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Showing posts from September, 2013

Best People To Learn From In Your Organization

If you are a manager or a leader within your organization there are two groups of people that I think you can learn the most from as far as making your team run better. First is the new people, fresh into your organization, without the baggage and history clouding their judgement and decisions. I make it a practice to talk with my new employees after they have been with the team for 90 days and get their insights. It doesn't matter if they are an experienced veteran changing companies for a new opportunity, or someone entering the workforce as their first real job. The information they have can help you see things with a new perspective since you are one of those people with a clouded view. What do you like that we do? What do you understand now that you wish someone would have explained earlier to you? What is one thing you would change? What do we do well you think we should do more of? Who are the individuals that have been the most helpful to you? What did they do that

Learning About Humility As A Football Fan

I played football a little bit growing up but I was made to play basketball and baseball, but over the years I have become a pretty big fan of the game. I'm a hard core Minnesota Vikings fan and focused most of my attention on the pro game, until recently. You see I've been blessed to be related through marriage to two exceptional young men who have worked hard and realized their dreams of continuing to play football at the collegiate level. This is something almost every boy dreams of growing up, just pick your sport. It has been an interesting experience as I've paid closer attention to stories in the media as well as fans, coaches and players on twitter. The passion that fans can show for their team can take some rather ugly turns though. If things aren't seemingly perfect the fans can turn very quickly. I am amazed at the level of hatred that fans can fire out at their so called favorite team. This got me thinking, what is a fan? What does the behavior of fans tell

Combating Complacency

Sometimes I think I get lost in my own thinking that I begin making up terms like Defensive Complacency and Offensive Analysis. Let me help you with my definitions of these terms: Defensive Complacency – The state of being content with how things in your organization are run, so much so that when someone questions things or believes that you can achieve more, you talk about the reasons it is the way it is. Offensive Analysis – The act of asking questions about why things are done the way they are in your organization, but done in a way that creates a sense of being attacked by the person being questioned. If we were all asking ourselves how can we make things better, on a daily basis, would either of these conditions exist? I get a lot of people don't like change, but what have we done in our society that has created an environment such as this? Everyone wants to not be miserable at work, but do we bring the misery on ourselves by not working to make things better? If I ha

We Need More Mercy At Work

Mercy is a word that seems to not exist in the workplace, why is that? We are all human, therefore we all make mistakes. When you make a mistake don't you realize it and feel bad? You know you messed up, you are probably beating yourself up over what happened, recognizing where you went wrong. Then, you get copied on the email chain or overhear a conversation where people are talking about the mistake you made. Nobody will come out and call you names, but you can hear it in their voice and you are convinced that everyone thinks you are the biggest idiot working at your organization. Don't worry though, because the vultures will be circling their next victim because someone else will be making a mistake soon enough and they will forget all about you. Choose to be different in your workplace: If someone else makes a mistake, support them, step in and ask if there is anything you can do to help them recover from it. If you were in that situation, how good would it feel to hav