Shrinking the Camel
Here are 11 tips to becoming the Chief Encouragement Officer. Read more
Here are 11 tips to becoming the Chief Encouragement Officer. Read more
I don’t usually preach much here at my Blog, but I came across a scripture passage the other day that struck me hard. It just so happened that it came on the heels of reading L.L. Barkat’s “Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places.” Sometimes words and messages can converge at just the right moment, burrow right down into your gut, and you just know that God is trying to tell you something. I woke up extra early this past... Read more
Yesterday, all of the senior executives gathered in the Board Room to have a meeting about meetings. Apparently, some people have been complaining that we are having too many. I will be the first to admit there may be some truth to this. Over the past several months we have chartered one team after another to attack a wide swath of initiatives, projects, strategies, and urgent priorities. However, in our enthusiasm for Getting Things Done, it appears that we may... Read more
Many economists are saying that the Great Recession is over. The stock market has rallied to new heights for the year. Gross Domestic Product is growing at a healthy clip. There are glimmers of hope in housing starts, manufacturing and auto sales. Sounds promising, right? But when economists pronounce the end of the recession, all they are really saying is that some technical statistics have indicated that the economy has stopped contracting. Unfortunately, the lagging indicator in an economic recovery is always unemployment. While the papers... Read more
One of the most opportune moments to introduce an element of spiritual influence into your work environment is when you are starting a meeting. If you are the one who is leading the meeting, then you should very well be able to set the tone with a spiritual call to order. But not in a way that would make everyone think you are a freak. Which, yes, I would be concerned about that too. So, anyway, I’m not saying that... Read more
When I first became interested in the strange idea of linking my spiritual life to my career, I enthusiastically sought out like-minded souls for advice and commiseration. Without knowing exactly how best to categorize this subject (which is a problem unto itself, to be discussed on another day), I carefully typed “Faith in the Workplace” into the Google search bar, hoping to retrieve a myriad of helpful and compelling resources. Unfortunately, the search results led me down a fragmented path... Read more
My friend Joan Ball over at Beliefnet recently attended a “Trust Summit” at the Harvard Club in New York City, where authors of the business books Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence (by social media gurus Chris Brogan and Julien Smith) and The Trusted Advisor (by David H. Maister, Charles Green and Robert M. Galford) were the featured speakers. The topic was how to build trust among your business constituents. Their presentations were followed by a lengthy Q&A session,... Read more
Each year at my company, all of our managers will do a peer review assessment as part of their performance evaluation. What this means is that each manager will rate all of the other managers on a number of factors. The end result is a conglomerate snapshot of what everyone else thinks about your skills, performance, service and leadership. It’s based purely on subjective perception. Not everyone likes it. This peer review is not the only tool we use to assess performance, but we... Read more
It’s my end-of-month re-post time, and here is one from last Spring that later got picked up by the Conference Board Review magazine. My first published magazine article! Enjoy! We have a saying here at my company: we like to see managers get “bloodied up a bit” before moving them into more prominent leadership roles. If we believe someone has management potential, we will intentionally put them in a situation where they will encounter extreme conflict, opposition, or just plain ambiguity (which... Read more
It was a horrible day yesterday. I can’t attribute it to anything specific, other than waking up with a feeling that this wasn’t my usual resilient and optimistic self. Sure, there were also a couple of troublesome meetings at work, but I typically navigate my way through those types of things without letting it bog me down. On a better day, I would shrug it off, take whatever lessons to be learned from it, and get on with my business. But yesterday I was a little off.... Read more
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