respect

When we say someone has a strong “presence,” what does that actually mean? I mean, specifically, what does it mean? Ask 100 different people (and we have), you might get 50 different answers. A strong presence means different things to different people. And when you push people to define what it actually is, you tend […]

The “Derek Jeter is Awesome” narrative has been pretty well done to death by now, so I won’t belabor the point. But his retirement on Sunday marks the end of a lot of things, above and beyond a baseball career. Sports, celebrity and politics have undergone a sea change in the last 20 years. Everyone […]

Have you ever worked with someone who “keeps score” with you? You know, that person who always seems to remember the people who owe them something, or who did something bad to them, or how many people they need to get even with? Scorekeepers are people who keep track of how many good things they […]

This past weekend, I participated as a speaker in a training conference for young leaders. This is something I do every year, and that I enjoy immensely. It’s a great program, well designed, with lots of valuable information from multiple speakers. I spoke twice (both times on good communication skills) to two different subsets of […]

Leadership can mean different things at different times to different people.  But a few things are non-negotiable. Not long ago, I read a short essay about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the concept of “transference” came up. The point of the essay was that during his presidency, Roosevelt was not a healthy nor a strong man. He was in […]

I prefer speaking with people who think differently than I do. It’s more interesting. It’s more challenging. It makes me think. It opens my eyes to other perspectives. And sometimes it makes me angry. But it’s all 100% healthy. And unfortunately our society – in business and politics, and especially on social media – is […]

Earlier this week, someone told me that “they are more efficient when they multitask.” Yeah… right. This will be a short post today, because the efficiency of multi-tasking is a complete myth. And there is tons of detail to prove it, including this recent spot on NPR. In last week’s post, I pleaded with you […]

In nearly every workshop I teach, I ask a question that sounds something like this: “How many of you attend too many meetings that run long?” Nearly every hand goes up, every time. “How many of you get too many emails that are too overwhelming to read?” Nearly every hand goes up, every time. “How […]

I just returned from a two-week trip to Shanghai and Singapore, where we conducted several training workshops for two different top clients. Our workshops were full of people from China, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Britain, India, Belgium, Turkey, and Germany. It was a global group, with all of them reporting to global executives. Work […]

“Respect a man. He will do the more.” – James Howell The second “R” in our ARROW equation for team alignment is “Respect.” An aligned team has respect—lots of it, for lots of things. An aligned team respects members’ roles and responsibilities, confidences, and decision-making processes. The members of an aligned team don’t have to […]