Relationships

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 […]

Steve Jobs died last Wednesday. Since then, tens of thousands of words of tribute and remembrance have been written along with other similar expressions for this man who on one hand was very human – “much more … a real person than most people knew” (Dr. Dean Ornish) – with a tremendous love for his […]

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 […]

John Baldoni is an internationally known leadership educator, coach, author, and speaker.  Today’s reading, a recent BNET blog post, is “’I Don’t Have Time’ and Other Excuses Managers Give for Not Coaching” and can be found at <http://bit.ly/mPG92a>. Baldoni notes that most leaders know that coaching is part of their job.  And, companies that have […]

Today’s reading is an article from the May 11, 2011 issue of Knowledge@Wharton – “Leadership as the ‘Norm, not the Exception’” <http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2771>, a report on a speech at Wharton by Barry Salzberg, who became global CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited on June 1, 2011. In his remarks, Salzberg identified ten leadership lessons for the […]

Today’s reading comes from Anthony Tjan’s Harvard Business Review Blog.  Tian is CEO of the venture capital firm Cue Ball and is a recognized business builder.  The piece “Six Habits of a Talent Magnet,” which he wrote with Tsun-yan Hsiehm chair of the LinHart Group, can be found at <http://bit.ly/e5VSWy>. In the piece, the authors […]

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 […]

Last week my attention was drawn to a 2007 article by Harry M. Jansen Kraemer, Jr. “What is this thing called CEO leadership?“.  Kraemer is clinical professor of management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and an executive partner with Madison Dearborn, a private equity firm based in Chicago.  He is also the former […]

In today’s reading “Thank You for Doing Your Job“, Whitney Johnson argues the value of saying thank you for routine work that contributes to the organization’s well being. Today, there is too little praise or appreciation voiced in our work environments.  In fact, I remember an organization that almost prided itself in being a “praise-free” […]

Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, has a new book, “Alone Together.”  In the book, Turkle raises an interesting point about how we get and maintain each other’s attention in our always-on-connectivity culture.   In one review – MITnews’ “The lonely crowd” by Peter […]

Some people seem to be born full of confidence, while others have difficulty speaking up about their ideas.  Is confidence, then, something you are born with and therefore that those of us less gifted, just have to muddle through? No!, say both Jessica Stillman – London-based free-lance writer with interests in green business and technology, and […]

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, “Never Duck the Tough Questions”, is an interview with Dawn Lepore, chair and CEO of Drugstore.com.  The interview was conducted by Adam Bryant and originally appeared in the Corner Office column of the July 18, 2010 New York Times. What impressed me from the column was the set of leadership lessons Ms Lepore learned over […]

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 […]

Today’s reading is alternately titled “Five Lessons We Can Learn from Toyota”.  In this piece Roberta Chinsky Matuson, founder of Human Resource Solutions, reflects on how you rebuild trust after you’ve made huge mistakes.  She provides five lessons that can be learned from Toyota’s current problems:  1.  When you make a mistake, own it 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 […]