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…
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Making Decisions, 100 Years at a Time
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…
5 Lessons Learned from a Failed Project
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…
Avoiding Verbal Spam
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. …
Redemption
Have you ever led a high-visibility project that has crashed and burned? I have and it taught me a powerful lesson about how a leader can turn a failed project into redemption for an employee hesitant to “play big” again. Read on . . . The Back Story Many years ago, shortly after I joined…