Committed Complaints? Good for You!

The US election season is now underway. That means there will be 18 months of complaining about the candidates, then we can switch back to our usual complaints about the weather, TV programming, and people who eat pizza with a fork. Those are all examples of “uncommitted complaints”, because we usually are not going to […]

Productive Communication: Your Best Goal-Getting Tool

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 – Nice, But Not a Management Tool

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 […]

Do You Have to Go to That Meeting?

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 […]

Building Teamwork is Not About Fixing Feelings

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 […]

Accountability Is Like Tango – It Takes Two to Do It

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 […]

Good Communication Works at Home Too!

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 […]

The NYPD Blues Need a Closure Conversation

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. […]

A Personal Scheduling Upgrade

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 […]

Organization Change: Uncertainty is Predictable

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 […]