Sooner or later, each of us is going to say or communicate something that is hurtful, insensitive, or just plain stupid. Over the course of a business lifetime, this will occur on more than just a few occasions. To be clear, I’m not talking about the grossly out-of-bounds acts and
Imagine . . . . Imagine someone you care about extending her hand toward you. In her hand she holds a small, robin’s egg blue box wrapped with a white ribbon. “Here,” she says, “it’s for you.” What feelings would that beautiful little blue box evoke? Anticipation? Excitement? Gratitude? Curiosity? For
On a visit last month to the Northwest Montana Fair in Kalispell, I stood in the horse barn watching a teenage girl attempt to pull her mare into a stall. With sweat forming across her forehead and her feet sliding across the straw-covered boards of the barn, she pulled hard
Consider two entirely different organizations: one is our largest automotive producer; the other, a massive federal agency. What General Motors and the Veterans Administration have in common now are acts of malfeasance that not only have created outrage, but tainted their reputations and the public’s trust. The facts are shocking.
From what we have learned from their lawyers’ recently released report, executives and other leaders at General Motors apparently perfected their own non-verbal communication styles with an effectiveness which would have made Don Corleone proud. As candidly confirmed by CEO Mary Barra, leaders developed a cultural practice of tacitly agreeing not
“My cats shredded your couch. You are correct.” This is the phrase that converted my husband’s lack of appreciation for cats into a wholesale intolerance of anything remotely feline. It was uttered by his then roommate, a woman with two cats to whom he very reluctantly rented one of the
“My male co-worker just called me, ‘babe.’” I turned to look at the forty-something woman sitting next to me on the plane who had just ended her phone call. “Can you believe someone would say that?,” she said. “How could he not know any better?” She explained that she didn’t
There’s a locker room full of facts yet to surface surrounding Jonathan Martin’s departure from the Miami Dolphins. The second-year lineman claims to have been bullied, threatened, and harassed by Richie Incognito, a veteran teammate who played next to him on the offensive line. Martin is 320 pounds, a powerful
Irrespective of party affiliation, I’m willing to bet that most Americans are irked, at the very least, over the failure of the ACA website to effectively launch after the government invested hundreds of millions of dollars to create it. Starting now and going forward, there will be many software autopsies
Colors mean a lot in our workplaces. They can symbolize issues, groups, and messages. Think of black, white, pink, red, and green, and, more than likely, several associations will quickly come to mind. Green means “go” or “money” or “environmentally conscious.” Most color associations are fairly easy to come up
