Leadership

Bump up Engagement to Bump up Leadership

It’s a bold new world for today’s federal leaders. Sitting in your office and shouting out edicts to your employees won’t cut it. Particularly with millennials, substantive employee engagement is absolutely necessary for successful leadership. This is true from the critical time of onboarding for a new hire through to an employee’s ongoing employment, developmentRead… Read more »

How Leaders Can Improve Employee Morale

When a crisis hits, leaders can overlook their people – focusing on the situation at hand, but forgetting about the person working right beside them. When employees see trust in government decline, their morale can suffer too. It becomes a domino effect – when employee morale suffers, so too does the agency’s ability to activelyRead… Read more »

Should Politicos Weigh In on Management?

The jobs of politically appointed executives leading federal agencies are typically seen as being mostly about policy and politics, not internal management and organizational performance. But is that really the case? And if so, should politicos then stay out of the management realm? Harvard’s Kennedy School recently looked at the issue in their new report,Read… Read more »

What Baseball Taught Me About Appreciation

It is unanimously accepted in effective employee motivation space that managers who positively reinforce their employees drive high levels of engagement. Unfortunately, much of the positive feedback employees receive is simply recognition for a job well done. While recognition has its place in the workplace, appreciation has much greater impact on job performance. Our country’sRead… Read more »

former federal CIO Steve VanRoekel at GeekWire

DorobekINSIDER: 6 Reasons Silicon Valley Can’t Fix Government

Hey there. I’m Christopher Dorobek — the DorobekINSIDER — and welcome GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER… where we focus on six words: Helping government do its job better. On GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER: Living in a Mobile World – lessons learned from ACT-IAC’s mobile apps fair: Some of the big takeaways from the app fair, emphasizing how government organizations areRead… Read more »

Leadership and…Barrel Racing?

Horse riders galloping through a rodeo arena, swiftly twisting and turning around barrel obstacles, racing to finish in 20 seconds or less. Go too fast, you risk getting bucked. Go too slow, you won’t win. This, my friends, is barrel racing. Like the intricacies of this wild sport, state and local governments face unique challenges.Read… Read more »

Why Ask Questions?

The average four-year-old girl asks 390 questions per day, mostly to her mother. Yep, you read that right. Three hundred ninety. Sorry, Mom. Warren Berger, our keynote speaker at GovLoop’s State and Local Innovators Virtual Summit and author of A More Beautiful Question, said this number isn’t all that surprising. At that young age, childrenRead… Read more »