We’re taught from a young age that actions speak louder than words—and to an extent, that might be true. Yet for leaders, words matter. They are among your greatest tools. A well-timed and well-chosen word can inspire your employees to achieve greatness; the wrong word can cause morale to plummet, or even bring your very leadership into question.

Your words will impact your employees—and your employees will absolutely remember the things you say.

So… what are you saying? What do your words reveal about your leadership style? And what are some phrases you should be adding to your everyday vocabulary?

Add These Phrases To Your Workplace Speech

As leaders, we all think and communicate a bit differently, but I can tell you that there are certain phrases that I always love to hear coming out of the mouths of business owners, managers, and bosses. These phrases, to me, epitomize leadership, and I think you’ll find them to be hugely impactful to your day-to-day engagement with your team.

Try them out and see what a difference they make:

What do you think about this? The exact wording may be a little different; for example, what’s your take on this? However, it’s important that you adopt the language of collaboration, and make it clear to your employees that you really value what they think. Actively court other opinions and perspectives, and give your team members ownership of team decisions.

What do you need? Empower your team members to do the work you’ve given them. Make it clear that your role is to support them, and help them feel comfortable asking for the resources they need to thrive.

I trust you. It is amazing how powerful this phrase can be in building confidence among your team members. Let them know that you hired them because you believe in their ability to do good work, and that you feel no need to micromanage or to babysit them.

Great work/we can do better. Part of being a leader means encouraging your employees and affirming their hard work—but it’s also your job to push your team to do better and to achieve at a higher level. It’s a balancing act, but one worth investing in.

Thank you. Short and sweet: Let your employees know that their work is acknowledged and appreciated.

These aren’t magical phrases that will transform your business overnight, of course—but they will help you establish a productive, collaborative company culture where your leadership is truly inspiring.

I’ve done a lot of blogging about the differences between bosses and leaders. I’ll let you peruse some of those posts at your leisure, but if I had to sum ‘em up I’d say this: Leaders don’t just manage people, and they don’t just tell people what to do. They inspire people. They make people want to follow them, and they empower them to succeed.

Of course, you’re probably asking yourself: Am I a great leader? Do I have the hallmarks of a true inspiration figure?

You’ll have to do a little self-inventory to know for sure, but to help you gauge your own leadership capacity, let me offer you this… seven signs that you are indeed an inspiration figure in your workplace.

The Seven Signs of Inspiring Leadership

1. You have a sense of purpose beyond your own success. Wanting to achieve great things on your own terms hardly makes you a leader. No, leaders are folks who measure their own success by the success of others; they see it as their mission and purpose to help their team members thrive. If your purpose is to empower, you may be an inspiring leader!
2. You’re approachable. Do your team members feel comfortable approaching you with questions, concerns, or feedback—or do they tremble at the very thought of entering your office? If you’re intimidating rather than approachable, that’s a problem.
3. You’re open-minded. Great leaders are open to whatever works, even if it’s not their own idea. Do you actively court solutions and suggestions from your team members—and implement the ones you think will work? Inspiring leaders do.
4. You’re candid—and constructive. Inspiring leaders give the gift of feedback. If your team members actually accept your constructive feedback and make changes to their performance, that shows that they respect you, and know you’re trying to help them improve.
5. You treat your employees with equality. Favoritism and inspiration do not work together. If your employees feel like you prefer some of them over others, that ultimately reflects badly on your leadership style.
6. You’re grateful. Inspiring leaders are thankful for the efforts of their team—and they’re not afraid to say so.
7. You focus on your team. If you’re happy to give credit to team members, rather than hog it all for yourself, then you’ve definitely got some of the traits of inspiring leadership!

Take stock of yourself—and use these points to determine how inspiring you really are.

Forgiveness is not a term that many of us associate with the workplace. There are a number of reasons for this, I think, starting with the fact that it just sounds so soft. We believe that running a productive and efficient workplace means holding people accountable for their actions—and indeed it does. But does that mean there’s no place in your company culture for forgiveness?

I hope the answer to that is no. Because while I whole-heartedly affirm the need to ensure your team members are doing their job—and understand the consequences of not doing their job—I also think it’s important to make forgiveness a key workplace value.

Why Forgiveness Matters

Why? Because a lack of forgiveness can cause your employees’ sense of confidence to become completely eroded. Your team members need to feel like you trust them to do their job well—but if you spend all your time documenting their wrongdoings and keeping track of every screw-up they’ve ever made, how are they supposed to feel trusted? How are they supposed to feel empowered?

A lack of forgiveness in the workplace, then, doesn’t just hurt people’s feelings. It can actually lead to much higher employee turnover, as the members of your team increasingly fret that you’re focusing too much on their wrongs and not enough on their achievements—that perhaps they’re not cut out for the job you’ve given them after all.

Bringing Forgiveness To Your Workplace

So how do you ensure that your workplace culture is one that embraces forgiveness? I’m not going to offer any easy answer or silver bullet here. I think forgiveness is something you work toward daily. With that said, I think it’s worth considering these questions:

• Do you have an overzealous documentation process, keeping track of all your employees’ wrongdoings to the extent that it does more harm than help?
• Do you regularly practice forgiveness—even if that just means offering a second chance or cutting employees a break for an honest mistake?
• Do you expect your employees to forgive you, when you mess up? Is forgiveness something you ask for?

Maybe meditation on these questions can point you toward a workplace that’s built on forgiveness—and, thus, a workplace that empowers its employees!

Stress in the workplace takes a toll—not just emotionally, but physically and even financially. Stressed-out, anxious, and fatigued employees don’t work as hard, they don’t work as creatively, and they aren’t as willing to take risks. They do tend to call off more, take more sick days and get less done when they’re in the office. So in a very real way, workplace stress can impact your bottom line.

The question is, what can you do about it? After all, stress happens. There’s nothing you can do to prevent stress from making its way into your workplace. You’ll have tough clients, urgent deadlines, high-stakes situations, and busy seasons. These common stressors cannot be totally prevented against, but perhaps they can be managed.

Learning to manage stress is important for any business owner or leader—but you can’t just leave it there. In addition to managing your own stress, it’s important to help your employees manage their stress for them—which often means leading by example.

Think about that the next time you feel yourself getting overwhelmed by your daily tasks. If you lash out, explode in a fit of rage, or have a breakdown in front of your employees—well, you’re only human, and these things can happen, but be mindful of the fact that the way you deal with stress is a model to the rest of your team. And when the boss gets overwhelmed, the rest of the workforce can’t help but feel the same.

That’s why it’s important—first of all—for you to have some stress management structures in place, even if it’s just an outlet such as journaling, exercise, or music. Use these outlets, and make it clear to your employees that you welcome them to do the same. Make yours a workplace in which everyone takes the time they need to deal with potential stress buildups.

You might even go as far as to invest in stress management training for your team—and if you do, make sure you’re in attendance. Again, what you want to do is lead by example—signaling to everyone on your team that proper stress mitigation is a part of your company culture.

Leaders, do you have an interest in keeping workplace morale high? In protecting your employees from burnout, stress, and fatigue? In providing them with the resources they need to tackle major anxieties or seasons of struggle? Of encouraging all employees—yourself included—to take vacation time in order to recharge those batteries and stave off exhaustion?

You should be, and not just because it’s the right thing to do. It’s also something that can impact your business at the bottom line. And if you aren’t mindful of workplace burnout, it could cost you big time.

How Workplace Burnout Costs Businesses

Indeed, workplace burnout has become an epidemic. And as more and more leaders and employees are succumbing to the physical and emotional ravages of workplace anxiety, it’s costing businesses billions of dollars each year.

That’s right, billions. And that number encompasses all of the following:

• The cost of replacing employees who leave the company because they feel overworked and underappreciated.
• The cost of sick days, call-outs, and employee absenteeism.
• Missed opportunities from sapped creativity and impaired ingenuity.
• Higher healthcare costs for your employees, which can put a big ding into workplace insurance costs.
• A general lack of energy and forward momentum.

Managing Burnout

The bottom line is that when you and your employees feel consistently burned out—beaten down by the stresses of daily life and work—it can have a big, negative impact on the entire team. So what can be done about it?

Well, we’re in the midst of the holiday season right now, so I hope one thing you’re doing is taking vacation—and encouraging your employees to do likewise! Something else to consider is investing in stress management training, or at the very least in exemplifying stress mitigation techniques for your employees. Even communication and regular affirmation can help avert workplace burnout; hard work is easier to swallow when it seems like it’s appreciated and meaningful!

Whatever you do, don’t ignore the problem of burnout. If you don’t deal with it early on, it could cost you big time.

We’ve all sat through a bad meeting. You know: The kind that seems to last forever, with a lot of words being spoken but no decisions being made and no action steps taken. Meetings like that are pretty obviously a waste of time—and that’s equally frustrating for leaders and employees, all of whom have things they’d rather be doing.

But there’s another problem with bad meetings: If all your meetings are unengaging, you’ll basically condition your team to arrive at each new meeting already expecting it to be a dreadful bore. You’ll have lost them before the meeting even begins.

So what can you do? Is it possible to salvage your meetings? Absolutely it is. You’ve just got to be intentional in making each meeting engaging.

How to Make Your Meetings More Engaging

A few basic ways to do that include:

1. Have a “hook” at the beginning of each meeting. Tell a funny story, show an entertaining YouTube clip, or simply take a show-of-hands poll—anything to get people engaged right from the start.
2. Lead your meetings with a clear definition of the meeting objectives—what you hope to accomplish and what all participants can expect to learn.
3. Allow emotions into your meeting. Ask people how they’ve been feeling about work since your last meeting. Take a temperature check of office morale.
4. Have a strong visual component to your meeting. In particular, have a way to showcase the brainstorming that’s happening and the thought that’s at work. A marker board, pin-up board, or even a sticker voting system can be useful here.
5. Build positivity into your meeting. Share success stories that have happened since the last meeting. Consider implementing a rule that the team must say three positive things about an idea before anyone is allowed to criticize or to shoot it down.
6. Make your meeting more active. Ditch the chairs from your meeting space, and instead encourage your meeting participants to stand together in a huddle—a great way to engage their bodies and, hopefully, their minds!

Engaging meetings don’t just happen: They’re planned and executed with intention.

Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody fails from time to time. What’s important is that we redeem those failures. What’s important is that we learn from them.

So let me ask you: Do your team members learn from their failures? Do you learn from yours?

Too often, the answer to these questions is no. That’s because many corporate cultures do not make it safe to fail. Failure is met with blame, if not outright shame—which means nobody feels comfortable taking risks and nobody is willing to own up to their errors and learn from them.

That’s no way to run a business. Smart leaders create environments in which employees can use their failures to get better. And that means shifting away from the blame game.

Does Your Culture Promote Blame?

Easier said than done, right? Well, not necessarily. You may have a culture of blame right now, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t steps you can take to improve things and create an environment where failure is safe.

Some tips for moving past a culture of blame:

• Provide your team with the room to problem solve. Give them training in identifying issues and strategically thinking through potential fixes.
• Be open to suggestions for possible improvements. Don’t take it as criticism; take it as meaningful feedback.
• Show real leadership by publically acknowledging your own errors and mistakes. Don’t try to hide them or cover them up. Own up to them!
• When chastising employees or discussing their shortcomings, do so in a private environment—but offer praise and affirmation publically.
• Remind your team members that failures and mistakes are learning opportunities, and encourage your team members to pause and reflect on what they can learn from their own shortcomings.

The blame game wastes time and prevents you from really using your failures; it’s very much worth your while to create a culture in which blame never enters the picture.

It doesn’t matter how great of a leader you become—how experienced, how deliberate, how learned. You’re still going to have some areas in which you’re weak—areas in which you could stand some improvement.

Many great leaders don’t actually recognize these areas in themselves, which means they don’t improve, and don’t seek assistance when they really need it.

These are your leadership blind spots, but they don’t have to be. It is possible to identify them and work toward improvements—making yourself a more robust and multi-talented leader than ever.

Let me offer you a few tips for doing exactly that.

Finding and Conquering Your Leadership Blind Spots

1. Ask other leaders and mentors what their blind spots are. Help develop your own awareness of some of the most common leadership blind spots that are out there. You’ll probably hear other executives list communication or organization or delegation as some of their top areas for improvement. Perhaps this can spur some introspection on your own part.
2. Hire people who are different than you—people who have different skill sets and different areas of strength. Not only will this help bring your own shortcomings into relief, but it will help you cover for them and protect against them.
3. Solicit feedback from your team members. Make it clear that you value their comments, even constructive criticism, and invite them to “review” your leadership during their own annual employee reviews.
4. Think about some of your own habits. That can be a good way of identifying strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if you have a habit of arriving at meetings late, then perhaps organization is a weakness. And if you have a bad habit of stress eating, what that tells you is that you need to develop tools for stress management.
5. Make a list of your strengths—but consider how they could come with liabilities. For example, persuasive and commanding speakers sometimes have a hard time listening to others; those who are decisive and dedicated may struggle with delegation.

Spend some time thinking about the ways in which your leadership could be improved; that kind of self-awareness can be invaluable!

Leaders and entrepreneurs, I’ve got a question for you: What’s the most valuable asset you’ve got? I’ll give you three guesses, but I suspect you won’t need but one. Most of us realize that time is the most precious commodity we have—the only thing we can never get more of.

So naturally, as your most precious asset, time is something you should protect, right? Well, sure…but the question is how.

How can you guard your time—keeping other people from disrespecting, abusing, and wasting it, and keeping yourself from squandering it?

There are a few common-sense solutions I’ve come up with over the years, and I’ll share them with you.

Five Strategies for Safeguarding Your Time

1. Schedule some appointments with yourself. Get out your calendar and mark off some blocks of time, throughout the week, to just be alone in your office and get stuff done. That means no phone calls or meetings. If people want to get in touch with you, tell them to schedule something for some other These blocks of time are your windows for productivity—so make good use of them!
2. Don’t be afraid to turn down requests for your time. Just say no. You don’t have to be at every meeting or become involved with every project. It’s not rude to say no to some things in order to protect your time.
3. Be willing to propose shorter meetings; if someone wants two hours of your time but you think the issues at stake only warrant half an hour, say so. Be willing to work with people, but unwilling to spend more of your time than is truly necessary.
4. Beware of the people in your professional circles who are constantly scheduling things at the very last minute—and don’t hesitate to tell them that you need more time to plan.
5. Note, as you set your appointments and schedule time for yourself, that you need to be protective of your time in every facet of your life—including personal. That means scheduling time for family, friends, and physical fitness, to say nothing of vacations and down time.

Remember: You can’t buy more time. So make prudent use of what you’ve got!

I say this to people all the time: If you’re having a hard time in the workplace—if you feel like you’re stagnant, struggling, or banging your head against a wall—the answer isn’t to hunker down for long hours in the office. The answer is to get out of the office and to get moving.

The answer is to get active.

It doesn’t matter how you do that, exactly. Me, I like to go out in the mornings and spend some time rollerblading. Maybe your thing is jogging, walking, yoga, or weightlifting.

Whenever and however you do it, getting active is good for you—and not just in terms of your physical health. It’s good for your professional health, too. In fact, it may be the answer you’ve been looking for—a way for you to unlock your full measure of creativity, energy, and resilience.

You may be surprised by some of the professional benefits of regular physical activity. Let me share just five of them with you.

1. Regular exercise will help you beat stress. I’ve written before about the high cost of workplace burnout, which leads to diminished creativity and productivity. Well, burnout is a result of stress—and if you want to deal with your stress effectively, the best thing you can do is start working out.
2. Working out can help you tap into your full creative reserves, too. Often, the best way to devise a solution to a problem is to take your mind off it and just let your mind wander. After all, don’t a lot of people say they do their best thinking in the shower? Well, if you disengage your mind and do something physical for a while, you may be amazed at the fresh ideas and new perspectives that come flooding to you.
3. Getting more exercise during the day will also help you get more sleep during the night—meaning better cognitive functioning and more overall energy during the day.
4. Speaking of which, exercise is the best way to unleash energy within your body—energy you can carry with you throughout your day. (That’s why I recommend working out in the mornings as opposed to the tail end of your day, if at all possible.)
5. Finally, working out will give you a greater incentive to turn over other healthy habits—like sound nutrition—which will only increase your energy, clarity, and physical wellbeing.

Get out there and get active today—and see how your working life benefits.

As a keynote speaker, focusing on the fields of leadership and engagement, I probably get one question more than any other: What’s the secret? What’s the magic bullet? How do I unlock my leadership greatness?

Of course, the question is usually offered a bit tongue-in-cheek. Most of us realize that great leadership takes time. It’s not something you can just flip on like a light switch.

And yet, there is an element of truth to that question. People want to know some quick habits they can adopt, some simple steps they can take, to move out of the good leader category into the realm of true excellence.

So let me share some insights—five significant steps you can take to put a little distance between yourself and those leaders who settle for mere goodness.

Transcending Goodness; Reaching Greatness

1. Develop others. Good leaders spend a lot of their time on self-development—which is fine, and at times needed. But great leaders won’t settle for making themselves better. They insist on making others Let me ask you something: Are you a mentor to someone younger or less experienced than you? If not, you’re missing out on a key method for unlocking your leadership greatness.
2. Listen to other people. Good leaders tend to be great speakers—but if you’re only interested in hearing yourself talk, you’re not doing yourself any favors. Great leadership means hearing the concerns, suggestions, and opinions of others. It means giving your team members the gift of your genuine engagement. It’ll sharpen you as a leader, and make your team more dynamic and robust.
3. Working for a cause. To be a great leader, you need a motivation beyond the company you lead. You need to really believe in what that company is doing. You need to have a sense of mission—whether it’s social, environmental, technical, or something else.
4. Own failure, not success. Great leaders always step up to claim responsibility when things are headed south; and yet, when the company is thriving, they’re more than willing to give the credit to their colleagues and team members. Are you a glory hog? That’s the antithesis of great leadership!
5. Be open to change. “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is about the worst thing a leader could say. Don’t take risks or take chances blindly, but do understand that there are almost always ways in which your team can adapt and improve.

With those habits down, you’ll be that much closer to unlocking your leadership greatness.

How do your employees see themselves?

Do they see themselves as mere cogs in a machine—or do they feel empowered? Do they feel competent? Do they feel like rock stars?

As a keynote speaker focusing on the fields of leadership and engagement, I’ve always been amazed at the numbers of teams I see that seem to have no sense of pride, no confidence in their own ability. And let me tell you something: It’s not the fault of the individual team members. It’s the fault of the team leader, who has somehow failed to make his or her best employees feel like the superstars they really are.

See, the way to build coherent teams and high-performing company culture isn’t to intimidate your employees. It isn’t to make them doubt their own skill or to shake their confidence. It’s to empower them. It’s to make them feel like they can do anything. It’s to give them faith in themselves to dream big, take risks, and solve problems.

Empowering and Engaging

Easier said than done? Not necessarily. There are several strategies you can use to make your employees feel like rock stars. Let me share just a few:

• Give your employees a sense of purpose. Let them know that their work is important, and that it’s about more than getting a paycheck or bringing more money into the company. Connect them to a social purpose, a cause, or simply a key role in the team dynamic.
• Include other voices and opinions in your decision-making. Solicit feedback and ideas from your team members. Ask them what’s working and what’s not. Consider what they have to say, and even if you don’t act on a piece of feedback, express gratitude for it. Make your employees feel welcome in sharing further insights and ideas in the future.
• Give public praise for the employees who do well—but when it comes time to offer constructive feedback or rebuke, make sure to keep it private and discreet.
• Create new opportunities for your employees to shine. Don’t ever let them get bored! As you see your employees master their work, consider new ways to expand their responsibilities.
• Invest in team training, providing your employees with opportunities to develop their skills and to become even more confident in their abilities.

Invest in creating a work environment that empowers your employees. Make them feel like rock stars—and don’t be surprised when they continue to perform like rock stars!

Do you implement morning huddles in your workplace?

As a leadership expert and keynote speaker, I talk to a lot of managers who use the morning huddle as a way to rally their troops at the start of each new day. I’m not here to tell you that morning huddles are essential, or that they work for every business, but I am here to tell you that huddles can be powerful ways for building team unity, boosting morale, and ensuring that all of your team members are oriented toward the same goal.

In short, huddles can be key for building engagement—but how do you ensure that your morning huddles are actually effective?

Building A More Effective Morning Huddle

A few tips come to mind:

• Be consistent. A morning huddle is meaningful as a daily ritual; it’s less meaningful if you huddle for a day or two, then forget about it for a month, then do it again, then off again and back on again. You’ve got to invest in huddles as part of your team’s daily rhythm.
• Shake things up. At the same time, don’t be afraid to change the structure or contents of your huddles from time to time. Like any ritual, a morning huddle can become rote. Keep things lively.
• Be thankful. One way to shake up your ritual is to begin morning huddles with a few words of thanksgiving. Express what it is and who it is you are thankful for—big achievements, significant progress, reasons you and your team should feel happy.
• Learn together. Share a valuable lesson learned or a new piece of information you picked up on the previous day. Encourage your team members to follow suit.
• Count down. Have something fun on the horizon—a getaway, a retreat, or just a holiday—that you can all look forward to together.
• Meet on your feet. Actually, stand in a circle formation for your huddle. Begin the day by getting some blood pumping. Take a break from the sedentary nature of office life.
• Identify challenges. Though the point of the huddle is to boost morale, you also want to be careful to specify upcoming obstacles or challenges and to work with your team on the right strategies for facing them.

Above all: Keep it brief! Nobody wants to have their day begin with a useless hour-long meeting. Make it five minutes, focus on quickly delivering valuable information, then let your team members get on with their work!

As a leader, you’ve probably thought about all the ways in which digital technology can enhance communication with your clients—but there’s another side of the coin to consider. Digital technology can also facilitate better communication between your employees and one another, and between your employees and you.

Digital technology can even be a catalyst for team building. The question is, how can you leverage technology in your workplace so that it actually improves collaboration and engagement? How can you ensure technology is a tool, not just a distraction?

As a keynote speaker and leadership expert, I’ve spoken on this topic to a number of team leaders—and here are some of the tips I often provide them.

• Measure employee engagement. Look into a software suite called Officevibe, which promises increased employee engagement in just a few minutes each month. The software allows your employees to weigh in with their feedback and suggestions for new workplace initiatives; you can not only get feedback but also quantify and track your progress as you strive toward new goals.
• Provide tools for collaboration. You might use a project management tool, like Wrike or Baseline, to help your team members share ideas and files and work together on a particular project—an especially good tool for those who have remote employees. You might use something like Incentive to make collaboration more social. Or you may simply use something like Dropbox to ensure easy access to files and documents.
• Use technology to boost workplace wellness. There are some great programs that make employee wellness actionable, measurable, and fun. Limeade.com is just one of many that are worth looking into.
• Get feedback. You can conduct easy, anonymous employee surveys with tools like TINYpulse, allowing you to have a better sense of what your employees are thinking—and letting them know that their voices are heard and that they are important.

Technology can be a great enabler of increased teamwork and collaboration—and an amazing way to boost engagement within your team.

As a keynote speaker, one of the topics I most love to discuss is employee engagement. What I’ve noticed is that many organizations are really hungry to discuss this topic, yet there’s often a misperception about what employee engagement actually is.

Think about it for a second: Do you know how to define the term? If someone asked you what employee engagement was, how would you respond?

It’s one of those buzzwords that a lot of us accept without really unpacking it—so let me try to clear some things up. First, a few words about what employee engagement is not. For one thing, engagement is not happiness—not exactly. Sure, engagement may make many of your employees happier at the office—but if happiness was all there was to it, you could just buy a keg and a Ping-Pong table for your break room and be done with it.

Happiness is not the same thing as engagement—and neither is satisfaction. You may have plenty of satisfied employees who are perfectly willing to do their job from 9 to 5 each day, but they won’t necessarily go the extra mile or even feel particularly loyal to the organization.

So what is employee engagement? Here’s my simple definition: Engagement is the measure of how emotionally committed your employees are to the team.

To put it another way: Your employees are engaged when they show up for more than a paycheck. They’re engaged when they feel like their work is meaningful, and that the organization is doing something significant.

As such, engagement doesn’t necessarily look like employee parties, socialization, or games—though those things can help. Employee engagement is founded on something more basic—letting employees feel like they are part of something, and that you have invested in them as integral members of your team.

Some of the most fundamental hallmarks of employee engagement: Soliciting employee feedback; genuinely listening to them; ensuring they are clear on the vision of the organization; and showing that you want them around for the long haul—something you can do by providing opportunities for professional training and development.

That’s what employee engagement looks like to me—but what does it look like to you? Leave me a comment to share your take!

Want to know the secret to hiring the very best employees in your industry, and creating a team loaded with all-stars? It’s really pretty simple. Call up all the ace talents you know, and ask how much you’d have to pay them to come work for you. Whatever number they throw out, make it their salary. And there you go!

Of course I’m being facetious, but I’m trying to make a point. If money were no object, hiring great talents would probably be pretty easy. When you have a limited budget, though—as all businesses do—hiring can be harder. There may be some great talents you’d like to poach, yet you fear that you simply don’t have the resources to make it worth their while.

There are ways to work around this, though. As a speaker and thought leader in the field of team building, I’ve witnessed some great strategies for hiring top talents, even while on a tight budget. Let me share a few of them with you.

Know the value of outsourcing. There may be certain tasks that you can simply outsource to someone to do, rather than bringing on a full-time, salaried staff member. This can save you some money on payroll and benefits, which will open more doors for when you do hire salaried team members.

Play up your small size. Believe it or not, many top talents leave bigger companies for smaller ones—even taking pay cuts to do so—in order to enjoy new challenges and autonomy. When recruiting, use your company’s smaller size as a selling point—not something to be embarrassed about.

Offer great benefits. Can’t offer a top salary? Well maybe you can offer childcare assistance, transportation stipends, opportunities to work from home, more vacation days, and so on. Try to be competitive with all your benefits.

Make use of your existing employees. Spend some time chatting with your engaged, loyal team members about some of their connections. Ask them to refer new employees to you, and trust them to present your company in the best possible light.

Don’t let money hinder you from trying to assemble your dream team!

Job interviews aren’t like they used to be. Once upon a time, it was possible for an interviewee to effectively feel ambushed by a strange or unexpected interview question. Today, there are countless career sites on the Web that provide a full rundown of any and all possible interview questions. Plus, in this era of robust focus on company culture, more and more interviewers are asking questions like, “What color crayon are you?” Job applicants practically expect to get off-the-wall questions like these. It’s simply very hard to surprise them.

So what does this mean for your recruiting? What it means is that, if you really want to evaluate someone’s talent, you need to shy away from these easily rehearsed questions and instead ask things that really prove ingenuity and creative, critical thinking.

Some suggestions:

• First, I recommend looking at glassdoor.com and other career sites to see what some of the most common and predictable questions are. You probably know some of them just off the top of your head—where do you see yourself in five years? What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses? The list goes on. Scratch these questions altogether; there’s no sense wasting time with something applicants can rehearse for so easily.
• I’d recommend avoiding questions that effectively ask the applicant to repeat information from his or her resume. You know where they went to school, where they worked before, and so on. Why waste time asking for a recap of these things?
• Be careful about historical questions, too. Asking an applicant how he or she dealt with a problem at one company, ten years ago, may have little to do with your company and its unique culture.
• A better approach is to interview for problem-solving abilities. Ask your job applicant how he or she would identify and solve problems in the first week on the job. Ask for a step-by-step process or just some best practices. You can even provide the applicant with the summary of a real problem he or she will face on Day 1, and ask for a potential solution.
• Ask the applicant to do a little forecasting—looking forward to the future of the company or simply the future of the industry, predicting trends and offering their vision.

As a speaker and author in the leadership space, I know that recruiting is where great company cultures are built. Step up your recruiting game with better interview questions—today!

As a professional conference and keynote speaker, I obviously believe in the power of communication—but leaders, let me ask you something: Do you believe in it? Do you understand communication to be one of the keys to engagement and productivity on your team? And if so, how are you actively improving your communications with team members and employees?

I’m asking these questions rather pointedly because it is that important. Study after study confirms that many businesses lose tens of thousands of dollars each year due to insufficient communication between leaders and their employees.

By contrast, the right standards of communication can help you improve engagement on your team—leading to better culture, better productivity, and better retention.

Here are some tips I recommend for any leader looking to improve communication with the team:

Be willing to get personal with your employees. This doesn’t mean you have to suddenly start showing up at their kids’ basketball games, but do make sure you know them by name and can engage them on a topic that isn’t strictly work-related. Show that your investment in them goes beyond the workplace.

Ask for feedback—and listen to it. Solicit the suggestions and opinions of your team members. Give them a voice in key decisions and in the general shape of the company. You don’t have to take every suggestion, obviously—but do give them the respect of genuine engagement. Starting an employee engagement survey is a good place to begin.

Recognize your employees for their achievements. Employee recognition is a key ingredient to employee retention. When a team member accomplishes something significant, offer public praise and affirmation.

Leave on a positive note. As a leader, you set the emotional tone for your entire team. Be mindful of the emotional imprint you leave on your team members; when an encounter with an employee ends, make sure you end on a positive note—letting the team member feel confident and inspired, not down or despairing.

Walk the walk. A key component in workplace communication: Do what you say you are going to do. When you signal, either verbally or nonverbally, that you are going to take a certain action, make sure you follow through with it. Build trust through integrity.

What tips would you add? Let me know about some of your secrets to successful communication in the workplace.

I’m sad to say it, but we live in a culture that closely links extroversion with leadership. Now, I’m a bit of an extrovert myself, so maybe I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth—but nevertheless, I have to say, as an international keynote speaker and leadership coach, that some of the best, most effective leaders I’ve seen have been introverts by nature. When we assume that brashness and loudness go hand in hand with decisiveness, we do so at our own peril.

One of the main things that holds introverts back, I think, is the perception that those who are quiet, even shy, cannot make commanding figures. That misconception keeps many introverts from reaching their true leadership potential—but it doesn’t have to.

Consider some of these tips, which introverts can use to break past those perceptions and turn their introversion into an asset, not a liability.

Remember that listening—not talking—is the mark of really engaging leadership. The best leaders aren’t necessarily the ones who talk the most. Often, they’re the ones who listen actively, truly engaging with team members, colleagues, and customers before offering solutions. As an introvert, you’re well-poised to practice your active listening skills.

Remain calm during times of crisis. When things get rocky, brash and loquacious, leaders can often fly off the handle—but introverts can be the voice of reason. Use that to your advantage! Seize crises as opportunities to provide stable, steady leadership.

Force yourself out of your comfort zone. You may not have much interest in making small talk, or in delivering big speeches—and to an extent, that’s fine. There’s a case to be made for playing to your strengths. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to push yourself a bit; that’s the only way you’ll ever grow as a leader.

Allow yourself some quiet time. Introverts need a little space to breathe, to recharge their batteries—and that’s fine! Take 15 minutes each morning to be alone, to be quiet, and to give yourself some space before you tackle the challenges of the day.

By following these quick guidelines, I believe that any introvert can break down the misconceptions and show real leadership skills.

For all the talk about engagement—what it is, how to achieve it, why it matters—there’s one question that receives precious little attention: How do you quantify employee engagement? How do you measure it? How do you know when you’re on the right track?

There are various answers to that question, some more quantitative than others. Employee engagement surveys, for example, can provide some helpful benchmarks and meaningful metrics.

A bit less formally, but no less importantly, there are some key qualities that define a truly engaged workplace—and if you want to know what kind of progress you’re making toward true employee engagement, looking for these qualities can be a good beginning.

Here are some ways you can tell that your organization has achieved a healthy measure of engagement:

You have a real, year-round strategy in place. Start by asking yourself this question: Is employee engagement something you push hard for a week or two each year, but keep in the back burner the rest of the time? Or do you have a full-time employee engagement plan in place? Simply having a plan implemented reveals much about the company’s intentions, priorities, and potential engagement level.

You have formal structures in place to get employee feedback. Remember the employee engagement surveys I mentioned above? Well, if you don’t even have a survey, that’s obviously a bad sign! On the flipside, having a program in place to gather employee feedback, to periodically take the temperature over the course of the year, is always positive.

You have formal structures to provide feedback to your employees. Here’s the inverse of the last one: In addition to a formal employee feedback structure, engaged organizations also need a formal employee review structure. An annual employee review should be the bare minimum here.

You know why engagement matters. A final consideration: Do you know why employee engagement is important to your organization? Do you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve? Having a clear sense of goals and expectations is critical.

Does your organization have the hallmarks of engagement? As a leadership expert and conference speaker, I know that this is a topic many executives are wrestling with. I hope you’ll find this brief checklist to be helpful!