When it comes to mental health and your organizational culture, storytelling reduces isolation, creates community, and reduces the stigma of mental health. Revealing details of your life and experiences can be uncomfortable, but it can have a profound impact.
Read more…Category Archives: Communication
Storytelling Can Drive a Culture of Wellness
Patricia Hayes: Vulnerability and Strategy are the Keys to Growth
With 30 years of experience in public policy, Patricia Hayes is a strategist at heart. Whether it’s policy or people, she can quickly identify the issues blocking growth and help executives create a plan to achieve those goals. She is also passionate about the communities we build around us and shares insights about nurturing and reconnecting with your network.
Read more…Leadership + Executive Presence for Our New Normal
We asked Elizabeth Goins, our resident executive communication director, to summarize some of the trends she’s seeing, and some new ‘best practices’ for communicating and leading effectively in virtual and hybrid workspaces.
Read more…Elizabeth Goins: Executive Presence Starts With Communication
Elizabeth’s leadership philosophy encompasses one word, COMMUNICATION. Today’s leaders must communicate to relay information, but perhaps more importantly, they must inspire and influence others.
Read more…Unleash Mindful Creativity with Melinda Rothouse
A multifaceted facilitator and coach, Melinda Rothouse is also a musician, a photographer, and an author. She recently published a book on how leaders can create cultures of innovation through mindfulness-based creativity and collaboration. The book, A Mindful Approach to Team Creativity and Collaborations in Organizations, reached #1 Bestseller in New Releases in several categories on Amazon on launch day. People appreciate learning about the research on mindfulness and creativity and the practical tools they can put to use with their teams.
Read more…A Better Way to Meeting: Smooth Flight
Our resident Improv Performer and Trainer, Shana Merlin, leads us through an exercise, based on the work of Dr. Rick Brinkman, that will improve any meeting, whether video, conference call, or in-person.
Why We Love Improv For Teams
Improv For The Win!
What is fun and can help you practice risk-taking and communication at all levels? Improv! In this leadership video, we’re talking about why we love this for teams.
Navigating Conflict in the Workplace
Three Tools to Help You Address Conflict
Deftly navigating conflict in the workplace is never fun, but it’s imperative to being an effective leader. In this leadership video, learn about our three favorite tools for addressing conflict at work. Get beyond the conflict by understanding priorities, scope, and social threat triggers for yourself and the other party.
Motivating People Up, Down, and Across Your Organization
How to Motivate Others
You inspire and galvanize your direct reports, but how do you motivate people across your organization? In this leadership video, get insights into our two favorite strategies for motivating others above, below, and across your organization.
Why Are We Here? Purpose Matters
Why Purpose Matters
Leading human teams is about much more than simply managing resources. There’s the transactional aspect of overseeing resources + workflow. There’s also a crucial relational component to managing people. In this leadership video, we’re getting relational. Let’s talk about how sharing purpose, or “the why,” with your people can lead to better work experiences and more sustainable results over the long term.
Culture-Centric Hiring: Win the New Talent Game
When it comes to the job hunt, it’s a buyer’s market these days. And job searchers are looking for more than just a set of benefits. They are looking for fit. What does this mean for organizations looking to hire?
It means you will need to work harder to find the right talent that will help you move your organization forward. Here are five insights to help your organization navigate this hiring frenzy and come out the other end with the right people.
How to Scale Management and Leadership in Your Company
We just finished a fun project with a client creating a Management and Leadership Style Guide. The partners of this company wanted to guide the development of their new managers in a way that’s meaningful both to them and to the staff they oversee.
Is It Time to Hire a Director of Culture?
The job title “director of culture” is relatively new within the past five or so years. But we’re seeing more and more smaller to mid-size, entrepreneurial companies creating this role within their organizations.
10 Things to Think About Before You Get Work-Married
I was recently asked for insights on what people should think about before becoming business partners.
Partnership is marriage. Period. When it’s great, it’s great, and when it’s challenging…you have to dig in. Partnership is being legally entwined with someone else (or multiple people), for better or worse. Read more…
Is your new boss messing with your mojo?
Hello!
I’ve had several clients this past year that have had new bosses enter the picture – sometimes at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. One even had this happen within just weeks of joining a new company!
A new leader can bring about excitement, fear, and a whole lot of uncertainty.
For some, uncertainty is invigorating and for others, it’s a fear trigger.
We want to make sure that fear around uncertainty doesn’t get in the way of you and your potential.
Both Sides of the New Talent Game
It’s a buyer’s market these days. Every time I visit LinkedIn, someone is searching for a Talent Manager. People want – and need – good in-house recruiters. Independent recruiters and recruiting firms alike have a bumper crop of jobs and roles to fill.
What does this mean for those looking to fill roles, and conversely, what does this mean for you as the job seeker? Read more…
Get Out of Your Element; Get Back in the Game
Think back on your career. What are the experiences that brought on the most personal growth, or are most fulfilling to look back upon? I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Read more…
Five Ways to Architect Inspiration
“Inspiration” isn’t some nice-to-have bonus at your office.
It’s essential to doing the kind of work you want to do. We’d place it up there with electricity and good coffee.
As a Creative Executive, you can’t put off inspiration until after all the “real work” is done. (Tweet+Share) (And when does that ever happen anyway?)
It has to be at the top of your mind. Every. Single. Day. Inspiration has to suffuse your leadership and the work culture you put into motion. (Tweet+Share)
Inspiration can take all kind of forms: Read more…
Why It Isn’t Your Job to Make People Happy
Happiness isn’t everything. Especially in how you lead.
Is it important to help build happiness? Yes. Is it the main thing that matters? No.
Your No. 1 job is to engage your people. Trying to make them happy and engaging them are two very different things.
We don’t always have perfect contentment, ease and satisfaction at work. And, really, we shouldn’t: Read more…
The Crappy Part About Passion
We like to talk a lot about following our passions. What we mention a lot less, though, is that passion can mean suffering.
I was recently watching Todd Henry’s talk “Be Creative Under Pressure” from the 3% Conference. The whole video is worth a watch, but one part especially stuck with me: He talks about the Latin root for the word passion: to suffer or to endure.
Think about people, things and ideas you’ve been passionate about in the last few years. Now, can you think of the suffering that accompanied those passions? Read more…