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But we are proud to say that Laurie Ford contributed 235 entries already.
A colleague called, sounding ½ angry and ½ upset and said he thought I was supposed to attend a professional meeting last week. No, I told him, I’ve got a book to write and will not be attending those anymore. He growled, “I thought you were going to support us until you retired.” I am retired […]
We did a little survey in a group of managers, asking them about the biggest communication problems in their organization. Here’s a winner: “How do I get people in different silos to cooperate with each other rather than butting heads?” They called it the Silo Effect: when you are trying to communicate with people outside […]
Karrie swears she is getting – and using – input from her people to make decisions. “The teachers and principals said they wanted these changes, so I approved them,” she insists. Karrie is a School Superintendent, with 8 School Principals reporting to her. One teacher disagreed, saying “We never had a voice in the changes […]
People are mad that Elaine avoids work – and sick of her “good excuses”. There are two different views about what their manager, Beth, should do: She should meet with Elaine at the start and end of every day to check on whether she’s doing her assignments or not. She should give assignments to everyone […]
We did a survey of about 25 managers, and one of the biggest problems they reported was “Getting people motivated, keeping them motivated, and/or having them motivated in the right direction”. Have you ever had anyone try to motivate you? Don’t you hate that? It’s more like a manipulation than any kind of inspiration or […]
I was in a good conversation the other day. Eric was leading a new team in the Purchasing department, and he told a small group of us – we were having lunch at Panera – that he was having trouble building good relationships with the new people on his team. “I want a strong team,” he said, […]
How much time do we spend waiting for other people to do something? I know a guy who just had a new floor installed in his house, and he was waiting to hear from the installer about completing the job. The moldings that connected the floor – a beautiful bamboo – to the carpeted areas […]
Meredith Fineman titled her article, written in September 2013, “Please Stop Complaining About How Busy You Are”. I looked it up recently, after listening to a colleague go on – and on – about how many appointments he had, how many deadlines, and how many staff had been cut in his organization. He told me […]
Here’s a failure in what I thought was a productive conversation. I’m thinking I’ll have to train everyone I interact with about the Four Conversations. Starting with myself. I told a person from the (radioactive) Waste Management Symposia – an annual conference where I participate and speak – that I was going to Saskatchewan to […]
I’m on my way to Canada to talk with the Indian Tribes there – called “First Nations” – about the nuclear industry’s plans to build a deep geologic repository for radioactive wastes. My job is to talk to them about having a productive conversation in the face of a serious challenge: the waste site is […]
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