The Art of Building A Strong Culture
Learning to build a culture is an art, and you can master building a culture if you are willing to invest the time and energy. The practice of any art, whether it’s music, carpentry, or athletics, requires four practices: First is discipline. To become good at something, you must undertake it in a disciplined way. […]
Accountability: Getting A Grip On Results
Accountability – Free Whitepaper
Transforming An Organization Into A Community: A Leadership Vision
Leadership is about transforming your culture into a community. A community is a place where work is meaningful, not just menial, where you support people to be genuine contributors, not just “task doers,” where people are honestly valued, rather than used up, where you invite intentional conversations, not just superficial exchanges. Communities are places where […]
The 80% Principle Of Leadership: Managing By Making Room
An astute executive passed along some good wisdom not long ago. “The problem with leaders today is that they expect 100% from their good people, and not enough from their poor performers.” This statement initially puzzled me, but after he explained what he meant, I was inspired. Let me illustrate the principle with an example. […]
From Performance Management To Success Management: A New View of An Old System
When I am asked to work with an organization to help improve their performance management system, my first step is to have leaders look at the request differently. If they want a better process for managing expectations and getting a grip on results, while at the same time making it engaging and meaningful, then “performance” […]
Authenticity and Art: Making the Connection
My father was a “closet artist.” He had a beautiful, artistic side that was repressed because our culture led him to believe that to be successful you had to have an office job, so he was an administrator. Suppressing his artistic, authentic self nearly cost him his life, sending him into an early retirement from […]
Transform Yourself From An “Employee” To A CEO
When a good friend was offered a position as CEO, he wrote me with this question: “If you were taking over an organization as the new CEO, what would be the first 10 questions you would want answers to? Here’s the questions that came to my mind. What would your questions be? What is your […]
The Research on Employee Engagement: It’s Not Rocket Science, But It Is Science
The Gallup Q12 is a survey designed to measure employee engagement. The instrument was the result of hundreds of focus groups and interviews. Researchers found that there were 12 key expectations, that when satisfied, form the foundation of strong feelings of engagement. So far 87,000 work units and 1.5 million employees have participated in the […]
Enlarging The Lives Of Others: The Work Of The Best Leaders
As we “spring ahead” and begin to think about the coming season of growth and renewal, I have been contemplating how we can encourage and support others by “enlarging” them. In the following article I offer some suggestions I hope will “enlarge” your outlook and actions. “Believe in your heart of hearts that your fundamental […]
Organizational Culture: Hire For Character; Train For Cashiers
The quote in the title of this blog is from an executive at Nordstrom, an upscale department store chain in the US who understands a vital component to organizational culture: the importance of character. You can’t teach character in a training seminar, because it’s not a skill; it’s the essence of who a person is. […]
