What he does do is let me zero in on what is really at stake and gives me the space to work it out on my own with an authentic listening.
Have you ever had one of your peers tell you how you should be doing things differently? Did you get turned off? If you have, that’s normal… and at the same time, you missed an opportunity to improve. People tend to feel quite protective about how they do things. It might have taken you years…
If you secretly want a doppelganger working for you, you’re not alone. It’s a desire many managers and business owners have privately shared with me. What they really want, more than anything else, is someone who: has the same values that they have can make decisions like they would take action when they would have…
We were moving fairly quickly on our project. My team was easily hitting every milestone. I was even able to start working from home once a week. You couldn’t find a happier manager. But happy times were about to end… or at least to be questioned. As weeks went on, I noticed how some of…
Do you always get things to go how you want? Look around. Some people have the ability to influence others and get their way, while some always wind up with the short end of the stick. You’ve probably met that charismatic manager who always gets the resources he needs. Or heard of that team leader…
Years ago, when I first moved to the U.S. from a non-English speaking country, I had difficulty expressing myself fluently. My mind raced to form sentences correctly in English, something that I actually preferred to blurting out broken sentences. The result was… breaks of silence here and there. At one point, I even asked some…
In The Illusion of Employee Productivity: Part 1, we explored how setting expectations and providing support impacts your employees’ productivity levels. Now let’s see what other factors influence employee productivity and what you can do about it. The Four Big Factors Continued 3. Grant Recognition Although some jobs are incentive based, such as commission based…
Many business owners believe that offering their employees fair compensation guarantees high productivity in the work place. These same managers run their organizations under the assumption that if they tell their employees what needs to get done, it will get done at the level of quality the supervisor had in mind. Often, these illusions and…
Do you know what your employees think about their work environment? More importantly, would it make any difference if you did? When it’s 90 degrees out and your employees are sweating profusely in the office, you know that they are hot and uneasy. At a time like this, you surely know what to do to…
Deadlines force you to contend with many core personal obstacles, including (but of course not limited to) your concern about commitments (do I really want to agree to this deadline?), perfectionism (how much work will it take to do this right?), procrastination (can I do this later?), and failure (can I pull this off?). So what are the two most common obstacles that come up when dealing with deadlines?
Deadline: a word many dread and even avoid. Deadlines can easily bring anxiety, stress, and tension to any interaction. The word even has “dead” in it! How empowering can a deadline really be? Let’s first sort out what a deadline is before we give ourselves permission to cringe.