Dan Kersten told me that his rock bottom smartphone moment came when his wife asked his son, Ben, what he loves about his Dad. “He gives me hugs, he makes cool things out of cardboard, and he’s always playing with his phone,” Ben responded. And that, Dan says, is when he realized he was addicted
What’s more important to leadership effectiveness: having low anxiety or high skill? As I realized last week, that question isn’t as simple as it might seem. I was on fire last week. In fact, I actually told a friend that I was “firing on all cylinders.” I was energetic, confident, focused, and relaxed. And I
Five years ago, I took a surprising phone call from one of my peers at another Dale Carnegie office. “Matt,” he said calmly. “We’ve been invited into an RFP by a large local company. We can’t win it by ourselves. Would you be open to collaborating with us on it and we’ll split the revenue?”
Ask someone why they want a particular job, and they might tell you they: Are looking for a new challenge Are passionate about the product/company Want to leverage their skills, abilities, and experience Have a connection to the organization’s culture/values Have practical considerations (e.g., money, hours, location) These are all good reasons. Yet research shows
It was the most upset I’ve ever been at work. Years ago, a part of my job was to negotiate contracts with vendors. One negotiation reached an impasse. The vendor raised his voice slightly and accused me of personally derailing the process. My reaction was intense. I shouted something back at him in my defense,
Psychologists say that anger is a “secondary” emotion. It safeguards you from dealing with harder emotions, like shame, sadness, or fear. It also generates a powerful, self-soothing neurochemical. And it creates a heightened sense of control. As the anger expert Dr. Leon Seltzer says, “If anger helps you feel in control, no wonder you can’t
How might you describe the organizational cultures you’ve worked in? For me, I’ve worked in independent-detached cultures, toxic-politics cultures, unhealthy-anxiety cultures, and high-trust cultures. The one constant across all of these is that the organization’s culture—the way people think, behave, and interact—has influenced my own thinking, behavior, and interactions. You’ve probably experienced something similar. It’s
I’m speed-walking through the airport, on the phone with my Dad, when he suggests I look up one of his friends in my destination city. That’s awkward. I’ve never heard of this guy and he’s not my contemporary. But I went ahead and googled the guy and invited him to lunch. I drove my rental
After my post last week about a difficult conversation I’d had with a colleague, several people reached out to me to share their own experiences. They told me things like: We have tense dynamics like that in our partner group. I’m struggling to have a hard conversation about performance with an employee. I’ve been there.
I was confidently rolling through my day when I got an email intended for someone else. It was a strongly worded message criticizing my leadership, sent by a colleague who felt they’d been poorly treated. Seeing that felt like a punch in the stomach. And the discussion that followed was really hard. But, like many
Matt Norman is president of Norman & Associates, which offers Dale Carnegie Training in the North Central US. Dale Carnegie Training is a global organization ...READ MORE