Effective constructive criticism maintains a delicate balance. When criticism is too harsh, recipients shut down emotionally, get defensive, and fail to hear a word you say. When criticism is too soft, recipients fail to hear the message that they really do need to change.
We’ve all used behavioral interview questions—questions that ask job candidates to recount a past experience so we can assess their likely future performance. In theory, behavioral interview questions should work just fine (because past behavior is usually a decent predictor of future behavior).
Leadership IQ recently conducted a study involving over 30,000 employees. And among the many questions we asked was "When I really make a mistake, I immediately start looking for another chance to try again." You can see from the chart below that there's a lot of room for improvement on this issue...
One of the most common employee engagement survey questions is "I recommend this company as a great organization to work for." So the employee engagement data below comes from a survey of 20,216 people from various size organizations. What you can see from the interactive chart is how organization size is related to employee engagement scores.
Want more effective meetings? Here's a very simple way to cut 17 minutes from almost every team meeting you sit in. Have a statement of achievement. What is that? Well, we did a survey recently. We asked people coming out of meetings: "Was the meeting you were just in, did it accomplish its original objective?" We gave people 3 choices, "yes," "no," and "I have no idea." 
It’s pretty hard to recruit a high performer if you don’t know what attitudes define being a high performer. And yet, that’s exactly what most companies are doing to their recruiters. At Leadership IQ, we recently surveyed 656 human resources executives and asked them to what extent their organization had clearly and scientifically defined the attitudes that distinguish the highest performers from everyone else.
Every company on earth has set SMART Goals. But does that mean they're effective? Not if the disturbing research we've done on goal setting is any indication. In this video, Leadership IQ Founder Mark Murphy talks about some potential problems with SMART Goals.
t's a commonly-held belief that the CEO gets fired (or forced to resign or retire under pressure) because of "current financial performance." But that's wrong, according to a study by LeadershipIQ.com. It found that 31% of get fired for poor change management, 28% for ignoring customers, 27% for tolerating low performers, 23% for denying reality and 22% for too much talk and not enough action.
