Almost universally, the leaders I have the good fortune to coach find that one of the skills they most need to work on is listening… really listening. That need has…
Category: Employee Engagement
Playing Favorites
Several of our recent employee engagement survey projects have indicated the presence of elevated levels of perceived favoritism within the surveyed population. It has occurred enough to cause us to…
Piercings, Goatees, and Tats...Oh My!
It was Q&A time after a speech I’d just made to a large audience of small business owners, in a somewhat conservative retail field. As the speech featured some tips…
Leadership is About Blood, Sweat, and Occasional Tears
In the time that I’ve served in a leadership role, in both for profit and non-profit venues, I have tried mightily to operate with a short list of simple, understandable…
Assume Positive Intent
In April, 2008, as part of a Fortune Magazine segment in which notably successful people were queried about the best advice they had been given, Pepsico Chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi volunteered a…
Make This Your First Business Conversation in 2018
Lots of people are now deep in the process of resolving to do a few things differently over the coming New Year. Many are resolving to join the growing crowd…
Stop Un-Recruiting
I read with interest a recent NY Times piece about the growing Brexit-inspired labor shortage spreading throughout Britain, as foreign workers across the breadth and depth of the workspace are deciding in…
You're Fired!
Everyone who accepts a role with responsibility for providing leadership to others must accept the reality that it will eventually be their duty to tell someone, “You can’t work here…
Expecting the Best: You Get What You Expect to Get
About forty years ago, before anyone had heard or even contemplated the term, “FedEx”, Federal Express marketing guru, Vince Fagan worked with the company’s ad agency to create one of…
There's No Hacking Leadership
One of my new least favorite words (along with “handcrafted” and “curated”, but that’s another post altogether) is the word “hack”. Not in the old sense of a taxi driver…