Life is about growth, whether you’re running a company, yourself or your family. If you’re not growing you’re either stagnating or falling behind. While it’s possible for growth to happen organically, it’s not something you can or should depend on. Positive growth—growth that leads to value—takes conscious effort. So how do you do it? To
Knowledge is power, so the saying goes. So when Matt DeKam, Senior Commodity Manager at Ingersoll Rand, told me that transparency has been one of the keys to his most successful supplier relationships, I was intrigued. After all, suppliers want to maximize profit, and buyers want to minimize cost. Can they really both meet their
We talk a lot about employee engagement and its connection to organizational results. And substantial research shows that employees are more engaged when they feel valued by their supervisor, senior leaders and company culture. But does it matter if our vendors are engaged? Will it affect their productivity and commitment if they feel valued? Peder
It vexes us all: that never-ending, un-prioritized barrage of messages—from spam to strategy, trivial to tragedy. Since nearly every coaching session I conduct makes its way to the problem of email, I decided to interview Nate Whittier, a good friend and the best industrial psychologist I know, to learn how we might manage email more
“Leadership is an intense journey into yourself.” – Bill Hybels The scene: An auditorium filled with thousands of leaders from around the world, gathered for the 2014 Willow Creek Leadership Summit. We watch as a group of kids with disabilities presents an honest, sometimes heartbreaking video that begins with each answering the question, “What’s hard
Last week, my wife and I became concerned about a rash that had developed on the head and neck of our newborn baby. Worried that it was an allergic reaction, my wife called the after-hours nurses’ hotline to present the problem. The nurse began by determining the urgency by asking life-or-death questions. Next, the nurse
Categorizing people by giving them labels is something we humans are really good at. We’ve always had tribes, territories, kingdoms, neighborhoods, cliques and departments, and sometimes these boundaries are helpful and healthy—they help us determine where we stop and others start in processes, laws and affinities. But other times, putting someone in a category makes
What if you knew as much about immigration reform as you do about your job? What if you were as comfortable discussing the trade-offs of imposing economic sanctions on other countries as you were discussing your favorite sport? What if you had as much of a well-informed point of view about poverty alleviation as you
What’s in a name? Since leading the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts has bucked a long-standing tradition. Instead of referring to lawyers arguing cases as “Opponents,” he calls them “Friends.” About this shift, Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus said in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “I think it does have an impact on
“The longer I’m a leader, the more I’m convinced that the key to my success is discerning who to disappoint and what I can’t get done.” The executive who said this has a point. I work with someone who has the ability to disappoint people, and it’s made her extremely valuable to the company—because she
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