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 […]
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 […]
Meredith Fineman titled her article, written in September 2013, “Please Stop Complaining About How Busy You Are”. I looked it up recently, after listening to a colleague go on – and on – about how many appointments he had, how many deadlines, and how many staff had been cut in his organization. He told me […]
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 […]
A program director in one of the colleges here at Ohio State is paying the price for not having the appropriate conversations with his boss, the dean of the college. Kevin, as director of programs, is responsible for admissions into the undergraduate and graduate programs in his college. In a recent conversation, he pointed out […]
One way to effectively manage a boss is to give her a deadline when she doesn’t give you one. One of the complaints I frequently get from managers in my MBA classes is that their bosses rarely say by when they want something done. Bosses say things like “when you get a chance”, “this week”, […]
Successful change depends on the use of the four conversations. I recently led an MBA course on Leading and Managing Change to a group of practicing managers in which they were required to produce an “impossible change” – one that was currently well beyond their position and capability to produce. In other words, they couldn’t […]
We recently received three copies of our book, The Four Conversations: Daily Communication that Gets Results, from our publisher and they were in Chinese (see photo). What a treat to see how something you wrote looks in another language! A colleague of mine has had several of his textbooks translated into other languages, but none […]
Good working relationships are essential to getting work done and to a satisfying work place. But what can we do when relationships turn sour? You could have a closure conversation with the person. One of the managers in my Mastery in Execution class had a very poor working relationship with a woman at work and […]
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