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But we are proud to say that Laurie Ford contributed 235 entries already.
I just looked up “management communication” to see how it is described in the world today. I’m a woman with an undergrad degree in Psychology, and two grad degrees in Engineering, and I admit to being horrified. The American Management Association has a communication training on “Getting Results Without Authority”, subtitled “How do you influence […]
Emotional intelligence measures the ability to recognize, understand, and use emotions – our own and others’ – as a guide to our thinking and behavior in family, social, and work situations. So it’s a good thing to have – it has been shown to correlate with better mental health as well as social influence, popularly called […]
A recent article in the Washington Post shared Tom Fox’s assessment of the meetings he attended over the course of one month. He didn’t report the score on his rating system for meetings he wanted to avoid in the future (Red), those that were a fairly good use of time (Yellow), and the ones that produced some […]
A manager – let’s call her Sarah – was instructed by her boss to find ways to improve teamwork in their complex working environment. “People don’t collaborate,” she explained. “People don’t talk with each other about things they need to know.” The whole group was about 45 people, but they are segmented into 7 different […]
So the Manager says, “My people aren’t accountable”. And the Staff People say, “People who do poor quality work are not held to account for improving it.” I know this because I’m doing a survey about what managers and staff say about their workplace. It’s the same workplace, but two very different perspectives. The difference […]
We deliver management communication programs in all kinds of organizations, but sometimes we get to see how the basic principles work in our personal lives too. We have a friend, I’ll call her Celia, who attended one of those programs, and sent an email saying: “Hey! This stuff works at home too!” Celia said she […]
We just returned from a long weekend in New York City – lots of walking, much of it on crowded sidewalks – and almost zero police presence. Usually they’re everywhere, providing the reassurance that someone is watching out for us all, natives and tourists alike. Not this weekend. The NYPD Blues need a closure conversation. […]
In my year-end cleanup of Stuff and Promises, I have been getting rid of stuff (Goodwill, Salvation Army, food bank, etc.) and closing out promises made. The stuff is easier to clean up than promises, because promises disappear unless they are recorded somewhere. But really, all I have to do to find broken promises is […]
Guess what? Things are going to change! What a big surprise that seems to be in some organizations. But I just met with a group of managers who are almost always preparing for change. I told them that one of the most frequent questions I get from managers is, “How do we retain knowledge from […]
“Don’t people know that they need to respond to their emails? Don’t they check their phone messages? They either have no manners or zero common sense!” That was the exasperated holler from a miserable manager with a serious project and a team of people who truly believe they are “too busy” to communicate. In fact, […]
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