We’d just finished facilitating a two-day offsite retreat with an international resources company when I came back to my office to find the June issue of Harvard Business Review with a feature article on “The Secrets of Great Teamwork.” The authors — two management and organization behavior professors at Wharton and INSEAD — were reporting […]
Read post »Terence Mitchell, professor of management, organization, and psychology at the University of Washington Business School, along with doctoral student William Felps “analyzed about two dozen published studies that focused on how teams and groups of employees interact, and specifically how having bad teammates can destroy a good team.” They concluded: “A single ‘toxic’ or negative […]
Read post »Community is one of those words that have many meanings, primarily because the experience of community is so diverse and rich. Community can help shape our identity as a collective and interdependent people. It creates the opportunity for us to care for and about others and, in turn, to be cared for, the key […]
Read post »I’ve known Paul Born for many years and have deep respect for his work founding the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement in 2001. Their community-based work has reduced poverty for 250,000 people in Canada and many other countries. When Paul gave me a copy of his latest book I expected it would center on his […]
Read post »I was working with a highly energized financial services team who really connected with the power of strengths-based leadership. Part of our discussion centered on the story of a 7th grade teacher who had each student write down what they felt was the greatest strength of each of their peers (see “The Enduring Impact of […]
Read post »Trust is a very slippery concept to grasp. Everyone agrees it’s vital to leadership. But what are its core components? And what are the steps to building trust? If a leader in our Extraordinary Leader Development System is rated as trustworthy but wants to be ranked in the 10% of leaders on trust, how does […]
Read post »“I don’t care about being liked, I just want to be respected,” is a statement repeated by many less than extraordinary leaders. Trapped in either/or thinking, these narrowly-focused leaders often push hard for results while leaving a trail of damaged relationships and enervated people scattered behind them. Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, is perpetuating a related […]
Read post »Fellow professional speaker and good friend, Donald Cooper, makes this excellent point in his December newsletter: “In many conversations with business owners and their teams I’ve been amazed and distressed at how many business owners use ‘I’ and ‘my’ when they should be using “we” and “our”. They constantly say, ‘I did this and I […]
Read post »If you’ve never taken in one of the amazing and spectacular shows of the Cirque du Soleil, you really need to treat yourself and see one. Cirque travels extensively to major cities and have permanent shows with elaborate stages and buildings in Las Vegas. One of my favorite shows of all time is their The […]
Read post »Today’s organizations are spanning geographic and departmental boundaries. Increasingly people — especially white collar professionals — are on teams whose members don’t all work in the same location. Telecommuting and cross-functional/regional/country collaboration are adding to this growing trend. The international training company, AchieveGlobal, has just published a study looking at leading virtual teams. Among its […]
Read post »We regularly review our seven Timeless Leadership Principles in our workshops while participants assess how well they feel they’re doing with each one, and which of the Principles they’d most like to improve. The one that scores number one or two on participant priority lists for improvement is Mobilizing and Energizing. Supervisors, managers, and executives […]
Read post »Marcelino Sánchez added this comment to my blog posting last week on “Keys to Building a Strong Team or Organizational Culture:” “My thoughts on building a productive team culture (subculture). For a team to do what it needs to do in a way that they like to do it and be effective, they have to […]
Read post »The April 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review has a short item entitled “How Toxic Colleagues Corrode Performance.” The authors polled several thousand managers and employees from a range of American companies. Here’s what they found is the impact of negative and rude behavior in the workplace: • 48% decreased their work effort • 47% […]
Read post »Just before the opening ceremonies in Beijing, Tavia Grant from The Globe & Mail sent me an e-mail and interviewed me for her story on how managers should deal with people watching the Olympics at the office (“World’s Watching: Who’s Working”, August 8, 2008). As the Globe & Mail so often is, her story was […]
Read post »In the movie, Groundhog Day, actor Bill Murray plays Phil, a weather forecaster who spends the night in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where he is to do a broadcast the next day (February 2), broadcasting the annual ritual of the coming out of the groundhog. He wakes up the next morning, does his story and is annoyed […]
Read post »Following are a few “how to” steps from the Responsibility for Choices section of the new workshop I have designed around The Leader’s Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. You might want to share and discuss them with your team. Identify common “victim speak” used within your team. This might include blaming other […]
Read post »Following are a few “how to” steps from the Responsibility for Choices section of the new workshop I have designed around Leader’s Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. You might want to share and discuss them with your team. Identify common “victim speak” used within your team. This might include blaming other departments […]
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