The People Equation

Are Your Employees Going the Extra Mile?

June 4, 2010

Leaders, when’s the last time you saw your employees go the extra mile? Today? Last week? Last month? The photo at right was taken by Terry P., the Library Media Supervisor at my kids’ elementary school. (Back in the day, we called them “librarians”.) Shortly before this picture was taken, Terry had been doing an [...]

Read the full article →

Making Decisions, 100 Years at a Time

June 3, 2010

I’ve been watching reruns of the Ken Burns series The National Parks on PBS. It’s an in-depth look at the birth and evolution of our country’s national park system. Called “America’s best idea” by writer and historian Wallace Stegner, men both famous ( Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir )and lesser-known (Stephen Mather , Charles Young) were [...]

Read the full article →

5 Lessons Learned from a Failed Project

May 29, 2010

Last week, I wrote about a powerful leadership lesson learned when my key project crashed and burned. People Equation reader Nancy asked about the lessons learned from that experience. Indeed, there were several. But first, the story of “The Institute”, the project that gave me both fits and gifts. . . Years ago, I joined [...]

Read the full article →

Avoiding Verbal Spam

May 24, 2010

Sometimes a tweet just sums it up perfectly. Ben Eubanks tweeted: “Verbal Spam”. Creates quite the mental picture, doesn’t it? How often are you subjected to verbal “spam” in the workplace? Probably more often than you’d like. My first reaction to Ben’s tweet was to imagine people who blather on, saying nothing of value. [...]

Read the full article →

Redemption

May 23, 2010

Have you ever led a high-visibility project that has crashed and burned? I have and it taught me a powerful leadership lesson. Read on . . . The Back Story Many years ago, shortly after I joined a Fortune 500 company, I was assigned to manage a project called the “Institute”. The Institute was an [...]

Read the full article →

We’re Renovating!

May 12, 2010

Please pardon our “look” as the blog gets a facelift. We’re working hard to bring you a site with more content, tools and tips to help you “master the people equation.”

Read the full article →

4 Ways to Gain Team Input

April 30, 2010

So I’m sitting at a large round table, talking with a team of eight senior-level leaders who work for a large corporation. These are smart, sophisticated people, who have both street cred as field operatives and many years’ experience leading various types and sizes of work groups. We’re discussing how to ensure that our communications [...]

Read the full article →

Author Interview with John Spence

April 20, 2010

Earlier this year, I discovered the book Awesomely Simple and wrote a book review on it for this blog. I admired the book’s down-to-earth approach and wanted to learn more, so I reached out to its author, John Spence. John agreed to sit down with me last month for an interview. [...]

Read the full article →

Roles Plays Are OK

April 19, 2010

Over at the HR Bartender, Sharlyn Lauby has declared role plays in the training classroom passé, declaring Nobody Likes Role Plays. I agree with her assertion the traditional format in which the trainer announces, “Now, let’s put what we just learned into practice” and calling up two training participants to the front of the room [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

Archives