Blog Topics
Looking for something specific? The following topics address a wide range of business needs and challenges.
Telling People What to Do Rarely Works!
“I told you to do it this way.”
“Weren’t you in the training where we learned how to do this correctly?”
“Why do you keep doing this?”
“I thought I was clear about how I wanted this done.”
Anyone…
Another Failed Change Initiative: 3 Roadblocks to Successful Change and How to Remove Them
A failed change initiative is costly—wasted time and money on failed implementation, lost ROI on the projected results of the change, and decreased trust from employees in leadership’s ability to…
Bad Rules Are Getting in the Way of Your Good Leadership
Language is truly a double-edged sword. Language allows us to cooperate, plan, coordinate, describe the future, talk about the past, and it even allows us to describe interactions between the…
Shaping That Inner Voice
A topic that often comes up while discussing behavioral consequences with leaders is that of self-consequences. In other words, can a person provide consequences to themselves for their own behavior…
Culture Change is Continuous
Once upon a time, organizations treated culture change like any number of other corporate initiatives: There were project plans, timelines, communication strategies, and roll-outs. …
Are You Developing Successful People?
We have all heard of the Peter Principle—“Observation that in an organizational hierarchy people tend to rise to "their level of incompetence." Thus, as people are promoted, they become progressively…
Stop The Meeting Madness
Who wouldn’t say that meetings suck up hours of potentially productive work time? Let’s face it, there are just too many meetings and most are just too long! For those who feel like their meetings…
You Own the Culture
Do people change culture, or does culture change people? When I meet with a group of leaders, I often begin with this question. It’s a fun question for groups to wrestle with, and inevitably, they…
Earning the Right to Coach
When it comes to developing employees and improving performance, coaching and delivering feedback are critical actions for achieving desired results. In fact today, most organizations expect their…
5 Leadership Tips for Managing Conflict
The ability to productively resolve conflict in the workplace is a necessary people management skill for leaders. Organizations require collaboration among employees to effectively meet their goals,…
The Secret to Managing Across Generations
Let’s face it, today’s workforce looks very different than those of the past—especially if you're a manager. It is now very common for employee groups to extend across many generations, making…
4 Steps to Increasing Employee Engagement: Linking Contribution to Impact and Meaning
How do you encourage employees to think like owners, to take initiative, to participate, to follow through, and contribute to the growth and success of your organization each and every day? This is…
Eliminating Rare Errors: Sleeping Air Traffic Controllers Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Several years ago it was reported that an air traffic controller deliberately made his bed and slept in it while on duty at a Tennessee airport. I am sure many people think that was an isolated…
Are You a Reinforcement Creator or Killer?
Most of us have had the opportunity to work under great, and unfortunately not so great, leaders. More than likely when you worked with great leaders you delivered high levels of discretionary effort…
Behavior For The Heart
About 11 years ago, my father underwent successful open-heart surgery at age 74. The surgeons completed a triple by-pass and valve replacement.
My family and I learned that among the many profound…
Hear No Evil: Yes-Men Leadership
Leadership requires confidence in one’s ability to make good decisions. Yet that confidence does not guarantee quality in the decision making. Sometimes confidence isn’t well founded. The dark side…
The Art of Teaching People to Recognize Their Best
When I was in college, I worked in a food distribution warehouse loading trucks. It was backbreaking work. We would load five trailers per day—each load weighing about 25,000 pounds!
We loaded the…
Tapping into Employee Behaviors with Exponential Impact
Every business goal is driven by human behavior. It follows then that your employees’ performance—their behavior and results—is the most important output of your role as a leader. Considering that…