Chris Shipley

expert panel

Are your traditional gift-giving gestures getting stale? The holiday season is the perfect time to spread more cheer by demonstrating to your dedicated employees how much you appreciate their efforts to help keep a well-organized business up and running. If your leadership team is all tapped out of original gift-giving ideas for their team this year, then try one of the following ideas that 17 experts from Fast Company Executive Board highly recommend to show gratitude for the hard work their staff members continue to put in throughout the year. 

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The following "strategic" patterns may push your company further away from its bottom-line business goals. If your brand's latest promotional strategy is entirely based on a trend that doesn't align with your company's core values and authenticity, then you should probably rethink your plans. You don't need to necessarily keep up with what the competition is doing.  Instead, turn your attention back to what your unique customers' biggest pain points are right now. These often change, so you need to be able to adapt to the specific needs of the people you want to serve. It also means taking your time to do the proper research and letting the data drive your decision-making process so you reach your desired results in the long run.  Many company marketers often struggle because they're wasting their company's time and money on the areas of advertising that don't resonate with their consumers at all. Here, 12 industry leaders from Fast Company Executive Board describe the nature of some of those pitfalls and why they should be avoided if you want to build a brand that is organically successful.

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Too often, empathy is conflated with sympathy and compassion, and the perception that expressing empathy burdens leaders to take on and solve the problems of employees.

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To accomplish a challenging goal, you've got to have the right game plan for your team. It's one thing to have an ambitious goal; it's another to have an effective game plan to ensure that goal is reached. Big goals are achieved through smart—sometimes small—habits. If a leader is to guide their team to the top of the mountain, they have to blaze a clear trail and give their people the tools they need to climb. It doesn't have to be a one-size-fits-all solution; leaders can leverage the right combination of strategies to fit their organization's unique purpose, procedures, and people. To get your ideas flowing, a panel of Fast Company Executive Board members has shared their best strategies for turning lofty goals into realities. Follow their advice to build efficient workflows that foster repeatable, scalable success.

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Most organizations have specific rules and protocols workers are expected to follow, as well as carefully developed missions and visions that are intended to guide the entire team's actions. However, employees won't just blindly follow these rules if the leaders who established them aren't modeling that behavior themselves. And it's not just about hard-and-fast policies and procedures either—teams are influenced by everything from a leader's speech patterns to their attitudes. Consciously or unconsciously, employees often pick up habits, mannerisms, and mindsets from their managers and other higher-ups—an instinct that often trumps paying close attention to "the rules." That's why leaders must stop and think about the messages they may be unconsciously sending to their teams. It can be difficult to know how you may be setting a bad example if you aren't aware of some of the more common missteps leaders make. To help, a panel of Fast Company Executive Board members shared 15 ways leaders might be unknowingly setting a bad example for their teams and how they can turn things around.