Management

SmartBlog on Leadership – Can Your Team Say No?

May 17, 2012

    Twice a month, Lead Change Group authors write a blog post on the SmartBlog on Leadership site. Today it’s my turn with a post called How to Get Your Team to Speak Up. It’s based on my observation that many team leaders create a culture where saying “no” is unacceptable, thereby causing their team [...]

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May Leadership Development Carnival by Dan McCarthy

May 7, 2012

Dan McCarthy, founder of the blog Great Leadership and host of the monthly Leadership Development Carnival keeps it simple this month and offers us a straight-forward carnival. No theme– just 27 excellent essays on leadership. Speaking of keeping it simple, you can see my carnival entry titled The KISS Model of Leadership Development. Other interesting [...]

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What to Do About Employees Who Don’t Care

March 20, 2012

I’ve never been much for watching sports. So when my kids started playing organized athletics, I was not very enthused. A friend who has already been there, done that told me “it’ll be different when you’re watching your own kid.” She’s right.   When it’s my kid (and by extension, the other kids on the [...]

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Why Call Center Employees Should Have Ellipticals Under Their Desk

February 14, 2012

I wrote a much-read blog post called Sitting Kills. What Your HR Department Can Do About It. In that post, I wondered what role HR departments should play when faced with data that says that people who sit for the majority of the day are 54% more likely to die of a heart attack. If [...]

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7 Questions That Help Conversations Move Forward

February 2, 2012

The other day I attended a webinar led by Al Switzler, co-author of the books Crucial Conversations and Influencer. During the webinar Al made this point about interacting with colleagues: If your response to frustrating conversations is to increase the frequency of your key point or the volume of your delivery, but you don’t change [...]

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Command and Control Just Won’t Die

January 25, 2012

For nearly two decades, management gurus have been heralding the death of the “command and control” mentality in Corporate America. Personally, I think it’s very much alive. Over a year ago, I wrote that the so-called “death” of command and control management is nothing but an urban legend. Now, a recent article on the Forbes.com [...]

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Don’t Kill Productive Meetings by Dragging Them Out

January 20, 2012

My friend Sally works for a company that holds monthly small-group “open forum” type meetings for cross-sections of various company departments. The purpose of these meetings is to promote cross-departmental communication.  Each month, leaders from different functions in the company moderate the discussion. In general, Sally enjoys the meetings, except for one aspect: they are [...]

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Book Review: Leadership Caffeine

December 14, 2011

I’ll be right up front on this book review: I know the author. Art Petty and I are professionally acquainted; we’re fellow leadership bloggers and our paths sometime cross on consulting projects. I’m a huge fan of Art’s writing about leadership—he’s extremely pragmatic, yet self-effacing. You won’t find bombastic pontificating on his blog. What you [...]

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3 Keys to Keeping a Virtual Open Door Policy

December 9, 2011

Recently I wrote a post about what happens to employees’ brains when they cross the threshold of their workplace door. In a happy coincidence, at about the same time, I was connected to Kyle Lagunas, who wrote an excellent post on his blog about doors and workplaces: how to maintain an “open door policy” when [...]

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What Do Office Doorways Say About Leadership?

December 1, 2011

What do your organization’s workplace doorways signal to employees? Whether it’s the front door, the employee entrance, or the boss’s cubicle doorway, have you ever considered what happens in employees’ minds when they pass over their work threshold? As a leader, you probably haven’t given it much thought, but consider this recently reported brain research* [...]

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