Vacation: How about starting the next meeting of your leadership team with a personal check-in? Take a few minutes at the start of the session for each member to report on the last trip or vacation that person made. Getting to know each other personally, not just professionally, is an excellent way to grow trust. Building trust with a group …
Bad Rap: We all use groupthink, whether we admit to doing so or not. I hear groupthink used as an epithet — “Avoid groupthink” or “That’s just groupthink.” I gather that the point of the warning to avoid groupthink is to make sure that I do think. And question not only my assumptions but the assumptions of others. I don’t …
Actively Managing the Corporate Culture The leader in most organizations has many and varied tasks. If the organization is large enough to have a significant leadership team, then the CEO receives help in the day-to-day operations and can delegate initiatives, duties, or projects. In small companies, including start-ups, of course, the leader/founder shoulders much, if not all, of the work. …
Drucker Day: I enjoyed the good fortune of having the time to drive up to Claremont, California, to attend the 2015 Drucker Day at the Drucker School of Management hosted by the Claremont Graduate University (CGU). The theme this year was The Creative Organization — Preparing and Managing Top Talent. It was a day well spent. As you might expect, given …
Creative People: That sounds redundant to me. We (people, that is) ARE creative. Can we speak of creativity and not be speaking of people for the most part? Yet we people also wind up somehow creating environments that stifle creativity. Why? Perhaps we don’t know the origins of creativity. Indeed, we haven’t figured out exactly how the brain connects things in creative …
Lately, I’ve gotten back into photography. When our children were young, we took lots of pictures. Like so many others, we cycled through prints, slides, instant photography and of course, Super 8 home movies. But as the children grew up we took fewer pictures until we eventually simply stopped all together. Then along came digital photography and smart phones. We …
The polite version of the comment I often get when I suggest to a business leader that they consider taking time to work ON (as opposed to IN) their business is, “I don’t have time to go to the bathroom as it is, and you want me to do what?” A truth is, of course, as leader you don’t have …
There’s a 17 month old boy running around our vacation home. He is just full of joy and curiosity. Everything is exciting and needs to have a word attached to it. He is adding words to his vocabulary at an amazing rate. The adults seem not to be able to move fast enough to “baby proof” the place or answer …
“I know you keep trying. And I know somehow, it isn’t working. You keep fiddling around the edges trying to figure out what will motivate me to do what YOU want. Stop breaking your pick on this. You can’t motivate me. There’s only one person who can motivate me and that’s ME. You are not doing your job as a …