David Burkus Presents

Leaders are learners.  That's not really disputed. You have to be a pretty strong learner to even get into a leadership role. And most people agree that you have to be continuously learning as a leader as well.  The problem is that what is common knowledge is not always common practice. As the demands of the leadership role pile up, and the freely available time on the calendar shrink, i...

Many leaders struggle to give great feedback. The secret to giving great feedback is “don’t mix messages.” Give positive feedback and constructive feedback at different times and in different ways. And in this episode, we’ll review a few simple steps to make both positive and constructive feedback conversations less awkward and more productive. Part of the reason giving great feedback is so uncomf...

How do you build a high performing team? If you think like most people, you will start with acquisition. You will start by thinking about how you can convince higher performing people to join the team. But the truth is that the so called “War For Talent” this acquisition mindset kicked off wasn’t worth the cost. It’s not that there’s no such thing as high performing individuals, it’s that high per...

In this episode, we’ll review the four elements of a powerful mission statement and offer some powerful examples as well. Most mission statements aren’t all that inspiring. The committee-crafted, jargon laden paragraph (or hopefully less) that gets quoted every so often in speeches and referenced in most printed documents. But they lack power either because they’re wordy and complicated, or becaus...

Every organization wants to attract and retain high performers. And it seems like every individual wants to be one of those high performers that gets attracted and retained. But there’s a misconception about high performers that stands in the way of improving our individual performance and hinders organizations from unlocking high performance in their people. That misconception is the belief that...

In this episode, we’ll review the six true causes of burnout and offer some practical tips for leaders to mitigate the damage from these causes. Excessive workload Poor Relationships Lack of control Lack of recognition Lack of fairness Purpose Mismatch Leaders need to take care of more than just the physical when it comes to keeping people productive and healthy. They need to talk about purpose, a...

In this episode, we’ll summarize that research by presenting the top four characteristics of high-performing teams. It's not about who is on the team, it's about how the team behaves. It’s about their habits. It’s about their norms and whether or not the culture of the team contains these characteristics—characteristics that help everyone (regardless of skill or past performance) do their best wor...

And further a company shouldn’t be a family. When companies began to overuse the family analogy, results are rarely positive. Instead, pushing for family levels of commitment can actually do damage to the culture. And in this article, we’ll outline the ways that the “family” metaphor can lead to dysfunction. As well as the steps team leaders can take to transform their dysfunctional fake families...

Decades after the "War for Talent," most organizations finally discovered the truth. Despite spending ever-increasing amounts of money on high performers, high performers weren’t really in it for the money. In this episode, we’ll outline some of the lessons learned about what actually attracts high performers to work on a team—and what keeps them engaged once they’re on board. They want to be hear...

Culture is the secret sauce of organizational success. It seems like nearly everyone agrees that culture is hugely important. The culture individuals find themselves in influences their future actions and ultimately their future success or failure. But while many agree about the importance of company culture, what many fail to understand is that the culture of the team matters more than overall co...

Onboarding new employees is one of the most crucial, but overlooked, aspects of building a great team and great culture. It’s crucial because the first few days of new team member tenure determine how included they feel and how much they internalize the mission and culture of the team. But it’s also overlooked because of the emphasis on using that same time to make sure every legality and regulati...

When good employees quit, it’s hard for those same leaders not to take it personally. An unexpected resignation letter can feel like a betrayal.   But before you place the blame solely on the newly departing and reframe your past history to try and spin them as less valuable than they really were, consider some of the reasons good employees quit.   Burnout Boredom Bad Managers Bette...

One of the easiest ways to predict how successful or not a given team will be, is to first measure how much trust exists on the team as a whole. When members of the team trust each other, they're more likely to succeed because they’re more likely to share information.  But how do you build trust on a team? How do you get people to trust each other? And how do you get people to trust the team...

In this episode, we’ll cover perhaps the five worst ideas in management in no particular order—in the hopes of correcting some errors and keeping the same error from happening again.  Stack Ranking Performance Reviews Personality Testing Open Offices Right-Sizing These five ideas are some of the worst in management, but they aren’t the only ones. What they have in common, however, is that the...

How do you identify that toxic company culture from the outside to avoid joining it. Or, if you’ve already joined it, how do you identify the toxic elements and create a plan to protect yourself from them? In this episode, we’ll outline six signs of a toxic company culture, and offer a few insights to keep that toxicity from infecting you and your team. Top-Down Leadership Style Information Hoardi...

In this episode, we’ll examine the reasons performance reviews don't work. And we’ll outline some practical steps you can take to offer feedback to your team that actually helps them grow and improve. Reason 1: Too Late Reason 2: Too Generic Reason 3: Too Subjective For these three reasons—too late, too generic, and too subjective—performance reviews don’t work they way they’re intended. But you c...

In this episode, we’ll outline the three steps to fixing a broken team culture, or at least preventing the toxicity of the companywide culture from infecting your team. Start With Who Create Role Clarity Build Psychological Safety If you lead your team through these three steps, you’ll help individuals feel engaged and inspired in their work and create meaningful collaboration across the team. You...

Culture is paramount. The success or failure of an organization or team depends upon its culture—the norms and behaviors around how employees communicate and collaborate. Most leaders agree that culture is hugely important. But that seems to be where the agreement stops. Many leaders disagree over exactly what culture is, why it is so important, or even what a healthy organizational culture looks...

The best leaders are those who truly learn to serve others. They learn how to put employees first. They learn how to flip the hierarchy.  Even though the hierarchy of most organizations flow from the many up to the few, the best leaders know that their job is actually to flip that hierarchy to help the many figure out how to do their best work.  There's been decades of research on varyin...

One of the core goals of any leader is to get the most out of his or her team. The ability to create team cohesion and a culture that elevates the talents of individuals as you pursue objectives is really what separates great leaders from the merely good. Great leaders have the ability to make the output of a team more than just the sum of its parts.  They have an ability to take the team to...

"How do I stop after hours emails?" it's a question asked by more and more leaders and team members as the work from home experiment drags on. In this video, we'll break down the research on after hours emails and offer some practical tips to get your team to stop sending after hours emails. //DO YOUR BEST WORK EVER If you liked this video and you want to help your team do their best work ever, ch...

In this episode, we'll outline the 4 Mistakes New Leaders Make If you've been in leadership for a while, welcome to the realization that we are always growing and learning as leaders. And part of that growth involves examine our past beliefs and actions and considering whether or not we were mistaken. In my work with leaders across a variety of industries and sectors, I see a lot of mistakes. Well...

As the great work from home experiment comes to an end, and more and more offices are opening up, many leaders have been asking "How much should my team work from home." In this episode, we break down the research to offer an estimate on how often your team should work from home...but also what you need to do to make sure that your team can work from home and still stay engaged. //DO YOUR BEST WOR...

We have a tendency to believe that successful teams are created by recruiting top-talent and raising the average of talent on a team. But recent research suggests that talent isn’t as portable as we once thought, and that recruiting star players might be more trouble than it’s worth. More often than not, great teams don’t become great because they recruit top talent or pay top dollar. Instead, bui...

In this episode of AskBurk, we'll cover how to celebrate small wins on your team. Small wins are a big deal. And taking the time to celebrate them can have a big effect on motivation. There are really three types of small wins you need to celebrate on your team: achievement wins, milestones, and peer-to-peer wins. We'll cover all three wins and how best to celebrate them on your team //DO YOUR BES...