Communication

This week’s Tuesday Reading, “Three Questions for Effective Feedback”, comes from the pen of Thomas J. DeLong, the Phillip J. Stomberg Professor of Management Practice in the Organizational Behavior area at the Harvard Business School.  His research focus is on the challenges facing individuals and organizations in the process of change. No leader improves without […]

This week’s reading “3 Ways to Improve Your Relationship with Staff”comes from the pen of John Baldoni, executive coach, author, and speaker. Baldoni begins the column with this strange sounding advice:  “Act like Mike Rowe” adding that this is the advice that he would give to leaders seeking guidance on how to connect more authentically with […]

I first saw reference to an E-mail Charter in Davig Pogue’s NYTimes column “We Have to Fix Email“on June 30, 2011.  In the column Pogue calls attention to the email overload that we all are experiencing almost every day in real time. That column points to a blog post by Chris Anderson, organizer for the […]

Today’s reading is a short piece by Jeff Haden, “One Small Step for You – One Giant Leap for Employees”.  Haden learned much of what he knows about management as he worked his way up the printing business from forklift driver to manager of a 250-employee book plant.  The rest he picked up from ghost writing books […]

Yesterday, Dave Logan’s column “Leadership Lessons from the Debt Deal Fiasco” appeared in the BNET newsletter.  Given the timeliness of the subject, I wanted to share the column and its lesson with you.  Logan is a faculty member in USC’s Marshall School of Business.  He teaches leadership and management.  In addition, he’s a Senior Partner in […]

A few weeks ago, one of the Harvard Business Review Blogs contained a short post by Linda Hill and Kent Lineback with the eye-catching title “The Words Many Managers Are Afraid to Say”.  Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor Business Administration at Harvard Business School.  Kent Lineback spent many years as a […]

On March 15,2011 Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Day was “Live Your Mission, Don’t State It“.  Two sentences – “A mission statement is an abstraction.  An organization on a mission is inspiring.” – caught my eye in this summary of Dan Pallotta’s HBR blog entry “Do You Have a Mission Statement, or Are […]

Last Saturday, Erik Lundberg, ITLP alum from the University of Washington, found at interesting piece – “Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss” – in the New York Times and sent it to me.  Erik noted that “By analyzing data from within its own ranks, Google proves what management practitioners already preach.  But then implements it […]

Wayne Turmel, writer, speaker, president of Greatwebmeetings.com, begins today’s reading, “Virtual Meetings Are Like Broccoli” <http://bit.ly/icPr7O>, by saying “Running good meetings for remote teams is like eating our vegetables:  we know we should do it, we know how to do it, it’s critical to our health in the long run, and we rationalize our way […]

Have you ever been in a meeting to make a decision and before the context can be outlined, a few meeting participants have taken over and are going deeper and deeper into a solution based on a suggestion of one of the individuals?  Today’s reading, ”Go Broad Before You Go Deep,“ from Roger Schwarz’s Fundamental […]

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 […]