Tuesday Reading

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “Don’t waste your time looking back.  You’re not going that way,” is an essay by Mark (Bo) Connell, Assistant Dean for Hospital Operations, Texas A&M University, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Texas Veterinary Medical Center.  It first appeared earlier this year as a leaders program reflection.   That quote I’ve […]

Do You Have One? Career limiting habits (CLHs) are habits, repeated behaviors that keep us from greater success or enjoyment in our careers.  And, really, in all aspects of our life.  Research has shown that most of us are aware of our career limiting habits but have not made much progress in addressing them.  Why?  […]

There are informal leaders in every organization.  These are the people in the organization who, without formal title or authority, get things done, and done well, show others how to do them, and have a large network interconnecting many people in a variety of teams and organizations across the entire organization.  Often we do not […]

What’s the difference? Someone asked the other day, “What do you think?” and I wondered, is this a time to coach or a time to mentor?  In our interactions everyday we may have the choice to adopt one approach over the other.  Yet we need to be able to make the distinction between coaching in […]

I suspect that you, like me, must answer “yes.”  From a neuroscience perspective, our brains are constantly, subconsciously scanning the world around us seeking to identify and examine “events” of note – for example, the school bus that went down my street this morning at 8:15, the traffic light turning from green to yellow, the likely […]

Earlier this summer we introduced the idea (in a series of Tuesday Readings, as referenced below) that if we understand how our brain works, we can better understand why we react the way we do.  I wrote, then, that the individual’s brain, in the days of our early ancestors, had one key goal – survival, […]

So, what do I do now? We all make mistakes.  Sometimes they are small and personal like forgetting to put the trash at the curb to be picked up.  Or, larger and embarrassing, like writing the amount differently in numbers and words on a check.  Or, sending a critical email to the wrong addressee.  Or, […]

Keep that “elevator speech” fresh!    Today’s Tuesday Reading, Missed Opportunity, is an essay by Brent Tuggle, Lead Windows System Administrator, in Technology Services at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign. The essay first appeared as a program reflection early this year. I wanted to take a moment to share a recent experience I had and an […]

SCARF  ::  A User’s Guide The focus of the past two issues of the Tuesday Reading has been on neuroscience and change.  Today’s essay continues this theme, providing some practical suggestions as to how you can employ SCARF to better understand yourself and to manage and lead others. The work of David Rock and others has […]

SCARF  ::  Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness In last week’s Tuesday Reading, we introduced the concept that our brains have developed in such a way that we are extremely sensitive to threats from change and ambiguity.  We noted how our brains are constantly scanning our environment to detect such threats at a rapid rate.  We […]