Marcie Schorr Hirsch, in a Harvard Business Publishing blog article called What Separates the Extremely Successful from the Pack, describes the results of a fascinating research project. She studied 12 sets of matched pairs of executives; in each pair, one was a moderately successful mid-level executive and the other was a high level “extremely successful” executive of the same age, gender, race, educational level and organizational background. She asked them questions to determine what they considered to be success factors and found that they attributed their success to the same sources; for example, 22 out of 24 of them said that being married played into their career success. What differed was the way in which they described how the success factors contributed. “The members of the extreme talent group — from their optimizing of other relationships without adhering to the limits of job descriptions (why couldn’t a comptroller offer creative…
We all control our emotions to differing degrees. Or I should say, we control the way our behavior is driven by our emotions to different degrees. But I’ve…
Recently I led a team building session for a federal agency group in which the team’s manager had a bad sarcasm habit. He used sarcasm for everything—to make…
A blog post on Harvard Business Publishing, Are Happy People Dumb? by Shawn Achor, got me thinking about this old but interesting question. The theory often touted is…
Imagine that suddenly, a new federal regulation was released that said you must take a test in order to prove you know what you’re doing in your job. …
An interesting column in Newsweek, High on Anxiety by Casey Schwartz, details research on emotion regulation that says some people seek a feeling of anxiety because that’s what…
Watching the Academy Awards the other night I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if every industry had a recognition event like that? I believe in the power of…
I haven’t even finished this book yet but I had to write about it already. Parts of it are the usual “here’s what makes our company great” type…
I was facilitating a leadership class for mid-level managers and supervisors recently, and two people were being very vocal about their frustrations with lack of information flow between…
I used to scoff at people who repeated this tired old phrase. Not only is it overused, but how can it possibly be true? How could anyone think…
During a recent team building session I gave my standard spiel about the fundamental attribution error, and how we need to give each other the benefit of the…
I had a participant in a team building meeting recently who was a pastor on the side (in addition to his job with the federal agency I was…
In a recent team building class for a federal agency, the participants got into a heated debate about government workers who are complacent or unmotivated. First we had…
Dan Ariely’s new book, The Upside of Irrationality, is full of stuff about employee motivation that we consultants take for granted. The beauty of the book is that…
That’s my new line, and I start every team building class with it. People come to a team building class thinking that somehow we will talk about different…
There is one thing people like to debate with me in a class, and that’s whether people have bad intentions. It goes like this: I’ll explain the fundamental…
I used to be a ski instructor and we had a saying: If you want a happy ski client, treat kids like adults and adults like kids. A…
Last week my brother and I decided to start a crane training school. Not only that, but we hired my friend Daniel Dunn of Dunn Productions to shoot…
I was helping a colleague teach an instructional design workshop, and the room was full of experienced instructional designers whose supervisor had felt they could use a refresher. …
I’ll bet I’m not alone in saying this: Thank god the elections are over. I’m sick to death of the negative campaign ads. Sharon Begley penned a Newsweek…