Organizational cultures are disengaging because managers hog all the ownership. They compete for advancement by being goal scorers, solution generators. Thus they want to own the best solutions, develop their own answers and just use employees to execute their visions. No wonder employees feel like passengers on the bus.

Help others recognize their own potential.

Being a manager is a tough job, but someone has to do it. Do it well.

Why are you keeping the poor performer on your payroll?

Full employee engagement is essential in a recession to get all employees thinking smart about how to improve productivity and reduce costs. This will only happen when organizations start treating employees like business owners.

As the leader, it is your responsibility to act on behaviors that are not in line with what you know are "normal" for your key people.

Popular employee engagement initiatives merely scrape the surface if they don't significantly modify the balance of psychological ownership so that employees feel more involved in determining the organization's future direction. Much of the problem lies with how we define leadership, making it a heroic, top-down function that is very disempowering for those not in "leadership positions."

Obstacles can be frustrating to leaders and can ultimately result to the failure of both leaders and their teams to produce results. These failures are usually attributed to many factors but the one that is most commonly overlooked is that the people working with these leaders are actually the biggest obstacles of all.

Be your own customer

A business amounts to little without the people behind it. The two most important things I look for when hiring are initiative and work ethic. I cannot overestimate the importance to the eventual success of your business of bringing on good people. But once you have hired these good people, how do you manage them?