Companies that want to boost employee engagement sometimes can’t make their efforts stick.

Confucius, also known as Kong Zi, was an ancient Chinese philosopher who believed that trust—or shin—enables people to contribute to society. He believed that, for a leader, earning trust was essential.

Effective leaders manage by keeping their finger on the pulse of their employees’ key activities.

Many companies measure employee and customer satisfaction without much to show for it. That’s because their surveys—whether one magic question for customers or 100-plus-item monstrosities for employees—often focus on the rational and exclude the emotional.

If loyalty is defined as being faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution or product, then there seems to be a certain amount of infidelity in the workplace these days.

Effective leadership is based on ongoing input and feedback. Where 20 years ago managers rarely asked for input, today effective leaders are regularly seeking and receiving employee feedback.

Lean Six Sigma has proven itself as an effective strategy for business success in both private and public sectors. The methodology has helped enterprise leaders recognize business processes as engines that drive performance excellence and help to deliver value.

In a perfect world, we’d all be looking forward to the holiday season without anxiety. Unfortunately, for most employees, that isn’t even close to being the case.

At a recent health-care conference I had a conversation with Mary, a Six Sigma Black Belt for a 700-bed hospital. She told me that the hospital had only a few copies of Minitab software, which was shared by several people.

I was listening to Alan Robinson present recently at the Lean Systems Summit about the power of “small ideas.” Alan wondered aloud why so many organizations