Been There, Done That
For the first seven years of my consulting career, I did tons of consulting projects with CEOs and senior managers, even though I had never actually been a CEO or senior manager. Eighteen months ago I joined forces with ...
Category: Leadership
Soft Skills are Hard
Several people tweeted this week about a study that "surprisingly" showed that so-called "soft" skills like managing relationships and creating an environment of trust are important and valuable in th ...
The Hard Work of Clarity
Last Friday I had the extreme pleasure to present a session with Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant of SocialFish at ASAE’s first ever Social Media Workshop. The title of our session is "What Social Media Means for the W ...
Starting with Trust
I have yet to come across anyone who argues that trust is a bad thing. There are certainly times where we don't trust people, and we wouldn't just blindly trust them because we think trust is generically a good ...
Succession Planning is About Engagement
On Friday I was in St. Louis doing a pre-conference session for an association client that covered a wide range of topics for their chapter leaders, including succession planning. My pet peeve with succession planning ...
Behavior During Recession Can Bite You in the Boom
I like this blog post on SmartBlog Insights that gives an HR perspective on how to manage things differently during the recession. Sometimes we get so stressed out about declining revenue and shortage of staff, th ...
More on Being Human in Organizations
I have written two posts that are explicitly about being human this year. The first was building off Dan Oestreich's blog and the second was building off of Gary Hamel's awesome book, The Future of Manageme ...
Big Picture and Little Picture
Both the big picture and the little picture are important. Forest and trees. Got it. But why do we insist that the big picture is the responsibility of the "leaders" in an organization, and the details ...
Stranded or Leading?
A lot of people who are doing social media in organizations, particularly associations, may resonate with the article on the Harvard Business Publishing blog that refers to "stranded evangelists." These are the ...
It’s Less About Theory and More About Thinking
I've always told myself that I like theory. I did my Master's degree in conflict resolution at George Mason University, and I remember talking to colleagues of mine in the conflict resolution field who weren' ...