David Burkus Presents

Handling low performers on a team is one of the worst jobs any leader must do. It's not fun to have conversations with unmotivated employees and try to figure out how you can get them to put in more effort. And it's not fun to have brutally honest conversations with team members who are facing a mismatch between their skills and the new demands on the job. But handling lower performers is also one...

Is the 4 Day Work Week the future of work? Or is a 4 Day Work Week just a series of fads and experiments. In this video, we break down the research on 4 Day Work Week experiments and outline what you really need to do to help your team be more productive and less stressed. //DO YOUR BEST WORK EVER If you liked this video and you want to help your team do their best work ever, check out the free re...

The single best way to grow as a leader is to lead and then get feedback. It is to act and interact with your team and learn what can be improved upon through feedback. Receiving feedback, and applying that feedback, makes leaders better. But there’s a problem with receiving feedback once someone is in a leader role. The nature of feedback changes—teammates minimize unpleasant messages or don’t wa...

What’s The Best Team Building Activity For Remote Teams? It's complicated. Team Building Activities in general aren't actually as effective as those selling them may claim....even more so when conducted over Zoom. But there are activities you can do to build bonds on your remote team. And in this quick episode, we share 3 equally quick activities for remote teams. //DO YOUR BEST WORK EVER If you l...

David Burkus reacts to reports of a coming "great resignation." What is the great resignation and what can leaders do about it? Should employees quit their job? What can leaders do to prevent employees from quitting? And what happens after they quit as part of the great resignation.    //DO YOUR BEST WORK EVER If you liked this video and you want to help your team do their best work ever...

One of the most significant decisions that leaders make is who to hire. No matter how many core values you have and how many posters you hang, company culture is downstream from people. So, the people that join the organization will have a massive effect on the evolution of its culture. And its widespread knowledge that hiring is the most important decision you can make, the knowledge of how to ac...

In this episode, we’ll outline four methods that can make giving positive feedback to employees much more effective. Do It Now Be Specific Connect To Purpose Do It Publicly (Maybe) If you add these four methods into the way you give positive feedback, you’ll not only have an easier time finding the right words to speak, but you’ll find those words have a lot more meaning. If you praise right away,...

Team building isn’t an activity, it’s a habit. Unless the chosen activity changes a team’s habits, it probably wasn’t worth the effort. Moreover, perhaps it would have been better to focus on team habit building in the first place. So, in this video, we’ll outline three habits leaders can start to build that will better build the team as well. Provide Structure and Clarity Find Unstructured Time D...

In this video, we’ll cover the three ways to drive employee engagement at work. They happen to be the three elements of job crafting that employees engage in. And provide ways for organizational leaders to leverage those elements and drive employee engagement at work. Job crafting is something around one-third of all employees do in order to drive their own engagement at work. But when you look at...

Feedback is vitally important. Feedback is how we improve performance. Feedback is how we engage employees at all levels. Feedback is how we measure progress in difficult to measure situations. Feedback is how we motivate others, and ourselves. So, in this episode, we’ll outline four ways you can get more feedback at work: Work Louder Ask Teammates Measure More Feed Forward All four of these metho...

Conflict on a team is inevitable. Conflict happens because people are different, they think differently, and they act differently. a lot of personal conflict on a team happens because of misunderstandings and misconceptions that don’t get addressed early enough. And that means a lot of personal conflict on a team can be resolved with a fairly simple, three-step process. 1) The first step in resolv...

Employee engagement has been a pretty hot topic over the past year. The “great work from home” experiment forced millions of employees to find new ways to get work done. And as working from home moved from a short-term experiment to a long-haul arrangement, it’s worth considering the long-term impact of working remotely on motivation, collaboration, and engagement. In this video, we’ll outline fou...

Distractions at work have been a constant for a very, very long time. But suddenly, those of us who were working from home—or living at work—found ourselves fighting off a brand-new set of distractions we’d never prepared for. In this video, we'll outline four ways you can limit distractions when working remotely. Set A Schedule Batch Your Tasks Build Work/Life Boundaries Build People Boundaries Y...

Psychological safety on high performing teams almost everywhere. From teams large and small and even in Google's infamous Project Aristotle study which sought to figure out what characteristics of teams led to their biggest performances, psychological safety is almost always present.  In this episode, we'll outline four ways that you can build psychological safety on a team: Treat Conflict As...

Having good friends at work predicts a lot about engagement and performance. But in this new, work-from-anywhere, world, building friendships among teammates looks a lot different. You can’t just rely on sharing the same space to be the conversation starter that leads to finding shared interests. Instead, team leaders have to be much more deliberate. In this episode, we’ll offer five ways you can...

Can Motivation Be Increased? | David Burkus Presents | 02.09 In the modern economy, motivation is a tricky thing. But in this episode, we'll outline the findings around motivation that come from the realm of Self-Determination Theory. Self-Determination Theory essentially argued that people are motivated when they can determine for themselves what to work on and how to work on it. In other words,...

How To Get Remote Teams To Work Together | David Burkus Presents | 02.07 In this video , we’ll cover a simple and easy way to get your remote team to work together. It all revolves around three easy questions: • What did I just work on? • What am I working on? • What is blocking my progress These questions help your team work out loud. Working out loud means that the team has developed a system to...

How To Create A Remote Team Working Agreement | David Burkus Presents | 02.05 A team working agreement is a living document drafted by a team that outlines the ground rules for communication and collaboration. It outlines how teammates will keep each other updated, how they’ll give each other feedback, and how they’ll communication—both in what medium and with what frequency. Creating a team worki...

How To Run A Virtual Team Meeting | David Burkus Presents | 02.03 In this episode, we'll cover the best practices around running a virtual team meeting. Virtual meetings don’t work” is the most common response I hear when speaking to leaders at all levels about remote teams. But let’s be fair: in-person meetings rarely ever worked, either. So, whether it’s your first virtual meeting with your team...

In addition to the normal methods we use to screen job candidates, and the tactics we use to judge whether those candidates are a fit for the organization, those same leaders have found that hiring remote workers and setting them up for success, requires candidates are evaluated for more than just their knowledge, skills, abilities, and past experience. In this episode, we’ll review the three bigg...

In this episode, we'll cover how to do remote team building. Most of what teams (especially remote teams) actually need to build better collaboration and team identity has less to do with a singular event and more to do with ongoing activities, habits, and rituals that the team engages in regularly. Here are five proven activities that, done regularly, will build your team better than ropes course...

In this episode, we’re going to review the two key elements of team culture that were uncovered in that experiment: shared understanding and shared identity. Plus, as a bonus, we’ll review one thing we know from more and more research that makes for a great team culture in any situation: psychological safety. We've known for over a decade that individual performance is hugely dependent upon the te...

In this episode, we’ll review four stages you should take your team through to make sure that you get more of the brilliance that happens from having multiple brains on the problem. And less of the internal politics, self-censoring, and squelching of ideas that makes for poor team decisions.  Find The Real Problem Analyze The Data Generation Possible Solutions Select For Commitment, Not Conse...

Remote Work is indeed the new normal. Not because we're headed for a future where everyone is working from home. But because the extended time spent working away from the office has led to many of rearranging the way we work into something better than before. The future of work is working from anywhere. And the future of leading teams, is leading from anywhere. //ABOUT DAVID One of the world’s lea...

When it comes to teams that work from home of work from anywhere, one of the key aspects that smart leaders pay attention to is making sure that their remote workers feel included. Making sure that the people who are mostly remote feel as valuable and as vital a member of the team as the people who are spending more time at the office is going to be core area of focus…and a key struggle when leadi...