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Good Television - Lousy Leadership?
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Posted Fri, Feb 05, 2010 |
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"Undercover Boss" is a British import and I assumed that the Brits probably handled things a bit differently. But to make sure, I checked with Stephen Martin, the Clugston CEO (and participant in the UK version of the show) whom I’d interviewed for the Washington Post article, "Would YOU be an Undercover Boss?"
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Enterprise Re-Engagement: Will Corporations Get It?
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Posted Wed, Feb 03, 2010 |
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Communities, environmentalists, consumers and employees are all making demands of corporations—and seeking redress for promises broken and expectations left unfulfilled. They are also teaming up with each other in varying degrees.
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Twitter Hits the C-Suite: Tales of Rioting and Redemption
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Posted Fri, Jan 29, 2010 |
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A satirical piece on what could happen when a CEO is set up on Twitter--highlighting the potentially explosive interreactions between internal and external communication, HR, corporate responsibility, stakeholder management and social media policies.
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Are You Asking Enough Quality Questions?
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Posted Thu, Jan 14, 2010 |
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Now's an excellent time to explore the uncertain. Channel your inner 2-year-old and take time to ask good questions, especially around purpose, people and process. You'll help yourself and your leaders.
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Why Jane Doesn't Lead
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Posted Tue, Jan 05, 2010 |
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Women are becoming the majority of the American workforce - but still only hold 2% of the senior leadership positions. Here is some research that helps explain why.
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Disqualify Friday
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Posted Wed, Dec 23, 2009 |
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Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday, as the old saying goes. But more and more, Friday is not the best day to take many actions at the office, especially these five.
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Get Grounded in the Basics to Reach for the Stars
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Posted Tue, Nov 24, 2009 |
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A new leadership communications study shows that the basics still work--even though we may not practice them as much as we preach about them. At any rate, respect information overload, do face-to-face communications and measure.
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Are You a Curator or an Editor?
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Posted Sun, Oct 18, 2009 |
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You need to curate conversations rather than just edit messages these days. We need to influence rather than control, and curating is a more effective approach than editing.
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Emotions at Work
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Posted Thu, Sep 24, 2009 |
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The more I study the psychology of people at work, the more I see how emotions are integral to everything that happens in an organization.
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What’s Your 2010 Journey for 2-Way Communications?
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Posted Fri, Sep 11, 2009 |
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How are you balancing your 2010 travel plans with your 2-way communications plans? Typically, 2-way communications has meant face-to-face communications, but that may be difficult to do if you and your leaders are curtailing travel again in 2010.
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Communicating in Space
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Posted Tue, Sep 08, 2009 |
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One of the easiest mistakes to make during a business encounter with someone is to misjudge how much space the other person needs.
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Emotional Contagion
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Posted Mon, Aug 10, 2009 |
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No one is immune to emotional contagion. Facial gestures and their underlying emotions (both positive and negative) are highly infectious and “catching” them is a universal human phenomenon.
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What Fashion Statements Do Your Leaders Make?
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Posted Thu, Jul 23, 2009 |
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Whether your executives are fashion leaders or followers, they need to avoid fashion mistakes. You want people paying attention to what they say and do rather than what they wear--even though people might find the clothes more interesting!
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Looking-Glass Leadership
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Posted Mon, Jul 13, 2009 |
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To be managed, employees must first be seen, acknowledged, and appreciated. Unless and until you see them, you cannot manage them.
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From Ventriloquists to Sherpas
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Posted Tue, Jun 16, 2009 |
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In the rarefied air of the executive suite, we leadership communications professionals need to serve as specialized Sherpas guiding leaders to communicate authentically in multi-media. The ventriloquist era is over.
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To Lead, You Must Listen
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Posted Wed, May 20, 2009 |
An open door is never enough. You can never count on others to take the first step toward dynamic, candid communication. You must take it yourself. And once you find someone who will muster the moxie to speak truth to you, have the wisdom to listen.
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What Empathy Looks Like
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Posted Mon, May 18, 2009 |
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Supreme Court Justice David Souter is retiring and President Obama is looking for a nominee who has, among other qualifications, "empathy for ordinary Americans." I assume that the president has his own definition of empathy. Here's mine.
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Being Authentic Through Actions, Not Necessarily Words
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Posted Sat, May 16, 2009 |
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The Authentic Enterprise, the Arthur W. Page Society groundbreaking report provides new food for thought--and action--for communication professionals. For individuals being authentic is keeping your promises, not being who you are.
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Socializing Your New Leaders
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Posted Mon, Apr 20, 2009 |
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How do you acclimate your new leaders? A well-thought out and executed socialization plan is just as important for leaders--alpha and otherwise--as it is for puppies and rescue dogs. Try these five tips.
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Venus, Mars, and Leadership Communication
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Posted Wed, Apr 15, 2009 |
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We know that men have a different workplace communication style than women – but does “different” mean better?
Well, yes.
And no.
Research finds strengths and weaknesses in the communication styles of both genders.
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Preventing Fires with LEAN Leadership
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Posted Sun, Mar 22, 2009 |
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Do you spend a lot of time fighting fires in your organization? LEAN leaders advocate and practice fire prevention. They also focus on developing employees. You can take actions to help your leaders be LEAN or become LEANER.
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5 Mistakes Reading Body Language in the Workplace
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Posted Thu, Mar 19, 2009 |
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No matter what the culture at your workplace, the ability to “read” nonverbal signals can provide some significant advantages in the way you deal with people. You can start to gain those advantages by avoiding these five common mistakes.
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The Hard Work of Soft Skills
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Posted Sun, Feb 22, 2009 |
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It's the soft skills of leadership that are paramount. Leaders (and their organizations) won't succeed without a genuine caring about people and the ability to develop and nurture interpersonal relationships.
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Are You Playing Show and Tell with Your Leaders?
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Posted Fri, Feb 20, 2009 |
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Do your leaders' meetings feel like you're back in elementary school watching Show and Tell? How do you move away from sedentary meetings with report outs to active sessions in which people talk about and deal with the burning issues of the moment?
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How Do Your Managers Grow?
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Posted Tue, Jan 20, 2009 |
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For manager communication to be effective and successful, you need to make sure it's aligned with your leaders' goals for manager development. So check in with your leaders on how they're growing managers.Be sure to follow their walk, not their talk.
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Tips for the Holiday Office Party
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Posted Fri, Nov 28, 2008 |
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The holiday office party offers a great opportunity to socialize with co-workers, meet new people, and develop or deepen relationships. However, a holiday get-together can also quickly turn into a career-limiting event.
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Do you have a collaborative culture
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Posted Wed, Nov 19, 2008 |
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Too often, companies breed a culture of competition in which employees, departments and offices contend with each other instead of collaborating. This article looks at the effect of breaking down internal silos.
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What is the Effect of Leadership Image on Your Job Performance?
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Posted Mon, Nov 03, 2008 |
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Image — the perception that others form of you as a result of the impression you make on them — has a significant correlation to perceptions of leadership skill and the ability to perform on the job, according to research from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), a global leadership education and research organization.
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What I've Learned About Communicating Change
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Posted Mon, May 05, 2008 |
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A quarter of a century ago I agreed to speak to the communications department of a major bank on the "human" side of organizational change. Twenty-five years later, here are some of the lessons I have learned about communicating change . . .
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Leading Change One Move at a Time
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Posted Tue, Oct 09, 2007 |
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Many years ago, a renowned European chess grandmaster played an exhibition match against a New York amateur -- and lost. The champion was renowned for his chessboard strategy -- for his ability to plan a dozen or more moves ahead as a game developed. At the post-match press conference the amateur was asked how many moves ahead he had planned in defeating the master. "Only one," he replied. "The right one."
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When the Change Changes
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Posted Tue, Sep 04, 2007 |
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A critical element in the health of any organism is robustness: the ability of a system to absorb small jolts. To create a robust organization, you must build flexibility and resilience into its foundation.
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Déjà Vu All Over Again: Managing Continuous Change
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Posted Thu, Jul 05, 2007 |
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Managers today are facing a flood of continuous, overlapping, and accelerating change that has turned their organizations upside down. And managing people through that kind of change requires all the communication and leadership strategies we learned in the past - and then some.
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Nonverbal and Cross-cultural Bad Manners
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Posted Sat, Jun 02, 2007 |
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In the high stakes world of international business, nonverbal communication often speaks for itself. Unfortunately, much of the meaning may be lost in translation. The most innocuous of gestures - when its intent is misinterpreted - can wreak havoc on business dealings.
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VIRTUAL FACE TIME
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Posted Fri, Apr 27, 2007 |
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For years, communicators have debated the most effective ways of delivering key messages. Newsletters, videos, personal voice mails, public address systems, even today's text messaging - all seem to have their proponents.
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Managing the Formal Voice
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Posted Thu, Apr 19, 2007 |
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You've heard the old saying that you are what you eat. That's certainly true. But it is also true that you are what you speak. What you choose to say or not to say, and how you choose to say it, accounts for much of your presence in the world.
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You Don't Say
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Posted Wed, Apr 04, 2007 |
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In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sachs describes how a group of his patients with lost cerebral functions were unable to understand spoken language, yet were highly adept at picking up the subtleties of body language.
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Management and leadership are two different things.
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Posted Wed, Mar 28, 2007 |
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Management and leadership are two different things. They're both essential to the success and growth of an organization, and they complement each other in ways little and large. But often the differences between them are lost amid the hustle and bustle of running a company.
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Getting employees to stop working, and start talking
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Posted Mon, Feb 05, 2007 |
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Did you ever think you'd see the day? In a complete reversal from the old "stop wasting time - and get back to work" mentality, the most progressive companies today are helping employees find ways to stop "working" and start talking!
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Generations at Work
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Posted Thu, Dec 07, 2006 |
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I love the holiday season! A great time to get together with extended families - and a perfect time to conduct a little informal research on generational differences.
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The Hoarding/Sharing Instinct
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Posted Sun, Nov 05, 2006 |
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Knowledge is no longer a commodity like gold, which holds (or increases) its worth over time. It's more like milk - fluid, evolving, and stamped with an expiration date. And by the way, there is nothing less powerful than hanging on to knowledge whose time has expired.
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This is Your Brain on Change
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Posted Sat, Sep 30, 2006 |
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Don't you just hate dealing with people who fight against every plan for organizational change? You know the type: They're disruptive, set in their ways, and highly resistant to change, even when it is obviously in the best interest of the business. Well guess what? New research suggests that those trouble-making, inflexible, change resistors are . . . all of us!
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Building Employee Confidence
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Posted Tue, Sep 05, 2006 |
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The personality trait most responsible for an individual's ability to deal well with change is confidence. Confident people are self-motivated, have high self-esteem, and are willing to take risks. But even the most confident of employees may suffer a crisis of self-doubt in times of radical change - and leadership strategies then become a critical factor. Here are seven ways that managers can help build employee confidence.
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Failing Your Way to Success
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Posted Wed, Aug 02, 2006 |
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Fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles to success. Yet every major achievement is preceded by many failures. It's the lessons you learn from your mistakes, how well you apply those lessons to future endeavors, and how quickly you bounce back, that matter in the long run.
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Using your "limbic brain" to communicate
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Posted Tue, Jul 25, 2006 |
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A baby, viewing a videotape of the mother's face becomes distraught; the baby needs to see the mother's "real" face before it calms down. Eye contact, it seems, is not just important for conveying messages, it is the means by which two limbic systems come into contact and affect each other.
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Collaboration: From Theory to Practice
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Posted Thu, Jul 20, 2006 |
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Global leaders place a high value on collaborative partnering, but most leaders have not yet made it operational. Some of the obstacles to collaboration are external - including government and other legal restrictions. But the greatest barriers are workforce issues, limiting funding, and (most of all) unsupportive corporate cultures.
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Collaborating for Innovation
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Posted Wed, Jul 12, 2006 |
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In direct contrast to past corporate doctrine, where innovation was considered too critical and proprietary to involve outsiders, major strategic alliances are quickly becoming the new competitive edge.
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Is leadership genetic?
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Posted Mon, Jul 03, 2006 |
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According to one theory just published, the human brain possesses a hardwired leadership prototype, a fixed idea of how a leader should behave and what they should look like, that is innate and difficult to change. A few thoughts from his theory:
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Building on Strengths
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Posted Tue, Jun 20, 2006 |
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Bosses tend to notice and comment on weaknesses and mistakes more than they comment on talents and strengths. While continuous learning and self-improvement are valid concepts for future success, focusing solely on what is lacking leads to an unbalanced evaluation of employees' worth and potential. It is no wonder then that most workers have problems taking risks and confronting uncertain situations.
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The Overload Chronicles - ROUND TWO: IT'S TIME TO "GET IT
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Posted Sat, Jun 17, 2006 |
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OK, VoxPop, I’ll plead guilty to some of your charges. Guys like me do spend a lot of energy shaping the corporate messages. We do that in part because – as you said – “da Man” pays our salaries (or consulting fees). We do it because people should know what their company is trying to accomplish and what it says is important. And we do it to give you the best window we can into what the people at the top are thinking. BILL SQUARED: Bill Boyd and Bill Jensen Square Off
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I heard it Through the Grapevine - presentation highlights
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Posted Mon, Jun 12, 2006 |
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Just back from Vancouver and the IABC conference. My speech ("I heard it Through the Grapevine") was based on research that I recently completed comparing the rumor mill with formal communications channels. Here are a few highlights from that presentation:
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Talent is highly overrated
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Posted Mon, May 29, 2006 |
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According to the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in sports or surgery, ballet or computer programming, music or leadership — are nearly always made, not born.
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Taming the e-mail elephant
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Posted Sat, May 27, 2006 |
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Serious reductions in e-mail overload will require three things: Better tools for in-box management, changing sender behavior, and alternative technologies. Here are eight ways to combat e-mail overload for yourself and your organization: A do-it-yourself kit.
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The Overload Chronicles, Round 2: It's time to get it!
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Posted Sat, May 20, 2006 |
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Are We Part of The Solution or The Problem? VoxPop: Well, InfoGladiator, in the words of one of your own, (a speechwriter for an American president, dubbed the Great Communicator): Therrrrre you go again! 1) Spinning your own importance to us, 2) You’re just not “getting it”, and 3) You completely misunderstand value. Let’s unpack each of those points….
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Innovation, People, and Change Communications
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Posted Tue, May 16, 2006 |
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The company 3M, one of the first organizations to fully embrace innovation as the essence of its corporate brand, defines it as "new ideas - plus action or implementation - which result in an improvement, a gain, or a profit." Good definition, but it needs another element. People.
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The Overload Chronicles: OPENING ROUND
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Posted Thu, May 11, 2006 |
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InfoGladiator, I’ll hand it to ya. When we — your employees and other stakeholders — want spin, you guys are masters! And when the senior team needs to get a consistent message across, you serve your masters very well. VoxPop, you think you can live without us? While you’ve had your head in the survey data, internal communications has been evolving.
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What Elephants?
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Posted Tue, May 09, 2006 |
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Have you ever designed or facilitated an all-hands meeting where senior executives addressed an employee audience? If so - did anybody mention the elephants in the room? Not likely. Elephants are those forbidden subjects and hard questions that lurk in the back of everyone's mind - and which senior management hopes will go unnoticed.
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Developing Future Leaders
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Posted Mon, May 01, 2006 |
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By the year 2011, the leading edge of the Baby Boom workforce will be 65 years old - eligible for full retirement. And that generation's collective wisdom will leave with them unless it has been transferred to younger employees. Which in turn makes succession planning and knowledge sharing increasing important to an organization's financial strategy.
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Change Communication Tips
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Posted Fri, Apr 21, 2006 |
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Question: What's the secret of real estate? Answer: Location, location, location. Question: What's the secret of organizational change? Answer: Communication, communication, communication.
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The "Unsiloing" of Organizations
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Posted Mon, Apr 03, 2006 |
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In a recent Wall Street Journal article on the latest business buzzwords, the word "unsiloing" was listed. Unsiloing mangles the noun silo to make a simple but important point: Managers must find ways to foster cooperation across departmental, hierarchical, and functional boundaries. Which is no easy task.
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A Future of Radical Change
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Posted Thu, Mar 30, 2006 |
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According to IBM's Global CEO Study 2006, competitive pressures and global market forces are driving 65% of the world's top executives to plan radical changes at their companies over the next two years.
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Why we need all the leaders we can get
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Posted Wed, Mar 01, 2006 |
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To understand why traditional leadership models no longer work, we need to understand the forces of change affecting our world. As much as they have changed the way we live and do business, these forces have also altered the kind of leadership we need.
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Learning about leadership
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Posted Mon, Feb 27, 2006 |
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Early in my communication career I found myself drawn to exploring the nature of business and that led me to discover more about the leaders who so profoundly affect organizational life.
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Welcome to Communication Leadership
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Posted Mon, Feb 20, 2006 |
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If you're curious about what leadership is all about, you've come to the right place. Here is where we are going to explore the art of leadership and how it applies to our practice as communicators.
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Work-Life Balance: What Gets in the Way?
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Posted Sat, Feb 04, 2006 |
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Especially noticeable in younger generations, employees are demanding more control of their time -- whether it involves organizationally structured arrangements such as flextime, flex-place, part-time or contractual work, or a corporate culture that stresses results over “face time.” And enterprises that don’t fully support and align with these initiatives will lose a competitive edge in retaining and motivating top talent.
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What's Changed in Change-Management?
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Posted Sun, Jan 08, 2006 |
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Max Ways, the former editor of Fortune magazine, predicted 40 years ago, "The main challenge to U.S. society will turn not around the production of goods, but around the difficulties and opportunities involved in a world of accelerating change and ever widening choice. So swift is the acceleration that trying to 'make sense' of change will become our basic industry."
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