Team communication — all communication — is an attempt at the impossible… To implant in your brain, all the way over there, exactly the meaning, the message, the nuance and intention that I am holding in my brain and to receive the same from you, all by using this clunky toolkit called language. That’s hard. […]
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 […]
Trust-based leadership is trickier, more important, and simpler than people acknowledge. My fear of loss sabotages my dreams for me and my company. And so does yours. Maybe you’ve read Stephen M.R. Covey‘s book, The Speed of Trust. Its thesis is that as trust goes up, the speed of business goes up and the cost […]
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. […]
Unemployment… 3.5%. Burnout percentage, unknown. Open seats you may be having trouble filling. When it comes to their teams, one of the top concerns we’re hearing from business leaders is burnout. “My team’s burning out. I’m burning out. I can’t afford for the people I have to burn out.” The conventional wisdom is that to […]
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, […]
“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. […]
We get a lot of people asking us about the ‘F’-word. Feedback Almost every question we get is about how to deliver effective feedback. And that’s a great question. Often overlooked and at least as important… How to receive feedback. People who receive feedback well perform better. They learn and grow faster. They develop more […]
Fear of the unknown is one of the great performance killers. It doesn’t have to be. Embrace the Fear We’ve got a choice. We can freeze. Or flee. Or fight. Most of us clench our jaw, grit our teeth, hold our breath, and try to face down the fear. That’s the circumstance in which fear […]
We recently conducted a workshop on cultivating a high-performance, collaboration culture at HR West in Oakland. Here’s a teaser. Feedback is a critical component. A Common Critical Feedback Error At one point, a CEO in our workshop loudly bragged. “Here’s what I do. My executive assistant knows she’s doing a good job when she doesn’t […]
Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions Who’s it for? Accountability is one of the biggest concerns for leaders today. It’s a word I hear multiple times daily. At The Yes Works, we very often get the question, “How do I hold people accountable?” People resist accountability when they […]
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Says who? Often, it’s said to be Peter Drucker — management guru for the ages. Why? How does culture eat strategy for breakfast? Who do you imagine will perform better… A team of competent, motivated, collaborators without a plan at the start of the day, or a team of arrogant, […]