Goals & Practices

This week’s Tuesday Reading is a piece “Anxiety for Fun and Profit” which I found on a recent flight in the April 2009 issue of United’s Hemisphere magazine. The article’s key thesis is “We need just the right amount of worry to achieve our goals in life.”  Too much anxiety, you succumb to perpetual negative thinking;  […]

Recently, Adam Bryant, writer for the New York Times’ Coner Office column, interviewed John Donahoe, president and chief executive of eBay for the past year.  The condensed interview is today’s Turesday Reading – “There’s No Need to Bat .900”. Donahoe has a lot of good advice: •  You can’t change people.  …  Allyou can do is help them help […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Stay Out of the Bunker”from the New York Times Under New Management column.  There Kelly Holland says that even though this may be a very challenging time for managers, employees still need leadership if they are to function effectively.  She suggests seven behaviors for leaders: 1.  Treat employees as responsible adults, […]

Recently, in reading through the goals of participants in the Leaders Program, I noticed a number of goals of the form “reduce my stress,” “learn to control the stress I encounter day after day,“ ”reduce the hours I work to help control my stress,“ etc.  And, then I came across a piece, ”Grownups Need Recess, […]

For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to Dan and Chip Heath’s Made to Stick column in Fast Company for a piece about goals:  “Time to Aim Lower”. In this piece the focus is on those ambitious goals that we often set for ourselves.  Sometimes these goals, instead of energizing and empowering the goal-setter, do just […]

How often have you laid out for your team, perhaps in a presentation followed by a clearly written document, a future state for the team as well as the strategies for getting there.  And, you wait, and wait, and nothing happens. This is the situation that Marshall Goldsmith addresses in “Don’t Just Check the Box”.  Though […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading “Taking Control of Your Work Life Balance and Gaining Personal Fulfillment” takes a hard look at work life balance.  In her review of clinical psychologist Henry Cloud’s new book “The One Life Solution,” Meridith Levinson, a CIO staff writer, wrote: ” Work will consume as much time as we allow it.  It will take […]

Today’s reading, “Degrees of Giving” by Bruna Martinuzzi, comes from the MindTools November 25th, 2008 newsletter.   Last week we celebrated Thanksgiving and were with our families and thought about all the reasons we have to be thankful.  We may have thought about giving — giving thanks, giving of our time, giving material gifts, etc.  Such gifts […]

This week we turn our attention to Generation Y, those individuals with ages 21-31, the youngest members of our staff.  The reading is “Leadership Lessons We Can Learn from Generation Y” which appeared in the July 9, 2008 issue of Fast Company. Bea Fields, author of this piece and Executive Coach, Speaker and Author as well […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading is “Six Tips for Fessing Up to Your Mistakes” by Deborah Brown-Volkman, president of Surpass Your Dreams, a career, life, and mentor coaching company. If you haven’t made a mistake you can pass this week’s reading.  But, somehow, I think you may find the column interesting.  We all mistakes and it is […]