Practice the power of peer-to-peer
Your peers. Regular employees. People like yourself. Whatever you call your work colleagues, you pay some degree of attention to what they say and do. How influential are they in helping you do your job, especially compared to managers and other leaders? Please take a...
3 ways to be agile with change
Stop managing change. Instead, work to make change happen. That message came through loud and clear in the excellent, thought-provoking July 30 webinar Change Management Is Obsolete: Learnings from Research and Practice about What's Next. Dr. Chris Worley and Dr....
Involve tribes to influence
What tribes can you tap into? A tribe is “any group of people, large or small who are connected to one another, a leader and an idea,” wrote Seth Godin in his best-seller Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. Traditionally, tribes tend to be ethnic, political, religious and...
Reduce your words to increase your impact
Want to influence more? Use fewer words and more images. As consumers, we’re showing a preference for smaller info helpings at a sitting—unless we’ve decided we want to binge. Consider the new Showtime drama Ray Donovan. Part of Ray’s power over people is that he...
Build bridges through personalization
The Asiana Airlines plane crash. The BART strike. The Bay Bridge’s broken bolts. Traveling in the San Francisco Bay Area this summer has not been easy. The new span of the Bay Bridge was supposed to open this Labor Day weekend, 11 years after construction began. Now...
Making SCARF a daily habit
Don’t underestimate the power of technology to improve your consciousness, your thinking and your actions. Ever since I started using the app Lift earlier this year to help me track my habits, it’s much easier for me to remember to practice “SCARF” in two different...
Set rules together; don’t order absolutes
Absolute is an ingredient for martinis and other adult beverages. Absolute is not a way to run meetings, especially when you’re dealing with complex, time-sensitive strategic issues. For example, it’s futile to declare absolutes about how to handle smart phones in...
3 ways to signal and support pivots
Finals are the purview of school exams, court dispositions and sport tournaments. The concept and the word "final" have become obsolete for organizations. No more final plans, final documents and final inspections—unless the organization is making final arrangements...
Use eye contact and ears to collect data
Look them in their eyes, ask them a question and listen to their response. When you meet with people one-on-one to gather information, you show respect. That helps you build trust as you also learn and gather valuable insights for making improvements. This old school...
