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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
You know that person who says they will do something and then doesn’t do it? The one who says he’ll be at your place at 10:00, then shows up 15 minutes – or an hour – late. Or the one who says she’ll email you that document as soon as she gets back to the […]
The Four Conversations aren’t just for the office. We communicate in our real lives too. I just had some great results out of having a “closure conversation” with a dear friend. She had been unhappy – and unusually touchy – for several months. I had been patient and kind with her, because I knew she […]
Here’s another survey result. This one tied for 5th place on the list of Biggest People-Problems at Work: “Dealing with difficult personalities and behaviors.” Comments went on to describe examples such as “unfriendly people”, “passive-aggressive people”, and “people playing power games”. One person explained, “Nobody wants to work with some people because they don’t like […]
A recent survey of workplace challenges listed one old favorite: Dealing with the “lazy people” in the workplace. These are the people who have clear assignments and do them fairly well, but never step outside their narrow boundaries. Why this hasn’t been solved is a mystery to me, as it’s really pretty easy. There are […]
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 […]
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