Where Accountability Comes From – How to Support People in Honoring Their Word

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Here’s how to help other people learn to keep their word with you. Please do it! It’s a service to everyone in their lives, not just you.

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A Recipe for Little Changes – Organizational and Personal

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Five steps to change the way things will be done – in the office and at home – by reducing resistance from others and including their best ideas.

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Why We Don’t Put Deadlines into Our Requests  

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Is it pushy to ask for what you want? Not if you’re pleasant about it. In fact, you might be doing them a service.

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The Power of Promising: Listener + Do + Due 

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How to get yourself to Do something you don’t want to Do? Add a Listener and a Due date. Here’s how.

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Want Something? Get Specific.

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Wishing is a waste of time. Invest some brainpower in getting clear about what matters.

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Time to Talk? Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

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Improve both efficiency and effectiveness with a clear and complete request.

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Attitude Can Cause Blindness and Ignorance

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  After years of saying that a consultant’s job is not to change people’s attitudes, I might need to eat my words. Here’s what I learned from reviewing a Harvard Business Review case: a bad attitude can blind an employee – even a good one – from seeing who to communicate with and who needs […]

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Getting Other People to Do Stuff

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A recent review of manager comments on their workplace communication was very revealing: they didn’t get the idea of dialogue. Two-way talking was not recognized as a tool for getting things done on time and on budget. Here are two samples of their management “conversations” for getting people to perform: “I think we need to get […]

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Big Change, Part II: Expanding the Executive Team

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Four weary senior executives came home from their 2-day “huddle” with a decision to close a regional office and eliminate 11 jobs in their company – the only solution they could find to solve the problems identified by a recent financial audit. The decision to decision to “outsource” the company’s marketing and communications responsibilities was […]

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Big Change, Part I: Conversations for Possibility

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A client organization has received a daunting financial audit: they’re losing money and must act quickly to save the company. I met with Matthew, the CEO, to discuss the way forward. He said, “My top 3 executives and I went into a 2-day “huddle” to review the audit report and talk about what we should […]

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