Harried managers are allowing today's electronic tools and 24/7 culture to drive and control them. Poorly disciplined and overly busy managers fail to harness these powerful tools. Instead, they often model micromanagement by responding to every little issue and expecting people on their team to do the same. Such behavior leads to short-term urgencies continually crowding out longer-term strategies and team or organization development.

Today's competitive global market environment brings steadily increasing pressure to improve return on investment (ROI). In the push for improvement, an organization’s biggest investment and its primary assets are its human capital.

"Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer." — Peter Drucker. Most of us have a poor sense of our talents and strengths. Throughout our education and careers, there is a lot of attention paid to our weaknesses. We are acutely aware of our faults and deficits, our “opportunities for development,” or whatever euphemism is popular for naming them.

Poorly designed organizations, ineffective processes, bureaucratic systems, unaligned rewards, unclear customer/partner focus, fuzzy visions, values, and purpose, unskilled team leaders and members, cluttered goals and priorities, low trust levels, and weak measurements and feedback loops all cause communication problems. Whenever a manager contacts us to solve a "communication problem," we always know we have some digging to do.

Our responsibility as a manager, executive or leader is to energize our people to do their jobs—to innovate, to deliver services at the highest possible level, to solve problems, to overcome challenges and so on. In short, our primary role is to motivate others. And then they do the crucial work of the organization. But motivating others can be a liquidation strategy in which we are spending all of our human capital. We need to get performance now and build a sustaining human capital base for the future. So the other critical part of our role is development.

Job hunting is more competitive than it has been in years. The present economy means that there are countless newly-unemployed people looking for the same jobs you are. Therefore it is more important than ever to know everything you can about job hunting skills.

Sincere recognition and genuine appreciation are highly energizing. Accomplishment and achievement should be our own reward for high performance. But it feels even better when other people notice and appreciate what we've done. Recognition and appreciation continually show up near the top of most lists of motivational factors. They are key sources of the fun and excitement, will to win, desire to belong, and passion so vital to continually improving performance.

Let’s admit it. Employers are not benevolent institutions hiring you out of the goodness of their hearts. They have a reason, a need, and, most importantly, a job that needs to be done. The person who will ultimately win the offer will be the candidate who succeeds in demonstrating a perfect fit through examples of past performance.