Performance is a team sport According to a nineteen country ADPRI study of almost 20,000 individuals, most work — in every industry, in every region of the world, and at every level in an organization — is actually teamwork; 83% of workers say they do most of their work in teams.The quality of your team experience … Continue reading Stop hiring for roles; start hiring for teams

Please find below a planning framework for the evolving worldwide pandemic and its personal and economic impact.  This is by no means a comprehensive list but it does provide some helpful ideas, information and tips for how to address the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic for you, your team and your customers.  FYI - This living document was compiled … Continue reading COVID-19 Planning Framework

Why we sleep? According to Matthew Walker, sleep researcher and author of Why We Sleep, sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.Within the brain, sleep enriches a diversity of functions, including our ability to: Learn Memorize Make logical decisions and choices Recalibrate our emotional brain circuits, allowing us to navigate … Continue reading We all are socially, organizationally, economically, physically, behaviorally, nutritionally, linguistically, cognitively, and emotionally dependent on sleep.

Here is a recent piece from Ryan Holiday about parenting from Seneca - a well-known Stoic philosopher. Following that is a table that outlines Amy Edmondson and her approach on how to be a leader, not a boss.  I believe they are quite similar in how to build great teammates and teams- the first is about parenting and … Continue reading Amy Edmondson and Seneca on high-performing teams

70% of all change initiatives fail. According to HBR article - Cracking the Code of Change People do not hate change, they hate change foisted upon them.The brutal fact is that if you want your company to grow, it is constantly changing. You, as a leader, are a key agent of change.  Without a proven change process, you are rolling … Continue reading How to make nearly every change initiative last

Useful HBR article to run better problem solving meetings with groups. I like the way the author simplifies the process and provides a methodology to be more effective when bringing a group of people together to solve problems.One thing that I think is missing is the "Team" aspect. This methodology fits into a model that I think is … Continue reading Why Groups Struggle to Solve Problems Together

What goes into creating a great new hire experience? Please find a great article sharing how a Small Giant company makes the new employee experience a memorable one - in a good way.My favorite bit:"The dreaded first lunch: without structured onboarding, this can often make team members feel like the new kid in the school cafeteria. A … Continue reading 4 Steps to a More Successful Onboarding Program

"The good men may do separately is small compared to what they may do collectively." Benjamin Franklin He would know.....Mr. Franklin started many first-of-its-kind successful organizations through his junto of 12 members. Some are still in existence today. The nation's first Lending Library University of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Hospital Most notably, he was the only Founding Father who was … Continue reading Why Performance is a Team Sport

I have been reading a couple of books by historian Yuval Noah Harari and Steven Pinker - two great thinkers of history and cognitive science.  In Sapiens and Homo Deus, Harari has an interesting take of why Communism, for all intents and purposes, failed. In Pinker's Enlightenment Now, he shows how Democracy has flourished in the past 30 years - doubling … Continue reading Why too many businesses look like communism

Click on this link to see the full video (0:38) of the screenshot above showing how one can get into trouble by doing too many things at once. In a February 2006 TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson said the following..."Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the … Continue reading Why the leader has to fire herself from the day to day