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

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.

A Recipe for Little Changes – Organizational and Personal

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.

Why We Don’t Put Deadlines into Our Requests  

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.

The Power of Promising: Listener + Do + Due 

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

Want Something? Get Specific.

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

Time to Talk? Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

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

Attitude Can Cause Blindness and Ignorance

  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 […]

Getting Other People to Do Stuff

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 […]

Big Change, Part II: Expanding the Executive Team

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 […]

Big Change, Part I: Conversations for Possibility

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 […]