Home Leadership Turn Archives Me RampUp Solutions  
 

  • Categories

  • Archives
 
Archive for the 'Leadership' Category

Leadership by What Example

Tuesday, March 24th, 2020

This is the post that I mentioned yesterday. As Wally points out so elegantly “do as I say and not as I do” doesn’t work anymore — if it ever did. (BTW, you might find this post on leadership as a profession of interest.)

“There is no leadership without leadership by example.” ~ Captain James Westley Ayers, USMC

Captain Ayers was right. There is no leadership without leadership by example. What he didn’t say is that example can be good or bad. You don’t get any choice about whether you lead by example, only about the kind of example you set.

Most writing about leadership by example assumes a good example. If you work hard, the people on your team will work hard, too. If you’re honest, they will be, too. It’s the way it is. It’s human nature.

Human nature has a baked-in capacity and desire for hierarchy. That’s why you must be careful. It’s easy to set a bad example.

People Are Watching

If you’re the person responsible for the performance of a group, the other members watch you. That’s because you have some power over them. It may not be much, but it’s there. They watch what you do as a guide to what they should do.

Everyone I know who’s been promoted in large organizations has some version of the same story. A leader does something without much thinking about it and people take it as a guide to behavior. The story I like best is the one told by Linda Hill about when she was promoted to President of General Dynamics.

She went shopping for a new suit to celebrate her promotion. The salesperson sold her a scarf with the suit and showed her an interesting way to tie the scarf. She wore the suit and the scarf, tied in that special way, her first day on the job. What happened, in Ms. Hill’s own words.

“And then I came back to work the next day and I ran into no fewer than a dozen women in the organization who have on scarves tied exactly like mine.”

Another friend tells about his first day on the job as plant manager. He made several casual comments about how they could move equipment to be more effective. The next day, when he went to the plant, he found that all his “ideas” had been implemented overnight.

Then, there was the friend who forgot to get his usual morning coffee on the way to the office on his first day in a new position. When he realized what he’d done, he said out loud to himself, in his office, “God, I wish I had some coffee.” Within minutes, three cups of coffee arrived.

Be careful what you do and what you say. People are watching.

Be Careful What You Praise

Praise is a power tool. You use it so that people will do things or keep doing things that you want them to do. We love praise. Just remember, people are listening.

You will get more of what you praise. If you praise great ideas, you will get more of them. If you praise courage, people are likely to be more courageous. But if you praise people who work long hours. other people will start putting in more time. If you praise people who answer email in the middle of the night, folks will start sleeping with their phone by the bed.

How Do You Act When Things Don’t Go Your Way?

Some things will not work the way you’d hoped. Some news will be bad news. How you act tells your team members some important things.

If you receive bad news gracefully and take it as information, people will be more likely to bring it. Even more, if you thank them for letting you know. People don’t mind being the messenger that gets praised for doing a good deed. They don’t want to be the messenger who gets killed.

When you’re interrupted it’s another opportunity to set a good example. Treat the people who interrupt you with respect and courtesy. Then, if the interruption is inappropriate, tell them why.

What You Tolerate, You Condone

It’s hard to do, but you need to address behavior or performance that violates your standards or values.

Mark Deterding tells a story from early in his career. Mark was in his mid-twenties, when he was transferred and promoted to plant manager. During his first few meetings, he was struck by the amount of swearing by the seasoned veterans on his team.

He decided he would just model the right way and his team members would change. But it didn’t work that way. They went right on swearing. Here’s the lesson Mark said he learned.

“It’s not enough to just model the way. It’s just as important to clearly and immediately address any issues that violate the values of the organization. When you allow unacceptable behaviors to go unaddressed, you send the message that the behavior is okay.”

Bottom Line

When you lead by example, you use your behavior to influence the behavior and performance of team members. Your influence is a leadership superpower. And, like any superpower, you can use it for good or for evil. What’s your choice?

Image credit: Wally Bock

Golden Oldies: Seize Your Leadership Day: Bad Leadership

Monday, March 23rd, 2020

Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

I was reminded of this article after reading one by Wally Bock that I will share tomorrow. I’ve always found it interesting that certain words, such as influence, are assumed positive, while manipulation is negative.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

There is a dangerous assumption out there that ‘leaders’ are chuck full of positive traits and on the side of the angels, but I’m here to tell you that it ain’t necessarily so. Just as leaders come in all shapes, colors and sizes they come with a wide variety of traits, not all of them positive. But it seems as if succession is tough all over.

Italian police have caught the Sicilian Mafia’s number two, the latest in a string of top-level arrests that has given the crime group that once terrified Italy problems with rebuilding its leadership.

The hero CEO who will save the company easily morphs into the imperial CEO. An intelligent, thoughtful opinion piece by Ho Kwon Ping in Singapore considers the dangers of this happening and assumes it will continue in the US—and it probably will.

The leadership of any company is critical to the success of its mission — but no one individual is mission-critical.

Yesterday I wrote Real Leaders are Fair, which means applying rules equally, but that rarely happens, especially when a government is involved and ours is no different. Consider the non-application of a federal law backed by a presidential proclamation that prohibits corrupt foreign officials and their families from receiving American visas. But business interests always seem to trump fairness.

“Of course it’s because of oil,” said John Bennett, the United States ambassador to Equatorial Guinea from 1991 to 1994, adding that Washington has turned a blind eye to the Obiangs’ corruption and repression because of its dependence on the country for natural resources. He noted that officials of Zimbabwe are barred from the United States.

Finally, on a lighter note, I found the answer given by Ask the Coach to this question to be classic.

Q: I am having a difficult time leading my team. The team members will not follow my instructions, which I am sure would make our project much more successful. What am I doing wrong?

A: What you’re doing wrong is very simple: you have simply forgotten that your team is more critical to the success of your project than you are.

Take a moment and read the whole post, I guarantee you’ll like what you learn.

And if you want more of my picks you’ll find them here.

Golden Oldies: Corporate responsibility

Monday, March 9th, 2020

https://www.flickr.com/photos/willemvanbergen/271164398/

Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Jack Welch died recently and Jeff Immelt is also gone from GE, but at the time, they were a good example of two sides of corporate responsibility — one who talked and the other who walked.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

If you’re a long-term reader you’ll know that I’m not a big fan of Jack Welch, while I am of Jeff Imelt—two guys with very different MAP.

Knowledge@Wharton made this comment as background in describing what Judy Hu, global executive director for advertising and branding, is doing to publicize the “new” GE.

Since becoming boss in 2001 — just a few days before September 11 — Immelt has aimed to make GE not only an innovator but also an environmental leader. In doing that, he has broken with his predecessor, Jack Welch, but also, in some ways, taken the company back to its roots. Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph, started GE in the late 1800s. More recently, under the combative, controversial Welch, it came to be known for operational excellence and a brassy pugnacity.

Welch famously declared that GE would have to be no. 1 or 2 in every line of business in which it competed and would ditch divisions where it wasn’t. And he battled state and federal regulators for years over their order that GE clean up carcinogenic waste that its factories had dumped into New York’s Hudson River. Under Immelt, the company hammered out an agreement to dredge the still-polluted river bottom. “Jeff said, ‘We’re going to fix that and move forward,’”

I find this ironically amusing after reading various articles where Welch was talking about corporate responsibility.

Corporate responsibility is a major buzzword these days, but it’s hard to tell whether it’s tied more closely to

    • doing what’s right;
    • doing what you can get away with; or
    • just not getting caught.

Image credit: Willem van Bergen

Role Model: Craig Newmark

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/6298843358

Is anyone in tech truly immune from the lure of the big bucks that come from mining user data?

Not just in the short haul, but over the long haul — like 25 years?

Certainly not Google, with its management-trashed “don’t be evil.”

Or Facebook, that continually violates its users in the name of revenue.

but there is one site known to techies and the rest of us alike.

Craigslist.

Craigslist started as an email listserv in 1995, when early web enthusiasts were looking for a sense of community and DIY education. By 1996, it had become a website with job listings, apartment rentals, and personal ads. Almost as soon as the internet was becoming widely available—roughly 1 out of 5 households was online at the time—Craigslist was there to help people find roommates, look for jobs, go on blind dates, or sell used furniture.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has been at the helm since 2001, and the founder, Craig Newmark, is still involved in the company. For years, Newmark did customer service, responding to design complaints and concerns about scams. Today, Craigslist has more monthly page visits than The New York Times or ESPN, and it’s been incredibly profitable.

Its profitability might come as a surprise to some. Many of those I spoke with thought Craigslist was a nonprofit or that it was community-run. In fact, Craigslist has always charged money for certain ads, such as job postings and classified ads. (By siphoning revenue from classified ads, Craigslist has been one reason newspapers across the country have struggled to stay in business.)

More recently, Craigslist has started charging for other kinds of ads, such as real estate listings from firms and car ads from dealers.

But regular users don’t have to pay a fee. The site doesn’t display banner ads, nor does it sell user data to third parties.

Way back when Craigslist was a startup I met Craig and found him to be a very nice, unassuming guy and it seems  he’s still the same, as reflected in a 20017 interview.

“Basically I just decided on a different business model in ’99, nothing altruistic,” he said. “While Silicon Valley VCs and bankers were telling me I should become a billionaire, I decided no one needs to be a billionaire — you should know when enough is enough. So I decided on a minimal business model, and that’s worked out pretty well. This means I can give away tremendous amounts of money to the nonprofits I believe in … I wish I had charisma, hair, and a better sense of humor,” he added in a completely deadpan voice. “I think I could be far more effective.”

Current entrepreneurs seem more focused on charisma, hair, and reaching unicorn status via multiple rounds of investment. A sense of humor is considered optional.

Image credit: Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter

AI As Blunt Force Trauma

Wednesday, February 12th, 2020

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikemacmarketing/30188200627/in/photolist-MZCqiH-SjCgwQ-78gAtb-4Wrk4s-Dcx4UC-24s3ght-2dZfNaQ-8nBs97-5JpQEE-4GXcBN-RNNXQ4-2eo1VjR-29REGc9-3iAtU2-8SbD9g-2aDXanU-dYVVaB-5Pnxus-29Jabm7-2em8eRN-24DS86P-4KTiY4-87gbND-TnPTMx-UWXASW-fvrvcc-9xaKQj-2dviv8X-7Mbzwn-4WrkmQ-EPaCDj-dWTnJy-4zWGpJ-2fuyjjE-23y8cHC-4HEcBa-585oYX-jR9gc-dZ2ueo-dZ2v6o-2etej9U-dZ2A5J-4vuuEb-TrNV8b-dYVQKp-4HCFvt-6kBMSR-7JvXoF-3Ym8Sz-ShBxCm

While AI can do some things on its own, it’s a blunt force, ignorant of nuance, but embracing all the  bias, prejudices, bigotry and downright stupidity of past generations thanks to its training.

Using AI to make judgement calls that are implemented sans human involvement is like using a five pound sledgehammer on a thumbtack.

Yesterday looked at what AI can miss in hiring situations, but candidates at least have more choice than others do.

AI is being used extensively around the world by government and law enforcement where its bias is especially hard on people of color.

The algorithm is one of many making decisions about people’s lives in the United States and Europe. Local authorities use so-called predictive algorithms to set police patrols, prison sentences and probation rules. In the Netherlands, an algorithm flagged welfare fraud risks. A British city rates which teenagers are most likely to become criminals.

Human judgement may be flawed and it does has the same prejudices, but it’s not inflexible, whereas AI is.

As the practice spreads into new places and new parts of government, United Nations investigators, civil rights lawyers, labor unions and community organizers have been pushing back.

Now schools are jumping on the bandwagon claiming that facial recognition will make schools safer, but not everyone agrees.

“Subjecting 5-year-olds to this technology will not make anyone safer, and we can’t allow invasive surveillance to become the norm in our public spaces,” said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center for the New York Civil Liberties Union. (…)

Critics of the technology, including Mr. Shultz and the New York Civil Liberties Union, point to the growing evidence of racial bias in facial recognition systems. In December, the federal government released a study, one of the largest of its kind, that found that most commercial facial recognition systems exhibited bias, falsely identifying African-American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more than Caucasian faces. Another federal study found a higher rate of mistaken matches among children.

So what do the kids think?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff…

Read the Q&A to find out.

Image credit: Mike MacKenzie

Guest Post: Nobody Starts Out to be a Bad Boss

Wednesday, December 4th, 2019

In all my years of reading Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog I have never come across an iota of unnecessary complication, convoluted advice, negativity, or BS in any form. Just solid common sense and usable how-to’s. Monday you met a good boss and yesterday one of the worst, today is some advice from Wally on how to become a Monday-style boss.

Nobody gets up in the morning and decides they’re going to go into work and be the worst boss on the planet. So, why are there so many bad bosses?

Depending on the research you read, between 1/2 and 2/3 of all bosses are ineffective. Most of them aren’t mean, or abusive, they’re just bad at the job. That research was done a few years ago, but I don’t think things have changed much. It’s the system, silly.

The System Creates Bad Bosses

Bosses are people who are officially responsible for the performance of a group. We expect them to accomplish a mission through the group and care for group members.

Alas, we promote people who give no evidence that they have the skills to do that job or have any desire to do it. You wouldn’t hire someone as an accountant because he or she was a good plumber. But we do that all the time with bosses. We promote people to group responsibility because they’re good at something else. That something else might be making sales, designing marketing campaigns, or writing code. It usually doesn’t include the things we want bosses to do.

You might ask, “Why do people take a position they don’t want and probably won’t be good at?”

That answer’s simple. In too many companies, becoming a boss is the only way that you can get more money and prestige. If it’s the only route available, people will take it.

We could fix this easily. Allow people who might become bosses to try on the job in a temporary assignment. That way the company learns who has the aptitude and desire for a boss’s job. And people learn whether they’ll enjoy the work.

Great. We give bunch of people a job they have no aptitude or desire for. We call it a promotion, but it’s more like a career change. What do we do next?

We compound the problem. Once you become a boss in most companies, you can’t go back to being an individual contributor. You’re stuck. For the rest of your career, you’re going to be miserable doing a bad job that affects the lives and productivity of dozens of people.

Then we compound the problem one more time. We dump people into that new career without much training or support.

Lots of Bosses Don’t Know What Being A Good Boss Looks Like

We build up our mental model of what a good boss is by experiencing a good boss. Too many people who get promoted haven’t had one. They have no idea what it’s like to be a good boss or how different it is to be on a team with a good team leader.

This is a chicken and egg problem. You need good bosses to set the example and help others imagine what being a good boss is like. And you can’t use the negative examples of bad bosses. Bad bosses may teach you what not to do, but they can’t teach you what to do instead.

Good Bosses are Effective Coaches

You want bosses who are coaches, mentors, and encouragers of people who want to do a similar job. That means training bosses in coaching and development skills. It means tying some of their compensation to the work they do developing people. It means basing their promotion, in part, on how effective they are developing good leaders.

The Transition is Critical

We must provide special support during the two years from the time a person is promoted. That means readily available materials, coaching, and coursework.

Deliver training in small bites not a three-day program that covers everything. Deliver training before a person assumes the job, not six months later. By then he or she has developed a bunch of bad habits. Supplement with coaching to transfer skills from the classroom to the workflow.

New bosses will come back from training with a head filled with good ideas about what to do. Then, those ideas slam into reality. Doing is a lot harder than knowing.

That’s when coaching is vital. They need to learn in small, doable steps that build confidence. The best place to get that is from their boss, who’s also a great coach.

Bottom Line

We have a system in most companies designed to produce too many ineffective bosses. We need to fix the system. Meantime pay special attention to coaching. Give potential leaders some experience of the job before they accept it. We can make sure the bosses we have understand new leader development as part of their job and have the skills to do it. We need to remove leaders who aren’t effective, so they don’t continue to affect performance and morale.

Image credit: Three Star Leadership

Golden Oldies: MAP Action 2 (management by walking around)

Monday, November 25th, 2019

https://unsplash.com/s/photos/office-space

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

80 years ago Dave Packard commented that good management was “marked by personal involvement, good listening skills and the recognition that “everyone in an organization wants to do a good job.” That belief developed into a management technique called MWBA and it’s just as powerful now as it was then — if not more so. 13 years ago I wrote a four-part series about it. The second post talks about why to do it, the third about uncovering problems and the fourth about using MWBA to crosscheck what you hear.

And yes, you do have time.

Author John le Carré, of Bond fame, said it best.

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Remember Management By Walking Around (MWBA)? It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

Great managers work to spend at least 25% (or more) of their time wandering around chatting and building trust with their people.

Don’t have time? Maybe that’s because you never really thought abut the benefits. Getting to know your people this way helps you to

    • spot high-potential workers;
    • raise your trust quotient with employees;
    • improve retention;
    • attract talent;
    • discover molehills before they’re mountains, and, most importantly, it’s the best, if not only, way to
    • know what’s really going on.

To work it must be the norm—that means it needs to be done constantly, not just when there’s a problem.

Consistent, casual visits make people feel comfortable and encourages them to chat—saying what they are thinking without editing it. To pass on information, rumors, and the like without wondering or worrying that it will boomerang and hurt them.

While wandering, you’ll hear enough to validate or repudiate what you heard from somewhere else. It lets you protect your sources—which means they’ll continue to pass on information—and it helps you avoid acting on erroneous information.

The higher you rise in the organization the more important this intelligence becomes. One of the greatest dangers for any manager is getting isolated and hearing only a sanitized or slanted version of what’s going on within the group, department or company. This is especially true for the CEO and senior staff.

Bottom-line—get off your duff, out of your office, wander around, say hi, listen, be a sponge and soak it all up.

Invest the time—that’s what managers do—and it will pay off handsomely!

Does it still work? Absolutely. Read about how it went from strictly a management tool to also offering personal growth and stress reduction.

A note for managers in love with tech. MBWA can’t be done digitally; it’s an in-person, face-to-face technique that works.

It takes far less time than recruiting new people.

And it’s free.

Image credit: LYCS Architecture on Unsplash

Ego vs. Profit

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/purpleslog/3134323442/in/photolist-5LYeam-d9DmTm-cAhxNh-dVhL7y-dVhKs1-TGBPPh-2TSgCv-9WCV3h-AnF1U4-9WA3Hp-7K5aVg-9wrvaw-9wrxUj-4H3sdR-8yo3F5-DEC3i-2h7m3VZ-XXt7T1-2gG7DBu-b5aMga-jATNhy-2hbtdiC-bVRXUM-8vJGry-cdhbFo-2ghfvhL-W61rLT-2gQvEo9-ixG8wg-KQ5F-KQ5C-KQ5B-KQ5G-KQ5D-KQ6Q-KQ6U-KQ6M-KQ6V-KQ6R-KQ6S-KQ6N-9VAAZU-WATzHX-2h7iwcz-2gQvErf-jnjP9-2ghfrP3-2gHswCh-2h5PFap-295cXUb

Yesterday’s post focused on the importance of financial controls.

Unicorns focus on funding.

The “horses” talked about yesterday are focused on profit and building sustainable business.

But when it comes to valuation, founders often focus on just one number: the magic B (as in billion).

This was analyzed in great detail in a post from CB Insights last month.
On the 31% of unicorns that are worth exactly $1B, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners Jeremy Liew wryly noted (via this tweet) that it’s “potentially not a coincidence.”

Investors are still enamored by founders with their fast talk and passionate visions to “change the world.”

However, enamored or not, when funding, investors focus closely on CYA.

Which is easy, since investors have all the leverage, because they dictate the terms.

This is what is happening to get that exact $1B valuation. Even if the fundamentals don’t justify the $1B valuation, the investors can lay on enough structure and terms to get the founders to a $1B headline valuation (while investors have the protections they need). With the $1B valuation, founders get:

  • desired media exposure to attract talent
  • bro-grats tweets
  • conference speaking gigs
  • a place on this list

Of course, it’s the programmers, marketers, sales and support who actually build the products that will pay the price for the inflated valuation.

In these exit situations, common shareholders, aka employees, get fleeced.

Harking back to 2015, money has tightened again and being profitable is at the forefront of founder thinking — mainly because it’s the focus of investors.

Stockpiling cash is at odds with the model of most venture capital-backed start-ups, which typically raise piles of money to spend on growing faster. Many investors are now pushing their companies to turn a profit.

Shades of déjà vu.

Image credit: Purple Slog

Too Little Too Late: Updating Antitrust Law

Tuesday, October 1st, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lmgadelha/4614173420/

Last week in a post about responsibility and the difference between Microsoft and other tech giants I said that change was coming, driven in by a surprising source.

The change is to antitrust law.

The University of Chicago is the intellectual birthplace of the consensus in antitrust thinking over the last four decades — that monopoly law should place consumer interests, usually in the form of lower prices, above the concerns of smaller business rivals.

Big tech has been protected, because you can’t get lower than free, but people are waking up to the fact that free isn’t actually free.

More importantly, so is the University of Chicago and a growing list of experts.

But amid growing concerns about the unchecked power of today’s tech giants, economists and legal scholars are questioning whether the Chicago School still makes sense. Even the university’s own faculty is starting to publicly challenge the ideology.

It’s about time.

Considering how fast the world moves these days there is no excuse for those who are supposed to protect us to move at glacial speed.

At last year’s summit, Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department official in charge of antitrust, told attendees that his view of the cost of free platforms “has changed” with a greater understanding of the nature and scope of data collection and sharing.

Duh. No kidding.

Makes you wonder how the European Union figured it out so much quicker.

Or not.

Image credit: Luiz Gadelha Jr.

Wally Bock on Leadership as if People Mattered

Wednesday, January 30th, 2019

I especially like this post because, in today’s build-your-brand culture, it presents a solid road to success as a boss based on a radical idea: it’s not about you. You are not the be-all and end-all and even if you were it wouldn’t make you a success as a boss. It’s why, in the long run, AI won’t/can’t replace human bosses.

I joined the Marines right out of high school and started in business before I earned my degree. I had a family to support, so going the traditional student route made little sense. I earned my degree while I also worked full-time at responsible jobs. It turned out to be a good thing.

I could take classroom learning and try it on the job right away. It didn’t take long to figure out that an awful lot of the so-called expert advice was nonsense. The people in my economics textbooks, for example, didn’t act like me or any people I knew. Years later, Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler would call them “econs.”

Most of my books and most of my professors treated management as an engineering problem. There was much language about designing an effective system and “well-oiled machines.” There was plenty of advice that involved knowing what buttons to push or what levers to pull.

I learned a lot of good things, but most of the good stuff had nothing to do with working with people. I learned most of that on my own, mostly the hard way. You can have the biggest brain on Planet Earth but working with people requires your heart.

Working with people differs from working with machines. You don’t have to read a book or this blog post to figure this out. Look around you. Think about the people you work with every day.

What are People Like?

We know a lot about people. For starters, we know that we’re all imperfect. We make mistakes. That includes you. Forgive other people when they make a mistake. Admit it when you do.

People have strengths and weaknesses. You want to get the most you can out of those strengths and make those weaknesses irrelevant. People want to make progress. You should help them improve performance and spot opportunities they can seize.

People are emotional. Your computer doesn’t care if you snap at it, but your teammates do. A turret lathe won’t have a fight at home before coming to work. But pretty much everyone I know has had that experience. That’s how it is. Deal with it.

Machines can run all day, every day, for months. Buildings can last for decades with little maintenance. People are different. There’s a limit to how many hours most people can put in before productivity dwindles to almost nothing. For most of us, the top limit is somewhere between 50-55 hours a week. Overwork your people and their productivity will drop like a stone.

People need recovery time, too. After a long day, or after that big push to get a project done, people need to take time off. They need to hang out with their friends, play with their kids, go to a baseball game, or cook and consume a fine meal. Anything that’s not work-related. You interrupt that recovery time at your peril. Do it too often and people get resentful.

People thrive on good relationships. People want to work with other people they enjoy and that they can count on. Many a team has seen productivity decline because two team members couldn’t or wouldn’t get along. It’s your job to manage the work environment.

You’re A People, Too

You’re a person, too. You make mistakes. You have emotions. You have strengths and weaknesses. You want to make progress. Relationships matter a lot. You need breaks and recovery time.

One more thing. You set the example, whether or not you want to. It’s almost impossible to have a team that’s productive and happy if you’re a grumpy slacker. See to yourself first. Revel in your humanity. Draw strength from your relationships. Work hard, but get recovery time, too.

Image courtesy of Three Star Leadership

RSS2 Subscribe to
MAPping Company Success

Enter your Email
Powered by FeedBlitz
About Miki View Miki Saxon's profile on LinkedIn

Clarify your exec summary, website, etc.

Have a quick question or just want to chat? Feel free to write or call me at 360.335.8054

The 12 Ingredients of a Fillable Req

CheatSheet for InterviewERS

CheatSheet for InterviewEEs

Give your mind a rest. Here are 4 quick ways to get rid of kinks, break a logjam or juice your creativity!

Creative mousing

Bubblewrap!

Animal innovation

Brain teaser

The latest disaster is here at home; donate to the East Coast recovery efforts now!

Text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation or call 00.733.2767. $10 really really does make a difference and you'll never miss it.

And always donate what you can whenever you can

The following accept cash and in-kind donations: Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, Red Cross, World Food Program, Save the Children

*/ ?>

About Miki

About KG

Clarify your exec summary, website, marketing collateral, etc.

Have a question or just want to chat @ no cost? Feel free to write 

Download useful assistance now.

Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.

Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
while $10 a month has exponential power.
Always donate what you can whenever you can.

The following accept cash and in-kind donations:

Web site development: NTR Lab
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.