There are better ways to learn how to swim than being thrown into the deep end of the pool. That said, should you find yourself in the deep end, you’ll learn how to keep yourself afloat or, well…the alternative. Do you notice anything missing in this analogy? If the goal was to learn to swim,

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I’ve worked with well-meaning, highly-principled leaders and managers for years. When the topic of coaching and developing their employees comes up, I often hear that they know coaching is important, they want to coach more, but they don’t have time because they are too busy “putting out fires.” The pandemic put many leaders in crisis mode,

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When I work with clients, I often see judgment driving much of the thinking during a conflict conversation. Rather than a genuine curiosity for understanding where the other person is coming from, one or both people judge the other person’s intentions. Here’s how I see the difference between these two attitudes: An attitude of judgment

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One of the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on teams is that even people who have worked together for a long time are seeing differences in how they work together now. And they seem surprised by that. We’re not. In The Long-Distance Leader, rule number 3 is this: “Know that working remotely changes interpersonal

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You hear a lot of negative things these days about working separate from everyone else on your team. We’ve all heard the complaints (heck we’ve written enough about them here). Remote workers sometimes feel isolated. They don’t interact with their team members enough. People who work remotely sometimes go down the wrong trail and spend

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For years I’ve asked people, “What’s the good word today?”  My intention always was to get people thinking about something positive, and if they were thinking something positive, to share it with me so I could benefit too. Unfortunately far too often people can’t come up with a good word, or in many cases, a word

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When we give feedback, it is with the hope that the person on the receiving end will take action on that feedback. But giving feedback isn’t a one-and-done action. It’s a journey that has many steps along the way. So before we (or should I say ‘they’) get to action, we must realize the emotions

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We hear all the time that the hardest part of being a connected, engaged member of a remote team is the lack of spontaneous communication. We say it an awful lot ourselves. And it’s true. When you work from home, every communication requires at least a little planning and effort. You don’t just bump into

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Empowerment is a great thing, especially during times of change, upheaval and disruption. Empowered employees show greater commitment, stay more engaged, and create better results. Empowered employees take more initiative and get more done than employees who work in a fear-based, command-and-control environment. As a new supervisor, you hear and read about these organizational performance

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This is the third in a series of videos on feedback. You can watch the previous videos from the links below. In this video, we talk about how to get others to accept the feedback you are giving – leading them to action. Tweet it out: Before people can apply the feedback you give them,

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