Communication

Today’s Reading, “How to Handle Surprise Criticism”, focuses on feedback that comes as a surprise, even as a shock, from out of nowhere, about an issue you haven’t even perceived. In this piece, Peter Bergman, speaker, writer, and consultant on leadership, says that to take such surprise criticism productively, you need a game plan.  He […]

Today’s reading, “Getting to the Heart of a Disagreement – and Resolving It,” is from Roger Schwarz’s Fundamental Change Newsletter and is found below. Disagreements are natural and inevitable, and their resolution is often crucial to moving forward.  So, how do you resolve them?  Do you focus on developing common ground?  Do you try to minimize the differences?  Do […]

Today’s reading is about a particular form of relationships called “clicking,” the phenomenon of rapidly connecting with another person, either in the work environment or in our personal lives.  The article “The Importance of Connecting with Colleagues” is a discussion by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman of their new book “Click:  The Magic of Instant Connections.” “Click” is […]

Today’s reading comes from an Amy Gallo posting How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team to the Harvard Business Review BLOG.  Gallo is a writer, editor, and business consultant.  Her writing on management issues regularly appears in the HRB BLOG.  Earlier she was a consultant at Katztenbach Partners, a strategy and organization consulting firm where she was involved […]

No matter who we are, we will meet resistance on some matter every day.  And, according to Kevin Daley, founder of Communispond, Inc. and author of “Talk Your Way to the Top” and “Socratic Selling,” the way we handle that resistance is often counterproductive. In “Overcome Resistance with the Right Questions”, Daley notes that our default […]

This Tuesday’s reading is “Communicating Vision”, by John Maxwell, prolific writer and speaker on leadership. In this short article, Maxwell outlines an approach for communicating a clear and compelling organizational vision.  (You will notice many similarities to the SUCCES tool that we have presented in many of the MOR leadership program workshops.) He makes six recommendations: […]

This weeks Tuesday Reading “Getting You and Your Boss on the Same Communication Wavelength” comes to us from John Baldoni’s FastCompany blog and can be found at <http://bit.ly/6PbJvE> Baldoni notes that too often communications breaks down between manager and managed because they are not speaking the same language, even though they are both speaking English.  The […]

Welcome to 2010!  I trust that each of you had a wonderful time with family and friends.  Just before Christmas Roger Schwartz published “Giving and Receiving Gifts in Conversation” in his Fundamental Change newsletter.  I found the article so thought provoking that I have published it here as this week’s reading  by permission. Two Decembers ago, I […]

Having heard a number of people talk about “leading-up, I decided to do a Google search on the words.   This led to far more references than I had time to explore.  However, I found one — “Leading Up”  The Art of Managing Your Boss” a review of Michael Useem’s 2001 book, “Leading Up:  How To […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is a piece which I reproduce below “Using Curiosity to Create Accountability with Powerful People” by Roger Schwarz of the Skilled Facilitator. In his piece, Schwarz notes that when people are accountable to you, you [should] expect then to explain the key decisions and actions they have taken.  Yet, when we are talking […]