t really be compared to any other leadership role. Still, the events of a couple weeks ago surrounding the election of Pope Francis brought to mind three surprising reminders of something I’ve written about before: the qualities of sacrifice, humility and selflessness that all true leaders must possess.

The first example has to do with the place where a new pope goes immediately after being elected. It is called The Room of Tears. As one website explained, the name stems from the idea that it is the place where “new popes have often been overcome with emotion at the thought of the heavy burden that has been given them.”

Much of today’s leadership writing focuses on what high performing leaders should do. Certainly, that material helps from a theoretical and aspirational point of view. Yet what really haunts leaders on a day-to-day basis is the mistakes that they make. They don’t trip up because they are bad people; they most often fumble because of a lack of knowledge, bad habits or too much stress.

The most common—and, not coincidentally, most damaging—mistakes involve interacting with people in the wrong way. Here are 10 such People Mistakes that I see in the field, and I’m sure you witness, too:

Last month we explored how critical passion is to achieving our goals and looked at some ways to identify and grow our passion.  This month we’re going to learn a technique called “Cutting-in-Half.” Once you’ve got the passion part of the equation taken care of, and you know you have ownership of your goal, Cutting-in-Half is how you can easily break that big goal into smaller chunks so you know exactly what you need to do today, and every subsequent day, to make that goal happen. 

Cutting-in-Half is effective with any kind of goal; professional or personal, and it works just like it sounds: by cutting the time to reach the goal in half.  So if you’re looking at a year-long goal, you’re going to say: “Okay, here’s what I want to achieve by the end of this year, and here is what I need to have accomplished at the end of the next six months in order to be on track to achieve that year-end goal.”  And then you simply continue cutting it in half by asking: “What do I need to have accomplished at the end of the next 90 days, and then 30 days (obviously, 30 is not half of 90, but it’s a breakdown people tend to readily accept mentally). Then we land at the big question of: “What do I need to do today in order to stay on track for my next 30 days, to stay on track for the next 90 days, for the 6 months, for the year?  And that’s where you really want to get to here: to know exactly what you need to do today to make this a successful day so you can go into tomorrow with a clear head and make it another successful day, and so on.

Anyone who has been on an interview recently has probably gone over the answers to the typical questions: what are your strengths and weaknesses? Why are you interested in working for this company? Where do you see yourself in five years? But, how would you react to the questions that knock you off your feet, and whose answers could get you the job…or not?

The answer to this question is as simple as it is complex; being prepared for just about anything (or at least practicing a couple times your “that question doesn’t surprise me” face.) And the new situation that any interviewee needs to have in mind now is the “weird” questions that are becoming more and more common. According to an article recently published in The Guardian, two out of every five candidates has been asked one of these uncommon questions.  These questions can seem irrelevant, but actually reveal a lot about the capabilities and personality of the people who are answering them.

In order to not be caught off guard, the online career and work community Glassdoor compiled thousands of interview questions shared by job candidates and put together a list of the 25 Most Eccentric Interview Questions for 2013. We present the top five in the following, along with a selection of experiences from the WOBI team, so you are well prepared for anything in the next interview!

A daily massage, gourmet lunches, on-site gyms, elaborate lounge areas…if one of these isn’t a perk at work, you probably aren’t working in Silicon Valley. However, the truth behind such outlandish offerings at the office is very simple: to keep employees happy and talent in the company. Enterprises such as Apple, Google and Facebook (to name a few) continue to attract and fight over some of today’s most promising talent in their fields. However, they now have to compete with the hundreds of successful, promising, fun and young startups that are popping up all over Silicon Valley that give exciting alternatives. And with such a small talent pool to fill the technical skills these jobs require, today’s largest tech companies are in a real battle to find and keep the right people.

With the almost unending lists of up and coming enterprises in comparison to the amount of qualified employees, the war for talent in Silicon Valley is more present than ever. In the following discover what some companies are doing to keep their top employees, as well as the pacts made between top companies to ensure competing companies don’t pursue talent.

If these first weeks of 2013 have you already wondering where you’ll find the time to achieve all the great goals you set for this new year, you’re not alone. When Leadership IQ asked over 1,500 leaders “Did you successfully complete your goals for today?” and provided three responses to choose from: “Yes,” “No,” and “I have no idea” the most common response was “I have no idea.”  The problem is that too many leaders aren’t sure what their goals really are. So let me make it perfectly clear from the start: your goals are not your to-do list and your goals are not whatever is filling up your email inbox.  These are actually everybody else’s goals, and if your time is getting sucked up helping other people achieve their important goals, you’ll never find the time to achieve your own goals.