Category: Gleaner Jamaica

I wrote this article based on my personal experience as a sometime salesperson. it has to do with being resilient in tough times.

Enjoy this peek into what it’s like to keep going, while managing your mind in this Gleaner article.

How to Be a Great Salesperson in Tough Times.

We all know that managing your time on the job is vitally important.

However, researchers have discovered that managing your free time is vital to your quality of life and has more of an impact than the quantity of time you actually have. Click here to read my article in the Gleaner.

The short vacation you took was good, but a longer one would have been even better. Not true!

Scientists have discovered that by themselves, longer vacations don’t make a difference. Rather than the number of days, what has an impact is how well we manage our free time.
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140831/business/business83.html

There are a number of reasons why employee feedback fails.

One has to do with the quality of the message and this article focuses on how to make high quality suggestions that pass 3 practical tests. Taking them into account gives the manager/coach more work at first, but with practice they help develop precise skills that last an entire career.

Today’s article is designed to help you, a manager, give better feedback.

Three Tests for Effective Coaching.

There are some Caribbean MD’s and CEO’s who insist that they have to look over their employees’ shoulders to get them to be productive.

Is this true?

Some new research brings this approach into question – my latest article published on August 3rd.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140803/business/business83.html

Francis

Here in the Caribbean we have things confused – we treat firing people as if it’s the next thing to being wicked and evil.

It’s a mistake. Companies need to think about the minimum number of people they need, and how close they can stick to that ideal number.

Here’s my article on this touchy topic, under a headline that’s a bit misleading.

Don’t Be a Wimp! Learn to Fire People.

The’re a cost to be incurred when employees, who are trying to get work done, end up having to work around your company’s formal processes.

It could be a dysfunctional department, or a broken process. Sometimes an ineffective person stands in the way. Getting routine work completed becomes a matter of creativity and ingenuity, but also extra time and wasted effort.

A much better approach is to fix the processes involved but few companies know how to make systematic improvements.

Click here : http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140706/business/business8.html

When someone doesn’t return phone calls or email messages is it safe to assume that they just are incompetent in some way. Read this article I wrote in the Gleaner called The Incompetence of Not Returning Phone Calls.

Culture: it’s an excuse we all buy into until we have to defend it. Then the excuses drop away.

Read this article I wrote for the Gleaner to see how this dynamic works and why we should be focusing on behavior instead. When Culture is a Very Bad Word.

There’s a kind of optimism that we engage in when we live close by – that our trip to our destination will be a perfect one. This assumption makes us late… and it has a name: the planning fallacy. My article in the Gleaner explains how it works. Why People Who Live Next Door Are Always Late.