communication
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Trust
Teamwork is a critical employment skill. Yet, many workers – and entire teams – often lack the ability to work successfully in a team environment. With COVID resulting in many working from home and away from their normal team environments, teamwork skills are becoming even more difficult to master. Patrick Lencioni is famous for his work on teams, most notably his enduring book, The Five Disfunctions of a Team. Despite the provocative title, Lencioni really talks about the BEHAVIORS of high performing teams, boiling it down to Trust, Healthy Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. Trust is the fundamental behavior that must be present for a team to function well. Without…
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The COVID Effect
It is a trite understatement to proclaim that we are all experiencing frustration and fatigue from COVID-19. Yet it is true. In the early days, it seemed temporary. As days devolved into weeks and weeks into months, our response needs some adjustment. This article is an attempt to cut through some of the noise to arrive at some practical advice for organizational leaders on how to cope – personally and as a team. Restoring normalcy - and sanity I recently asked a group of nonprofit executives for their best advice on dealing with the stress, the organizational impact, and the staff relations issues resulting from the pandemic. Their responses were…
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“No One Ever Told Me”
I make a mean apple crisp. I’m locally famous for it. My daughter, the pickiest of picky eaters, would never even try it, asking for vanilla ice cream instead. Then finally, one Thanksgiving while she was home from college, she accepted her helping of apple crisp with delight. I asked what changed, and she replied with a straight face, “No one ever told me how good it was!” Oops, guess I missed that lesson in Parenting, 101. It got me thinking about the value of lived experience to expand one's perspective. I have seen many “No one ever told me” examples during my career that point to the importance of…
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Five tips for communicating in uncertain times
During times of uncertainty like the world is experiencing now, leaders are called upon to step forward with decisiveness, empathy, and transparency. It there ever was a time we are living in a VUCA world, it is now. VUCA, of course, stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous and was first conceptualized by the U.S. Army War College in 1987. Leaders who consider the VUCA implications of their environments are better able to plan for success in spite of these factors. In the COVID-19/VUCA world, you must be prepared to communicate boldly and decisively to your team and your various constituencies. Your organization, your staff, and maybe even your community…