David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, addressed the German Project Management Forum in Berlin yesterday via satellite. I was busy translating for colleagues who couldn’t keep up with his (for non-native speakers) slightly too fast delivery. I’d no time to take notes, so this is just a a rough summary. The speech [...]
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Category Archives: communication
He wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
Nice interview with Richard Andersen, CEO of Delta Airlines, in today’s NY Times, “He wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects” . He talks about the importance of communication skills and the dangers of Powerpoint –people get used to talking in bullets and begin to lose the ability to formulate complete sentences.
Another interesting snippet is about hiring: [...]
No Agenda = No Meeting
Seth Godin recently distilled a great list about getting serious about your meeting problem. It highlights the problem that many people in companies face: being in meetings all day. If you’ve wondered when the work gets done, for some people the answer is that they have forgotten what work involves. The day is taken up [...]
Further thoughts on “Burning MBTI Questions Answered”
Sandy McMullen has started a series “Burning MBTI Questions Answered” on her Personality Plus in Business blog. The current question deals with a conflict between two team members. Given the level of information in the question, Sandy does a great job of offering a framework in which to think about a solution, rather than trying [...]
An interview with Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis published a highly readable article on Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership in the Harvard Business Review last September. Their work on emotional intelligence brought them fame and they developed their Primal Leadership model based on that. The recent breakthroughs in neuroscience improve our understanding of what happens in [...]
Shoulda, coulda, woulda …
Michael Bungay Stanier has just posed the question Should you be working on vacation? on his Great Work blog, as part of a follow-up to an entry on the Brazen Careerist blog: I’ll Be Working On Vacation: What’s Your Idea Of Work/Life Balance?
“Should you …”: My life used to be full of shoulds, each of [...]
How Well Does Your Communications Center Work?
On my way home from a leadership seminar yesterday, I was faced with train chaos. The train staff just announced it was country-wide. Once in a train that was actually able to travel, I asked the ticket collector what was going on. After a bit of squirming, he explained that the central computer in [...]
Validation – the movie
A while ago I wrote an entry about Positive Feedback Loops. This video tells a story of the power of giving people positive feedback. And, if you watch carefully, you might even notice Angelina Jolie’s brother in a supporting role.
So, take 16 minutes out of the pre-Christmas rush and enjoy!
Give the other person a chance to do some of the work
In a recent leadership team-building workshop, we practiced giving clean feedback. Later, Jane asked me during a break for a chat about how to deal with another participant who had blocked her attempt at giving feedback on a behaviour causing a lot of friction between them – during shift handover, Mary reacted to improvement suggestions [...]
Why You Need The No Asshole Rule
McKinsey offers an excerpt entitled Building The Civilized Workplace (you need to register in order to read this) from Robert Sutton’s new book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace And Surviving One That Isn’t. The article includes a checklist for the most common behaviours as well as what jerks can cost your business, [...]
