You may think of your career as a ladder–straight up, or down–but a better analogy might be a rock climbing wall, where going sideways or even backwards can be how you find your unique route to the top.

"There is no excuse. Creativity has to be at the forefront.” If not, one day you'll wake up and discover your competitors have the edge.

When you’re in the middle of a conflict, it’s common to automatically enter a “fight or flight” mentality, but it’s possible to interrupt this response and clear a path towards a more productive discussion.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet on the Most Important Skill Job Seekers Need Today

Should you always be looking for another job, never make a lateral move, or be sure to stay at a job for two years? There's a lot of conflicting advice out there. HBR's Amy Gallo helps you sort the myths from the facts.

Sure, you could just argue with them. But if you have to work together, here are more productive ways for everyone to win.

I'm happy to announce a live-streamed recording of my Lean podcast with my guest Jarvis Gray. You can join us Live on Linkedin on Wednesday, October 30 at 1 pm ET. EVENT LINK The episode will also be released as a podcast via the normal feeds and my YouTube channel. But if you attend live, you can ask questions via LinkedIn Chat. We'll discuss his new book, MASTERING HEALTHCARE EXCELLENCE: A Leaders Guide to Getting […]

The post Coming Soon: A Livestreamed Podcast Episode with Jarvis Gray by Mark Graban appeared first at Lean Blog.

I'm very excited to depart for Japan on Sunday for the first time in five years! The week of November 11, I'll be part of Katie Anderson‘s Japan Study Trip, this time after five previous trips between 2012 and 2019 with Kaizen Institute and Honsha Consulting. Read my posts about past trips. Each time, I've learned something new, visited new companies, and met new people — and have just enjoyed everything about being in Japan. […]

The post Reflecting on my First Time Meeting Isao Yoshino in Japan — 2012 by Mark Graban appeared first at Lean Blog.

Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #518 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Jerry Wright, author of the new book The Insanity Trap: What Your MRP Consultant Won't Tell You. Jerry M. Wright, PE, MBA, is an accomplished operations executive and teaching professional with over 39 years of experience in the manufacturing and service sectors.  His extensive career spans various industries, including aerospace, consumer goods, healthcare, medical […]

The post Breaking the MRP Insanity Trap: Jerry Wright on Lean Systems and Supply Chain Transformation by Mark Graban appeared first at Lean Blog.

Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better. Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation Will AI Transform the Factory Floor? Want a business case approved? Just say you are implementing GenAI. Process optimization has remained focused on leveraging […]

The post Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 1, 2024 by Mark Graban appeared first at Lean Blog.

Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #519 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Jarvis Gray, the Managing Director of The Quality Coaching Co. He offers more than 16 years of strategic planning, quality improvement, and operations leadership experience in the healthcare industry.  Through his firm, The Quality Coaching Co., Jarvis and his associates help healthcare organizations foster cultures of system-wide quality improvement by offering customized Lean Six […]

The post Achieving Healthcare Excellence: Insights from Jarvis Gray on Lean Six Sigma and Leadership by Mark Graban appeared first at Lean Blog.

I'm thrilled to be back in Japan for the first time in five years. Today is the start of Katie Anderson's Japan Study Trip (learn more about joining her in May 2025). It's great to be here for another week of learning and great experiences. Little did I know, I'd kick off the trip by nearly losing my iPhone on the streets of Tokyo–a mistake that ended up teaching me a valuable lesson about Japan's […]

The post Lost My iPhone in Tokyo: A Lesson in Japanese Kindness and Culture on My Japan Study Trip by Mark Graban appeared first at Lean Blog.

“From alarms and task chunking to time-estimation exercises, the strategies below can help you develop a more ‘ACCURATE’ sense of time.”

“Maybe soon I’ll add ‘measured response to frustration’ to the list of things I can pass on to my children. It’s not as fun as singing ditties about teachers or toilets, but it’s arguably a more essential skill that will serve them well in their own lives.”

“Perfection isn’t a prerequisite for self-trust... It’s consistency in another form: knowing that I do my best, learn from my mistakes, practice honesty, and pull through most of the time. Understanding my version of ADHD has transformed my ability to trust myself.”

How can you craft an ideal career that brings fulfillment and joy? Begin by sharpening the focus on these five ADHD assets and strengths.

Business leaders with ADHD do best when they surround themselves with teammates who offset their executive functioning weaknesses.

Sleep problems disproportionately impact adults with ADHD. This study found a higher risk for women and those with co-existing mental health conditions.

Structured literacy, an evidence-based dyslexia intervention, combined with thoughtful accommodations, benefits students with ADHD and reading disabilities. Learn about these approaches here.

ADHD brings unique strengths that can drive innovation and boost the bottom line. Learn how inclusivity in neurodivergent workplaces translates into a competitive advantage.

"If you hold a leadership position in your workplace, commit to these five strategies to create a positive work environment. While its benefits will extend to everyone, for neurodivergent employees, these strategies could mean the difference between struggling in silence and thriving in an environment that understands and meets their needs."

Serious consequences can befall a worker who reveals their ADHD diagnosis to an employer. Here’s what leading experts advise.

School refusal impacts up to 28% of children. It often stems from anxiety associated with ADHD and learning challenges. Follow this three-pronged approach to get your child back into the classroom without trauma.

In today's fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, companies require top talent to keep up with the competition, innovate, and, ultimately, succeed. At the heart of every successful company lies an efficient and effective hiring process. With the recruitment industry becoming increasingly specialized and advanced, many companies are turning to Recruitment as a Service (RaaS) to turbocharge their talent acquisition efforts. RaaS is an innovative model that offers candidate sourcing, assessment, interviewing, and onboarding in a ...

Training is a vital part of any business's long-term growth plan. In fact, a study from the American Society for Training and Development found that organizations that invest the most in employee training have 218 percent higher income per ...

Before the pandemic, 17 percent of US employees worked remotely full-time. Now, it's closer to 44 percent. More businesses than ever before are operating without physical headquarters or offices, giving their employees lots of flexibility around their work schedules and workplaces. And it is safe to say that these remote work policies are here to ...

One of the most critical performance factors for hiring teams is time to hire. Only 30% of organizations can fill a position within 30 days. The remaining candidates take anything from one to four months to get hired. Why should you try to shorten the hiring process? Taking too long to fill a ...

Working an internship is good for more than just earning college credit — it's also an opportunity to make valuable connections in your preferred professional field and gain real-life work experience. However, many college students have a tough choice to make ...

The process through which corporations seek, track, and interview job candidates and train new employees is called talent acquisition. A talent source looks for and finds suitable candidates. They do this by employing a variety of proactive recruiting tactics. Sources seek applicants who are both active and passive. The human resources (HR) department is normally in charge of this.

The recent global shift to remote and hybrid work models allowed many employees and companies to reevaluate how and where they work, fueling fundamental shifts in the workplace. In addition, many employees realized that "work-from-home" could expand to "work-from-anywhere," permanently changing the ...

You've invested time, effort, and money into designing your recruitment strategy — but you're still not getting the results you'd hoped for. What's going wrong with your recruiting strategy? Why isn't it attracting the top talent your business needs? To help you troubleshoot, here are a few of the most common reasons why recruitment strategies fail — and how to fix the problem: 1. Using Outdated Recruiting ...

Job seekers hate the application process. I can make that claim without citing a source, and no one will contest it. We just accept it as fact at this point. The folks at Jibe, an HR software company that provides a set of cloud services for recruiting and managing talent, recently conducted a survey to ...

Most companies today have something to say about their company culture and how it makes them unique with regard to what they do and how they treat their employees. And that's a good thing: Today's employees are not motivated solely by money, and behaving as if they are will rarely lead to good long-term recruiting results. When candidates are considering prospective employers, they have a ...

Key takeaways As the remote work landscape has become increasingly popular, businesses have had to adapt to virtual onboarding and training methods to offer a positive onboarding experience Communicating business expectations and job requirements and sharing vital information is key to integrating a new hire ...

In today's business environment, where millions of open positions remain unfilled and labor shortages abound, hiring right is more critical than ever. Yet, many organizations are woefully shortsighted in their hiring decisions, ignoring the very business strategies that ...

Remember the '90s horror hit, The Blair Witch Project, which shocked audiences with its groundbreaking found-footage style? More than 20 years after its release, audiences are going to be able to step inside the house where it all took place — except it will be happening just steps off the Las Vegas Strip. Immersive experiences are a hit in ...

They're motivated, they're eager to make a difference, and they bring a breath of fresh air to every team. I'm talking, of course, about college students and recent graduates. Young talent is a real asset for a company, which is why competition for these candidates is so high. To attract qualified young professionals, you need a solid university marketing plan. Understanding University Markting But what exactly is university marketing? To put it simply, "university marketing" refers to your means of ...

When we think about the issues associated with "ageism" in today's job market, we largely tend to first think of older, more experienced workers who live their lives - and livelihoods -  in a somewhat precarious position, plagued by the widespread misperception that they are somehow past their professional prime. Older workers should be valued for their extensive experience and proven expertise, but instead, find themselves with the sword ...

The 2024 HR Technology Conference is coming to Las Vegas, and like every year, pretty much every one of the myriad vendors, consultants, pundits and practitioners in the industry descend upon the desert, bringing with them an arsenal of booth accouterments, branded swag, buzzword-dense marketing collateral and, as always, a litany of overinflated promises and underwhelming products. This is actually my first HR ...

From the way we find jobs to the way we find love, from the way we connect with our friends to the way we connect with colleagues and customers, technology has fundamentally altered the very foundations of how we work, how we live and how we experience the world around us - for better or for worse. Except, of course, for when it comes to talent sourcing or recruiting, where

Every candidate on the job market is looking for the perfect position — and that's harder than it sounds. Looking for a job is a full-time job of its own. Job seekers head into the market every single day to ensure they'll get the role they truly desire. Even though it's a very tiring and time-consuming process, candidates put up with it because they know they will be rewarded in the end. On the flip side, employers are doing a very similar ...

Since April, Recruiter.com has been tracking recruiter sentiment and hiring activity through the Recruiter Index®, an ongoing survey of recruiters and hiring professionals on the front lines of the job market today. While May's poll showed significant improvements in recruiter confidence and job market activity over April's, June's results are strikingly positive. For the first time since the survey began, the majority of recruiters — 51.4 percent — believe their job requirement ...

As businesses start to embrace global remote workforces, one of the challenges they must deal with is managing employees spread across different geographies. It's important to understand that this task involves much more than just being considerate of different time zones. For a global remote workforce to be truly successful, organizations must also take into account important differences in culture. The prevailing values, behavioral norms, and personal situations in different ...

When sales reps are hunting for a new job, they're looking for more than just robust compensation packages and quality products. Of course, these two factors are key attractors for many quality candidates, but the best sales reps want more. To succeed and be satisfied in their roles, they also want to work for great leaders who set an example and support them on their paths. To an extent, your recruiting ...

A little healthy competition is a good thing — under the right circumstances and with the right people. In many industries, internal competition has long been used to increase everything from productivity to profits. But what about using competition as part of your employee engagement strategy? Does pitting individual workers against each other really increase engagement across the board? While there are

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused nearly every aspect of everyday life to come to an unprecedented halt. We have never before had to shutter our entire economy for something that we cannot see with the naked eye. Businesses with in-office workforces were forced to quickly shift to fully remote operations. This sudden and dramatic change has presented us all with a set of stressful challenges including social isolation, economic uncertainty, and soaring unemployment rates. As a result, employees are overwhelmed ...

Even before COVID-19 took the world by storm, giving everyone a "new normal," remote work was already on the rise. Prior to the global pandemic a study by Upwork from their Future Workplace Report found that 5x the number of hiring managers expect more of their team to work remotely in the next 10-years. Now, given the new state of the world, every company that can has been forced to rapidly adopt remote work as a means to continue business operations ...

These are shaky times for the US economy. In April, a record 20.5 million jobs were lost, driving the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent — numbers we haven't seen since the Great Depression. The economy received a boost from increasing employment numbers in May, but the job market is likely to need more time to fully recover from ...

According to a report from the Better Business Bureau (BBB), job scams were the riskiest scams facing consumers in 2019. The BBB assesses scam risk along three dimensions: how prevalent a scam is, how likely consumers are to lose money to a scam, and the average amount of money lost to a scam. Along those lines, the BBB ...

As we enter the second half of 2020, the beginning of the year already feels like a distant memory. So much has changed so quickly, and one might assume the priorities and challenges for staffing and recruiting businesses today are worlds apart from what they were just six months ago. While there's no doubt that the landscape has changed dramatically, the industry is still all about people. In that sense, many ...