The Hard Work of Making Good Requests: Part I

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Help people give you what you really want by making complete requests that use all 6 “journalist questions”.

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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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On Getting What You Want

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The hardest thing about getting what you want is the problem of deciding what, exactly, you really do want. If the Lamp Genie offered you one wish, what would it be? Over 70% of people would ask for some time to think about it – which probably means they are living a pretty good life already. […]

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A Tip for Smarter Staff Meetings

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  A manager I know came up with the best idea I ever saw for having her staff meetings be short and smart. Her name is Sharon, and she has a staff of 14 direct reports. I borrowed her idea myself when I managed a conference, and I have recommended it to every manager I […]

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Agreements for Change

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Last night was the final class on “Leadership and Implementing Change”, and graduate students reported the most valuable things they learned. Their #1 tip – Make agreements, track agreements, and follow up on agreements. Each student had done a semester-long project to define and implement a change in their workplace, applying the latest class lessons […]

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Committed Complaints? Good for You!

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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 […]

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Productive Communication: Your Best Goal-Getting Tool

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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 […]

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Do You Have to Go to That Meeting?

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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 […]

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Good Communication Works at Home Too!

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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 […]

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