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 […]
The biggest problem I’ve seen with teamwork in my years of consulting is that two conversations are missing. First, the team might have been launched with a good statement of “What we’re here for + When we want to see results + Why these results matter to us and to others”. But usually that’s said […]
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 […]
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 […]
That’s what a friend, Earl, said to me two months ago: “I can retire in 1 year and 1 ½ months.” I could tell this wasn’t a simple fact for him, because it was accompanied by a sad face and a sigh of defeat. This guy can’t wait to leave his job behind. We talked […]
The understanding conversation is the one that some senior-level managers and executives dislike. A VP in a financial firm once asked me, “Why should I ask people who work for me to give me input on a plan? Won’t they think I don’t know what I’m doing?” The difficulty is that it is a dialogue, […]
The students in my MBA class on Leadership in Action are confronting the difference between the reality of leadership and the romance of leadership. By romance, I am referring to the concepts or ideas they have of what it is to be a leader. For example, some of them believe that if they just have […]
Managers undermine their integrity in following a “don’t tell them” strategy. The topic in my leading change class today was integrity and its impact on a leader’s ability to effect change. Integrity was defined as honoring your word and doing what you said you would do by when you said you would do it and […]
Credibility is a key element in effective leadership and depends on the effective use of closure conversations. Most people realize that credibility is built by telling the truth. But credibility is also built by doing what you said you would do by when you said you would do it and when you don’t, acknowledging the […]
Why is there such a high failure rate among projects? One reason is that there is a gap in the soft skills of project managers. Although project managers are well trained in the technical “hard” skills of risk assessment, project planning, etc., little attention is given to interpersonal or people skills – the so called […]
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