Maybe you’ve experienced a similar situation: A friend you haven't talked to in a while calls and tells you he recently sold his business and moved five states away to be with his girlfriend. He sold his house, most of his furniture and got a new job. Months into his new life, the relationship fell apart and he’s now faced with…what?
“What would you like coaching on today?” I asked Jonathan.
“Well, my team is working on an important project. Everyone wants this to succeed and we’re even aligned around how to make it happen. But a couple of team members are chomping at the bit to implement this in the next three months. The rest of the team believes we need to take it a bit slower. Everybody’s frustrated and it’s causing all sorts of tension.”
It was February of 1990. I’d just walked into my office after a long drive from a meeting in Connecticut. Picked up the phone to check voice mail. There were three messages from Jim’s office manager, Karen: “Please call me as soon as possible.” “Please call as soon as possible.” “Call me immediately!” This was years ago, before everyone carried cell phones and was instantly reachable.
Ever start a meeting and, pressed for time, you launch right into the agenda only to have the meeting dissolve into discord within the first fifteen minutes? There are certain practices whose pay off is far greater than the time invested in them. A quick check in at the beginning of a meeting or conversation is one of those.
Imagine this: Your team has designed an organizational change that will have significant operational impact. It’s a complex process and you’ve worked for months to get all the moving parts aligned. The deadline for rollout is fast approaching, you’ve run out of time, and you’ve pinned down the last details just under the wire. You all leave the final meeting exhausted but proud of your accomplishment.
Sometimes, a piece of writing presents a view that is both so obvious yet so refreshing that it changes the way you think about an entire phenomena. Johann Hari’s recent article, The Likely Cause of Addiction, and It is Not What You Think, had that effect on me. Connection is a theme that has longstanding meaning in my life, yet I never considered addiction to be a disease of disconnection.
Susan looked up at me with panic in her eyes when I walked into her office. “Oh, no!” she said dramatically. I thought she’d just heard about a major disaster. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “It’s 10:00, time for our appointment. I got in at 7:00 and I haven’t gotten anything done! I’m so overwhelmed, I can’t think straight. I was supposed to prepare for our session and I don’t even know what I want to talk about.”
“Why don’t we talk about this?” I said.
I'm reposting a beautifully written review by Michael Sales of an excellent and important book by two widely recognized consultants, researchers, and theorists in the Organizational Learning Field.
Before the holiday season is over, I'd like to share a video that left me with mixed feelings. I've always been a big fan of the work of Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield of Vital Smarts, the organization that has given us Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, Influencer and Change Anything. Their work has provided a myriad of powerful tools to improve communication and bring about behavioral change.
There is some interesting research on how people experience pain differently that has many useful implications. One comment by Dr. Robert Coghill really caught my attention.
Last week a coaching client told me he was in the process of creating a model of leadership for himself in the context of working on professional development goals in several key areas: creativity, proactive communication and strategic leadership.
His model emerged as we discussed what he specifically wanted to accomplish in each area.
Here’s a quiz:
It’s Monday morning and your current to do list is two columns long. Do you…
…knock off the 5 things you know you can get done before your conference call in an hour (What my colleague Christine calls low hanging fruit) or
…create a plan to address the big challenge you’ve been putting off because it seems so daunting?
Of course, the answer isn’t clear cut.
