Business articles by Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Leading and Managing a Staff of Subcontractors and Freelancers For the past several years I’ve been a solopreneur. That is, I’m a company of one. Initially I offered consultancy services. Then I added periodical publishing to the mix and phased out the consulting work. I later added commercial freelance writing, while authoring and publishing books. […]
Discover How to Become a Company of Choice Unemployment rates go in cycles, oscillating over the years between seasons of high unemployment and times of low unemployment. The prior chapter addressed a worker surplus. Now we’ll consider a worker shortage. During times of low unemployment, it’s a workers’ market. With too many positions going unfilled, people […]
A Rare Case When Inaction Is Better than Action Recall the parachurch organization where I was board president. I gave needed structure to the board meetings, trained the board members to be more effective, and groomed my successor. But this isn’t where the story ends. With a few months left in my term as president, […]
Don’t Work Harder, Work Smarter Many years ago, as a first-time manager, I was green with much to learn. Management looked easy from the outside. I assured myself that, when given the opportunity to lead, I’d never make the same blunders I witnessed. Yes, I would direct my future staff with enlightenment, never forgetting the […]
Be Fair with Your Staff I once led a service department that provided telephone customer support for specialized, high-tech equipment and software. We staffed our office during regular business hours, Monday through Friday. And we rotated handling on-call to cover emergency situations that arose in the evenings, on weekends, and on holidays. I sought to […]
React with Courage to the Unexpected My employer had just undergone a rightsizing effort to optimize our workforce and strengthen our financial situation. A result of this was that I now had two departments to manage instead of one. I also had twice the staff. I embraced this challenge with enthusiasm, implementing changes to merge […]
The Unexpected Can Be a Gift and We Shouldn’t Squander It My employer once tasked me with turning around an unprofitable subsidiary of the company. Two people preceded me in this effort and failed. I suspect, however, that they were unprepared to deal with the momentous task in front of them. Overwhelmed, they didn’t know […]
Strategic Planning Failure I was once on the board of a local nonprofit service organization. When my stint ended, I didn’t qualify for a second term, but there were two roles I could move into. One was a task I disliked. The other was a challenge I relish—strategic planning. I told the executive director I […]
Followers Must Be Willing and Able I once volunteered for a local parachurch organization. They addressed an unmet need in our area, and I relished the chance to give back to my community. It wasn’t long before the executive director asked me to join the board of directors. I jumped at the opportunity, but what […]
Lead with Effectiveness and Manage with Success Leadership is the ability to cast a vision and draw others to you in a collective pursuit of that vision. The mark of leadership, therefore, is if you have followers. And the mark of great leadership is if you have committed followers. Conversely, someone with no followers is […]