Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, is a popular book about negotiation skills and a favorite of consultants and trainers. In my mind, the most valuable nugget in the book is “separate the people from the problem.” When you ask participants in a training or team building session what this means, most of them invariably say it means to focus on the problem and not let people issues or emotional issues get in the way. But actually, it means just the opposite; the people issues are so important that you’ve got to identify, separate and deal with them first, or else you won’t get anywhere with the substance of the problem. I was thinking recently about how to convince stoic employees of this point–employees who believe that emotions have no place in the office. Here’s a good story: a few years ago, my brother and I were…
Jeffrey Saltzman’s blog this week talks about how we tend to base our assessment of organizations not on current performance but on the direction in which they’re moving. …
In a recent training session on federal personnel systems with a government agency, participants kept venting their frustration about a “changing mission.” I pushed back several times; surely…
I was facilitating a class for a group in interns in a defense-related federal agency this week, and when I arrived to set up the meeting room I…
My best friend came to visit last weekend and she reminded me that we never write our goals anymore. This is something we used to do at the…
I got some shocking news last week: my brother, who has been my partner in New England Crane School for the past year, is taking off for greener…
I love it when this happens. I had another video teleconference session to facilitate this past week, and where is the conference room I’m working from? In the…
Gervase Bush, one of my favorite organizational development theorists, likes to talk about teams, tribes and federations. Here are his definitions: A team in the truest sense of…
Sometimes I do things that I think are really smart and proactive and they turn out to be the stupidest thing I could have done. I was supposed…
I just finished up a three-day training session via video teleconference. It’s been a long time since I had nightmares before a delivery, but this one really had…
Confirmation bias is one of my favorite topics, in work and in life. We all tend to pay more attention to observations that confirm our beliefs and filter…
Shawn Achor had a great blog post on Harvard Business Review last week called “What Giving Gets You at the Office.” Two decades of research, Achor says, prove…
I moved back to the east coast recently, to be near my family again. The cool thing about that is I get to spend time on the lake…
In 2001, I quit my job, sold my car, put all my furniture in storage and traveled around the world for seven months, backpacker-style. When I came back,…
During a recent team building class with an agency group, employees began to complain about their headquarters back in Washington, DC. “They have no idea what we do…
One of my favorite things to do in a team building class is to take the participants through a shortened version of an interpersonal style model (I use…
Penelope Trunk, my favorite blogger, had a post recently about how prom is a career stepping stone for teens. Why? Because it’s about learning how to fit into…
I just finished reading Seth Godin’s new book Poke the Box. At first I thought it was just a long restatement of the truism that you must not…
Priscilla Claman, in the HBR blog post Choose Your Boss Wisely, talks about how important it is to evaluate a potential boss’s leadership style when interviewing for a…
I ask participants to make their own ground rules when I facilitate a meeting or training session. But I always ask their permission to add one ground rule…