My new favorite blog is Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. The posts rarely have much to do with the workplace, at least in a direct sense, but she’s a great writer who always has something to say and you can apply it however you like. And she’s usually got an insane-sounding story to illustrate her irreverent but useful points. You can check her out here. Last week she wrote a post on another website called Perfectionism is a disease. Here’s how to beat it. This one doesn’t have an insane story, but it has some good thoughts: 1. People don’t care if you’re right all the time. “They just want you to get stuff done well enough that they can do what they need to do.” 2. People stop learning when they’re constantly afraid of being wrong. 3. Smart people cut corners; they just know which corners to cut. Lastly and…
I’ve always been fascinated by how culture—national, tribal, organizational, etc.—impacts performance. Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of airline crashes that were caused by a cultural norm that says “never question…
In training sessions on communication skills, interpersonal skills or even performance management, I often try to sell the idea to managers that if they can find the source…
…then you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. That’s what I tell folks who complain to me about their labor market and their impossible, imposed-from-above recruiting goals. It’s…
Recently I was facilitating a team building session for a young, enthusiastic group of government employees, and a new colleague who would serve as my back-up for this…
In a recent team building session, a group I was working with posed an interesting question. If members are not fully engaged in their team meetings, is that…
Dahlia Lithwick, in her recent Newsweek column “The Female Factor,” asks the question whether having three women on the Supreme Court will make any difference. The answer, according…
One of my favorite topics to teach, in any teambuilding, leadership or communication skill-related class, is Peter Senge’s concept of balancing advocacy and inquiry in conversation. Advocacy means…
A great blog post on Harvard Business Publishing’s site—Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work by John Hagel III and John Seeley Brown—summarizes some interesting trends from…
Another great Newsweek column from Sharon Begley, The Limits of Reason—Why evolution may favor irrationality, describes a phenomenon of human error that brings to mind Chris Argyris’ Ladder…
I like to talk about the Fundamental Attribution Error, because after you explain what it means, everyone has a good story. Take the workshop I taught this week,…
I love Sharon Begley, Newsweek’s science columnist, because she makes me realize I had a false notion in school: that I hated, or at least could not get…
I just read one of the best articles I’ve ever come across on interpersonal communication and particularly on the sources of misunderstanding: How to Avoid (and Quickly Recover…
Of all the wonderful self discovery assessments and tools out there, my personal favorite is the one I’ll call Interpersonal Styles. I first came across it in the…
Recently I wrote a blog post called Overcoming objections to alternative work arrangements. A reader named Sharon made some interesting additional points about why telecommuting causes heartburn for…
If there’s one thing all customer service workshops have in common, in my experience, it’s the big picture stuff: why customer service is important, the costs and benefits,…
It seems that in every management training session I do lately, the same issue comes up: we’re being forced to do this flex time and telecommuting stuff and…
I’m driving a 26-foot truck from Colorado to New Hampshire this week with my friend Allison. I’ve never driven a truck this big before. At first I approached…
A recent article in Harvard Business blogs (Why We Shouldn’t Hate HR by Bill Taylor) commemorates the 5th anniversary of the infamous 2005 Fast Company article Why We…
In an article on the Harvard Business Publishing site, Trina Soske and Jay A. Conger argue that leadership development programs fail for two reasons: 1. They focus on…