A typical conversation around our dinner table among our four teenagers: “Can I have the car tonight?” “My teacher is the worst!” “You’ll never believe what happened to me today!” My clan around me, sharing a meal together after a busy day, I felt fulfilled. Amidst the chit-chat, our second son Jeremy says “I’ll stay…Continue reading
“…our ability to be daring leaders will never be greater than our capacity for vulnerability.” ~ Brene Brown Courageous leadership is a core mandate of Brene Brown’s 2018 book Dare To Lead, as described in this October 2020 episode of her newly launched Dare To Lead podcast. Vulnerability is at the heart of the matter.…
We’re all spending so much time in online meetings, that it’s worth a little effort to use a virtual platform in the best ways we can. Here are some tips. You probably already know that it can help a meeting if everyone has their video on when possible (see key #2 in 7 Essential Keys…Continue reading
In ordinary times, meetings can run the gamut from dismal to invigorating. There is possibly even a wider range in this time of economic upheaval and physical distancing, when many of our “normal” practices for productive meetings are disrupted. Now with so many virtual meetings, how do we keep some of the spirit and function…Continue reading
Remember in-person meetings? When we would be in the same physical room with in-the-flesh people? If we’re fortunate, we had meetings where people established trust and rapport, respected and were curious about each other’s ideas, and thought creatively together. Or maybe meetings were occasionally like that, or we hoped they would be. Now with so…Continue reading
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds many businesses are being forced to make hard decisions. Not only are teams working remotely, leadership is triaging financial bleed through staff layoffs and restructuring. In many companies with a traditional top-down organisational structure, managers alone make these decisions without broad team consultation. Workers lower on the ladder have little…Continue reading
Dan Pink knows something about what motivates us. In this RSAnimate video he shares some surprising findings about what really moves us to perform better, to do our best, to stretch ourselves. His most general finding is that for all but purely mechanical tasks – that is, for anything that requires a bit of conceptual…Continue reading
This is the third in a three-part series, and is an excerpt from a white paper by the same title. Part 1 and part 2 listed four pitfalls of a top-down organization: (1) communication goes one-way, (2) the person who makes the decisions creates a bottleneck, (3) management and workers become adversaries, and (4) workers…
Would you be surprised that the research on workplace effectiveness addresses the value of psychological safety? The notion of “psychological safety,” a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson,1 has been researched extensively over the years. Psychological safety in a work context relates to a person’s perspective on how threatening or rewarding it…Continue reading
This is the second in a three-part series, and is an excerpt from a white paper by the same title. Part 1 listed two pitfalls of a top-down organization: (1) one-way communication, and (2) decision bottlenecks. Here are two more. Pitfall #3. Management and workers become adversaries. We all know of companies where relations between…