Optimists or pessimists? Wrong question. We all want to fill our teams with optimists, folks who look on the bright side, positive people. Or do we. Optimists are often more fun to be around. They look on the bright side. They see opportunity. Pessimists on the other hand usually consider themselves to be realists. It’s […]

Zoom meetings (or Teams, or Google meet, yada-yada — pick your video meeting platform) are still a thing, and therefore so is Zoom fatigue. Our calendars are still laden with meetings — one-on-ones and group meetings both — in which we’re going to have to stare into a camera, tell Jody that she’s on mute. […]

Exit interviews are notoriously poor at providing useful information. The information you do get comes too late to keep this valuable employee on-board, and it’s hard to separate the valuable input from the bias of the interviewee. Therefore, someone brilliant came up with the idea of the stay interview to provide better information that’s more […]

Have you decided that it is (or that it may be) time to fire someone? There’s no best way. Firing people sucks. Dark topic… I hope to shed some light. And to mix a metaphor, this article will give you the key — heck, 7 keys — to the least worst way to go about […]

Come on… Surely technology has taken us beyond the point where we need to use a quill and ink to take meeting notes. Wait a sec, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We all have heard a bajillion times just how expensive meetings are, that there are too many of them, that people hate them, and […]

“You’re nice,” is a compliment. Many of us would like to be seen as nice. Truth is… Nice isn’t necessarily good. Nice at work — and in so many other areas of our lives — can be destructive. And now you’re probably as tired of the word “nice” as I am. Good. Maybe you’ll stop […]

What do your company and diapers have in common? They’ve got to be changed regularly. It’s not your fault. You’re not doing anything wrong. Your company (unlike diapers) isn’t full of crap. Rather, we live in a changing world and you’ve got changing goals, and so what got you to the present you’re in won’t […]

You’ve got something important to communicate to someone on your team — and maybe they don’t want to hear it. Before you even begin to deliver your message, you feel a pit in your stomach as you start to fear the dreaded defensiveness. As leaders, we’ve got the responsibility to have difficult conversations and challenge […]