Articles by Aubrey Daniels
Yahoo: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right
I can’t believe this. Yahoo is now ranking employees on the curve! If it was April I would think it was an April Fools' joke. Who is advising Marissa Mayer? At a time when Yahoo needs everyone to give it their all, someone has convinced her that r...
Embracing the Transformation From Leader to Mentor
I’m drawing a line in the sand and proclaiming that leadership, as we know it today, will become extinct. Those who want to survive must transform themselves into mentors whose sole purpose is to breed success in those they lead. Seem extreme? Per...
Six Steps to Win/Win Budgeting
We all look forward to paying our taxes, right? It’s always nice to know that our hard-earned dollars are going to be used responsibly. For example, a YouTube video to instruct us how to properly handle watermelons would be a good use of tax dollars,...
Delivering Effective Performance Feedback
Let me first begin by defining “feedback” as information about performance that will allow the performer to change his or her performance. It is a crucial part of improving performance, as all of our learning requires feedback or some knowledge of t...
Shaping Performance Appraisals, One Step at a Time
The last performance appraisal blog that I wrote caused quite a stir. While I am pleased that people actually read it and took the time to respond, the responses caused me to rethink what I wrote. While I don’t apologize for writing that the perfor...
Back to School Lessons for the Workplace
This time of year brings with it a certain set of feelings and, unfortunately, not all of them are positive. For many students, starting school for the first time or starting a new grade may cause anxiety as they face new teachers and new roles and ...
Finally! A Real Solution for the Performance Appraisal System
When is nothing better than something? Could it be the Performance Appraisal? I just read another article suggesting another tweak to the Performance Management System. How many do you think have been written? Thousands, I am sure. In workin...
Saying ‘Thank You!’ for ‘New’ Recognition Research
One would think after decades of research and information about the effect of positive reinforcement on behavior that business leaders, of all people, would have caught on by now. Yet, study after study shows that the workplace remains the least like...
5 Steps for Setting and Accomplishing Productive Goals
Goal setting is a common practice in organizations, and if done well goals lead the way to improved productivity and performance for individuals, departments, teams and the company as a whole. Yet despite widespread use of goals in business, most org...
Commencement Speeches: Worth the Time?
For the last month, thousands of commencement speeches have been delivered, listened to, remarked upon and viewed on YouTube. I guess you can say it’s a time-honored tradition to invite a celebrity or someone of status to inspire graduates with addre...
Big Brother Is Measuring You!
“When we recognize and measure the effect of our actions, we gain knowledge about what we must change so that we can make a different impact.” That’s a quote from Measure of a Leader, a book I co-authored with my brother James E. Daniels. Measurement...
IBM — Shades of Yogi Berra
As Yogi Berra would say, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” When I read last month about what IBM CEO Virginia Rometty said to all 434,000 employees following a poor financial quarterly report, I thought, “I’ve heard this before.” So, I dug back i...
Why We Will Never Forget ‘The Office’
After more than 200 episodes, the oddly quirky and debatably successful sitcom "The Office" came to an end last week. Even for those who didn’t watch, it was clear that the premise of the show was to unearth the totally inappropriate goings-on in th...