Is Your Strategic Plan Fighting Human Nature? Ask Yourself:• Is your team exhausted but can’t slow down? • Is an us-vs-them mentality killing your culture? • Do people resist change despite knowing it’s necessary? • Do you need results NOW but your people need a break? If you answered yes to any of these, your […]

Zoom meetings (or Teams, or Google meet, yada-yada — pick your video meeting platform) are still a thing, and therefore so is Zoom fatigue. Our calendars are still laden with meetings — one-on-ones and group meetings both — in which we’re going to have to stare into a camera, tell Jody that she’s on mute. […]

Recruiting effectiveness is a competitive advantage. Maybe it’ll be your competitive advantage over your competitors. Maybe it’ll be their competitive advantage over you. Up to you. And in a tight labor market like this, the field of competitors is spread — the best are further ahead than even the next best. In this season of The […]

A championship swimmer nearly drowned while professional lifeguards watched, and there are critical lessons for you as a business leader if you don’t want your company to drown while your people look on. What’s a near-drowning got to do with your company policy? Glad you asked… Story Time Here’s the story in brief. Immediately after […]

What do your company and diapers have in common? They’ve got to be changed regularly. It’s not your fault. You’re not doing anything wrong. Your company (unlike diapers) isn’t full of crap. Rather, we live in a changing world and you’ve got changing goals, and so what got you to the present you’re in won’t […]

You’ve got something important to communicate to someone on your team — and maybe they don’t want to hear it. Before you even begin to deliver your message, you feel a pit in your stomach as you start to fear the dreaded defensiveness. As leaders, we’ve got the responsibility to have difficult conversations and challenge […]

Why Cultivate a “Change-Ready” Company Culture? We want to have fun at work. And there’s a paradox — though stasis is not fun, we resist change and fall into habit. The logistics of corporate change are often planned meticulously. No matter how complex a business, the mechanical variables of change execution can be identified, quantified, […]

Every time someone leaves your company — whether by their choice or by yours — the space they leave in your organization is a company culture diagnostic opportunity. You can expect there’ll be some neglected details that emerge… Projects started and not completed, and the like. What you want to be on the lookout for […]

Let’s face it. There’s a lot of defensiveness at work. It’s part of the human condition. Despite how much of it we face (and exhibit) leaders around the world struggle to easily address defensiveness. And because continuous improvement is essential for reaching our goals, we need tools for addressing defensiveness at work. So… Let’s look […]

Improve accountability with Support vs. Challenge You want to improve accountability in your team. This is the third and final installment of our Leader’s Accountability Guide. Did you miss the first or the second installment in this series? You’ll get more out of this entry if you go back and read those first. In installment […]

The Accountability Culture Formula In the first installment of this series on improving accountability on your team, we talked about three surprises. We busted three myths.  And now we’ll look at the “how to” of creating an environment of accountability. To be entirely too simplistic about it, there’s an Accountability Culture Formula. Leaders who implement […]

“How can I improve accountability in my team?” That’s the question we get again and again. Sometimes that question comes in different words. And when we dig in, we often find this is the question underneath. Looking for Accountability in Your Team A breakthrough in accountability on your team could become your company’s unfair advantage. […]