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Caterpillars can Fly, if they just lighten up!
“Caterpillars can fly, if they would just lighten up.” I work a lot on the theme of change and improvement. Often, the leadership could do a lot less to improve things a lot more. By less, I mean...
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Thoughts on Organizational Improvement, Teamwork, Collaboration and Decision...
We often think of disagreement as negative, which it can sometimes be. On the other hand, having some good discussions because we cannot agree can be quite useful, since the issues raised can be...
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Two Miles of Ditch for Every Mile of Road – Thoughts on Teamwork and...
There is that old joke about when you are up to your axles in alligators, it is hard to remember that your job was to drain the swamp. Sometimes the tasks at hand simply overwhelm the possible...
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My short rant on HR and relevancy…
On one of my LinkedIn group discussions, I contributed a post a week or so ago and then just completed what even I would refer to as a rant. I did it with good intentions, but I am just so tired of...
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“In The Beginning”— Thoughts on Communications
For some reason, the issue of upwards communications of information and filtering keeps coming up again and again. And, I have used a fun little tool to address this over the years, so I thought to...
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On Performance, Teamwork, Millennials and Collaboration
I got an email flyer on workforce development from ASTD this afternoon and thought to paste a reaction to some of their thinking, which I think tracks reality pretty well in this case. The point that...
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Thoughts on Millennials, Workplace Aging, Conflict, and Innovation
Three different articles this morning got me thinking about the workplace. One was by Lisa Woods about ideas to manage conflict in the workplace. It is posted up in her Managing Americans blog at this...
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Innovation. Continuous Continuous Improvement. People. Engagement.
As I wrote this title, I thought: Keywords. Innovation. Continuous Continuous Improvement. People. Engagement. Intrinsic Motivation. Team Building. And I also thought Connection. How all these things...
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Having an Off-Site Company Meeting? Ideas for Success
There are some good tools out there to optimize the success of an off-site meeting. The list of Don’ts is pretty obvious to most of us if we spend 2 minutes thinking back to either the “Most Memorable...
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Workplace Motivation –“I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…”
“I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…” is my anchor point for what seems to happen often in the workplace. It may be a sudden thing, where the pin hits the balloon and the worker finally snaps and decides that...
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Thoughts on communication – Nothing Made Sense…
A favorite quote is from Joseph Heller, author of the book, Catch 22. In the first couple of pages of his sequel, Closing Time, Heller writes: “Nothing made sense, and neither did everything else. For...
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Square Wheels – Going Viral on People and Performance
Jonah Berger’s recent book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, is about why things go viral in today’s social media world. He is a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business and in 2009,...
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What are The Square Wheels Toolkits and why do they work so well?
Since 1993, we have been working with interactive “cartoons” and sharing the related tools as worksheets in seminars and powerpoint-based toolkits downloadable from our websites. My conference...
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Teamwork, Communications and Optimization of Performance
My friend Lou Carloni has been sharing ideas about people and performance for many years and a post I received from him this morning was one that got my full attention. The focus of it was on the...
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Flying by the seat of your pants – NOT the way to Engaging Employees
In the process of writing a new newsletter on the criticality of supervisors in organizations, I was looking for some statistical anchors. And while doing that, I got invited to be on the board of the...
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Tons of Good Writings, so why is improvement so hard? Part Two
This is the second of two articles that hammer on the issues around supervision and how they affect engagement and performance. Spending billions for decades, why can’t we actually make improvements in...
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Managers. Leaders. Engagement. Involvement. Not! (And what we can do)
For the past two weeks, we have 50 or so people engaged in a LinkedIn conversation about: “We’re spending $200 billion on training. Why can’t we involve and engage people in the workplace?” And there...
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Engagement, Productivity and Work Happiness
There are just SO many statistics supporting why we should be improving organizational engagement and involvement. Right now, is seems to be “relatively okay” but that is certainly not really good...
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A softball cartoon on employee engagement…
John Junson, a cartoonist working with David Zinger at The Employee Engagement Network, just published his 365th cartoon around issues of employee engagement and the reality of the workplace. I thought...
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Dis-Un-Engagement – Improving Motivation and Facilitating Workplace Improvement
Solutions to performance improvement are not always obvious and apparent and selecting an optimal approach often requires careful analysis and planning. Sometimes, the solution requires training of a...
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