David Burkus Presents

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...

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...