Compassion
At the end of my session Friday, the group asked if I had any final words of wisdom. I like to respond to those requests, even though I don’t have a “stock” answer prepared ahead of time. And although I didn’t make the c ...
Category: Managing People
Science and Fiction of Meetings
Jeff De Cagna sent me an article from the Sloan Management Review about “the science and fiction of meetings” (thanks, Jeff). Here are some data tidbids: The amount of times we spend in meetings doubled between the 1960s ...
Relationships Matter
I love Margaret Wheatley’s writing, and she has a great article in Associations Now this month. Really, you should read the whole thing. Herre’s my favorite quote:Many of our frequent and recurring failures in organizati ...
But I am NOT a micromanager!
Here are some words of “wisdom” from an article in Forum magazine:CEOs should delegate and should avoid micromanaging. But they should never fail to supervise. The buck stops with the CEO. They ultimately are responsible ...
Staff Meeting or Strategic Conversation?
Next month I will be speaking at ASAE & The Center’s annual “Great Ideas Conference.” This time I am doing a session about staff meetings. The title of the session is “Turning Staff Meetings into Strategic Conversati ...
More on Voice and Trust
Just a little more about yesterday’s post about voice and trust. I did a training for a small group of Fellows at a Federal agency last week. They made reference to the fact that at a large and important meeting recently ...
Voice, Trust, and Control
In Jeffrey Pfeffer’s column in Business 2.0 this month is he cites a famous article by Albert Hirschman called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.” Hirschman argues that when people are dissatisfied, they have a choice: complain ...
Safety and Threats
I like the article in HBR about “ambiguous threats” this month. I wrote about it on the Association Renewal blog in relation to the dangers of “data-driven” cultures. But I wanted to talk about it here in the way it talk ...
Capitalizing on Diversity
Associations Now has a good article on Brainstorming. The term is very well-known now, but I find in organizations we rarely do it the way it was intended. As the article states, the purpose of brainstorming is to genera ...
Would You Tell Your Boss They’re No Good?
Shawn Lea wrote an interesting post over on the Acronym blog about the fact that managers overwhelmingly rate themselves as good managers, but their employees…not so much (92% versus 67%). One of the studies she quoted s ...