Senior leaders have a cadre of talented and highly trained executives who have great ideas about how to spend those resources.

In this video, I suggest three questions every senior executive must ask his or her team before making a major investment.

Ultimately spending money on worthwhile projects is a good thing. It means your business is growing. But you must, as you know, invest wisely. Trust your people, and trust your instincts more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Posts:

• Replacing a missing star: How to deal with losing a high-performing worker
• Visiting the troops: Why good managers spend time outside their offices
• 3 questions to create powerful engagement

More tomorrow …

Related Posts:

• SHRM roundup: Reflections on Jack Welch
• Executive Time Management: 3 questions to ask before allocating capital
• Tuesday’s SHRM roundup

• Lance Haun: SHRM conference Sunday – Don’t call me the press
• Michael Long: SHRM conference – Welch’s call to action
• Michael VanDervort: Jack Welch has a few opinions
• Sharlyn Lauby: Live from SHRM 09 – Day 1
• Laurie Ruettimann: SHRM 2009: Day One

Related Posts:

• More SHRM coverage
• Executive Time Management: 3 questions to ask before allocating capital
• Tuesday’s SHRM roundup

In the wide-ranging Q-and-A with Claire Shipman, Welch took HR professionals to task for playing the victim a little too often. “I’ve seen too many organizations where HR whines about their role,” Welch said.

If you want senior management to take you seriously, he said, “get out of the picnic, birthday card, and insurance forms business.”

Instead, he told the crowd, their focus should be on building trust throughout the company and developing recruitment and retention strategies that attract the best workers in good times and bad. “Your job is to raise the quality of the team.”

To keep your workers engaged, “you have to communicate like hell,” he said. And, “you talk about your real feelings. Don’t be phony.”

You also want to make sure that your company’s compensation system isn’t stale, he warned. “You get the behaviors you measure and reward.”

Related Posts:

• The changing face of SHRM, with Monster’s Eric Winegardner
• Dave Ulrich on getting more than a paycheck out of work
• Shaping SHRM’s political agenda