Leading – whether in your family, your team, community, or company – is like life: it’s hard at times. When you decide to step up and stand for something, you open yourself up to be attacked, dismissed, criticized, silenced, and sometimes even assassinated. It is not uncommon to bear the scars from your efforts. Leaders […]
Friendships in the workplace were seen as distractions. But recent Gallup data indicates that having a best friend at work actually improves employee performance and motivation and is strongly linked to business outcomes, including profitability, safety, inventory control and retention. Employees who have a best friend at work are significantly more likely to engage customers […]
Boundaries are healthy and important, but can the idea of a boundary give us an easy out and prevent us from being brave and stretching ourselves? Years ago, in a family counselling session, parents were complaining that their 25-year-old son living in their basement wasn’t employed or contributing to the family in any way. The […]
John Coltrane, the American jazz saxophonist and composer, once said that to be a better artist you have to be a better person. He could have been talking about leadership. We understand that leadership is too important to be diminished to techniques or titles. Leadership is about the character and integrity of a person. It’s […]
In the very early months of WWII, my father excitedly rushed to enlist at the first opportunity. However, upon the discovery of his poor eyesight, he was declined. Unable to go to war, he returned to his work as a youth leader on the inner streets in Calgary. Forty-five years later, if asked about being […]
It has been said that the true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit. Not long ago I received an email from a childhood friend who was in my boy scout troop when I was a teenager. My father had been our scout leader, and in […]
