Five decades of research shows the huge impact of organizational culture on outcomes like Return on Investment, stock prices, service/quality levels, productivity, sales, profitability, cost-effectiveness, and similar results. Organizational culture is also a key factor in levels of employee engagement, extra effort, innovation, morale, and teamwork. “Magnet cultures” attract and retain the best people. Or […]
Read post »In the Shakespearean tragedy titled after the main character, Hamlet ponders his imprisonment by Denmark and the King as well as in his own mind when he says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” In my previous post in this series of posts on the nature of “reality,” we […]
Read post »Adding to last week’s blog on Emotions at Work… If you ask subordinates what they want in a leader, they usually list three things: direction or vision, trustworthiness, and optimism. Like effective parents, lovers, teachers, and therapists, good leaders make people hopeful. – Warren Bennis, An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change Leadership […]
Read post »Emotions are the heart of life and leadership. Health, happiness, and high performance are highly dependent on emotions. In their seminal book, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee explain the book title by pointing to emotional impact as being at the very core of leadership. Emotional […]
Read post »Sam Walton built Bentonville, Arkansas based Wal-Mart into the world’s largest retailer through treating staff as respected partners. One of his legacies was to “treat them as partners and they will treat you as a partner and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.” A scout leader was trying to lift a fallen […]
Read post »During a retreat with the leadership team of a large healthcare organization, we were running a little behind schedule so I said we’d move fairly quickly through the Responsibility for Choices principle in our leadership discussion. Fortunately, an astute participant piped up with, “Jim, I think we need to talk about our ‘blaming and disclaiming’ […]
Read post »It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue … but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look … – Henry David Thoreau, American author, poet, and philosopher Before we can learn to lead, we must learn […]
Read post »The messenger must be the message. The most effective communication is face-to-face. But the most believable communication is behavior. We would all much rather see than hear a sermon. Many well intentioned managers lead change or improvement efforts that are all about changing everyone else while they carry on pretty much as before. They’re preaching […]
Read post »I’ve written quite a lot about coaching as a central leadership task. The CLEMMER Group is getting ever deeper into developing and delivering customized coaching workshops, competency models, performance management systems, and the like. I have over 300 citations, quotations, and research papers filed under coaching in my research database. Here are a few: “You […]
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