 “There are very simple things you can change about your behavior -- as simple as memorizing a few basic words and concepts -- to leverage emotions and increase the odds that you'll achieve your goals.” So writes Bill Murphy Jr., contributing editor of Inc.. Murphy contends that people with high emotional intelligence keep five simple words in mind when they hope to be persuasive.
Which of these words resonate most with you, and why? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.
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 Micromanagement gets lots of attention, but under-management may be just as big a problem. This is the term Victor Lipman, author of The Type B manager, has given to a constellation of behaviors that often co- exist: Weak performance management, a tendency to avoid conflicts, and generally lackluster accountability. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Lipman explains that results often suffer as a result.
“Under-management can often fly under the radar because the managers who have these tendencies aren’t necessarily incompetent; on the contrary, they often know their business well, are good collaborators, and are well-liked.” The problem is they just do not manage! There are several intertwined causes behind this phenomenon, including too strong a desire to be liked and a penchant for avoiding conflict. If you suspect you are under-managing, try these steps:
Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  Have you talked to a friend today? A recent study published in Communication Research suggests that people who engage in meaningful conversations may be happier and experience better mental health.
Researcher Jeffrey Hall identified seven types of communication commonly found in social interactions: Catching up, meaningful talk, joking, showing care, listening, valuing others and their opinions, and offering sincere compliments. The researchers instructed over 900 participants to engage in any one of the seven types of talk on a given day. Some participants performed the tasks via online messages or phone calls, but most spoke in person. At the end of the day, the participants reported how good or bad they felt, as measured by feelings of stress, connection, well-being, and loneliness. The results showed:
While one conversation was enough to increase positive feelings, more than one was even more effective. And while conversations by text or phone call were helpful, in-person conversations yielded the best results. The final takeaway: Stay intentional about maintaining your relationships! Have you had a meaningful conversation with a friend lately, and how did you feel afterward? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  You may have seen the letter “B” added to the three-letter acronym DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), which has become ubiquitous in the world of business, government, and academia. The B stands for Belonging. According to Forbes senior contributor William Arruda, “Belonging is critical for inspiring a productive, engaged culture within any team.”
The hybrid/remote work environment has diluted human interaction, along with people’s sense of belonging. More than half of American employees reported feelings of isolation in the past year, and, according to McKinsey, 51% of people who left their jobs in 2022 did so in search of belonging and connection. Great Place to Work revealed that when employees experience belonging, “they’re three times more likely to say their workplace is fun and five times more likely to want to stay at their company for a long time.” So, how can organizations foster a sense of belonging?
Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  The best leaders motivate and inspire people. Writing in Inc., contributing editor Marcel Schwantes characterizes four simple, accessible behaviors that consistently create impact and drive performance:
Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  Without quality leadership, employee engagement and retention are endangered. Turnover hurts the bottom line, since hiring a new employee to replace an old one can cost anywhere from an additional 50 – 200 percent of the role’s salary. A far better solution, according to Katy Tynan, a principal analyst at Forrester, a global research and consulting firm, is to invest in leadership training.
According to a survey of more than 700 HR leaders conducted by Forrester and HR Executive Magazine, 65 percent of businesses spend up to $2500 per employee annually on such trainings. Consider that if five managers making $100,000 annually quit, a company might need to spend $500,000 replacing them. Of course, leadership development isn’t something you can simply throw money at, and there is no guarantee that one course will transform a person’s leadership ability. Tynan’s advice for retaining the best talent is to reinforce workshops and virtual learning programs with immediate opportunities for practice. For example, after a workshop on giving feedback, HR leaders could match attendees with learning partners to practice in simulated real situations. Time, of course, has its own cost, but creating a learning community of practice can have deep and lasting benefits. How much does your organization spend on leadership training, and how much time does it allocate for follow-up? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  Tommy Mello, writing in Inc., says he doesn’t relish having tough conversations with employees. He is certainly not alone. “A lot of leaders have a hard time having tough conversations, and that is one of the big reasons why companies fail.” Quoting Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations, he reminds us, "Never be afraid of the conversations you are having. Be afraid of the conversations you are not having."
So how can you improve your approach for tough conversations?
How did you recently handle a tough conversation with an employee? Did you initiate it or did they? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  Life often presents us with good news/bad news scenarios. When we have to break such news to others, we tend to want to lead with the good stuff. But when Jeff Haden, contributing editor of Inc., polled his readers, most said they would rather hear bad news first.
The tendency to lead with good news is something researchers call “priming emotional-protection.” In non-research speak, this means: “This might go badly, so I'll ease into it.” If you have bad news to share, it's natural to seek to protect yourself from how other people may react. But often the goal of delivering bad news is to alert others about a potential issue, to resolve a situation, or to change a plan or direction. So take a moment to put yourself in the other person's shoes. Don't they deserve to know -- and the sooner the better -- of any problem that they are facing? Once people know that there is bad news, they can shift into problem-solving mode. And here is where the news deliverer can be especially helpful. What has already been done to fix the problem? For example, let’s say your company makes laptops, but one of your chip suppliers can’t deliver for a month. That's the bad news. But suppose the news deliverer now tells you that they have already alerted sales and customer service and have already reached out to alternative suppliers. That’s the good news. Now you can pitch in and offer suggestions. Do you tend to deliver bad news before good, or the other way around? Do you think you might alter your approach? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning courses awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  If you're struggling with turnover, or looking to solidify what's currently working in your organization, you've likely been thinking about employee engagement plans. With the media continually talking about attrition and “quiet quitting,” this seems an urgent topic to address.
Organizations need engagement plans that resonate with employees, writes executive coach Robin Camarote. Yet too often such plans are a hodge-podge of initiatives. “Engagement is separate from compensation policies, rewards, and appreciation efforts, like parties and gifts,” says Camarote. "We work best," concludes the author, "when we are invited to participate in arriving at solutions to our day-to-day struggles." The most effective employee engagement programs consist of a series of conversations among leaders and staff that address four essential pillars of engagement: Purpose, Communication, Workplace Environment, and Relationships. These four engagement pillars can include as much or as little formality as desired. For a more simple approach, consider hosting a series of open-ended discussions focusing on one pillar at a time. To learn more about structuring employee engagement conversations, check out our Hardwiring Teamwork curriculum. What is your organization doing to enhance employee engagement? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Create lifetime communication mastery online, with our virtual programs, awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  “There are countess ways to screw up a meeting,” writes contributing editor Jeff Haden in Inc.. In fact, many employees view meetings as “costly” and “unproductive.”
Research shows meetings are even less useful when they start late and when there are too many of them. They are especially counter-productive when participants complain in ways that express futility. Killer phrases like “Nothing can be done about that” or “Nothing will work” can set off a chain reaction of negativity that — as you can imagine — lessens the odds of productive outcomes. Yet, Haden says, smart leaders know how to convert even a sense of futility into effective problem solving. Here’s how: Begin setting an expectation that requires everyone to reframe objections or different opinions as questions. If a participant says, ”There’s no way we can get everyone to work overtime this weekend,” the leader can reply, “Please reframe that as a question.” That might sound like: “How can we get our staff to work overtime this weekend?” Similarly, “We will never finish this job on time,” becomes “What actions can we take to finish this job on time?” Soon enough, such reframing becomes a habit! Now, you’re in problem solving mode. Many of you have experienced our Hardwiring Teamwork course that offers step-by-step guidelines on how to make meetings successful. Check it out here. What do you do to ensure your meetings are productive, and what do you avoid? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Create lifetime communication mastery online, with our virtual programs, awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  Research shows that workers who quit are leaving managers, rather than companies. Managers can increase retention, and productivity, if they learn to lead people while managing the work. But along the way, writes INC. contributing editor Marcel Schwantes, all managers “must confront a few hard truths about how to effectively inspire and get the best out of their people.”
Among these truths:
Can you tell us about a leadership lesson you learned “the hard way?” To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Create lifetime communication mastery online, with our virtual programs, awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  A significant part of a manager’s role is staff development. But if you delegate a task to someone with no prior training simply because you are too busy to handle it, their chances of succeeding are marginal. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Art Markman, PhD, professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas, says managers should stop thinking of handing off responsibilities as delegating (thereby potentially setting the stage for failure) and start taking on the mindset of a trainer instead.
Markman suggests managers actively look for ways to begin upping the responsibilities of your team members:
Taking on some direct reports as apprentices takes effort and extra time, notes Markman, and you will also have to review their work carefully at first. But by adopting this approach, you are helping your associates reach their career goals, and creating a team of trusted colleagues who can step in when you are overwhelmed or unavailable. When was the last time you delegated a task, and did you provide any training to your associate? And what experience have you had when people asked you for help? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. Create lifetime communication mastery online, with our virtual programs, awarded International Gold for Best Hybrid Learning of 2022.  It's inevitable that at some point we will all be the targets of insults, admonishments, or negative feedback. We may be advised to “shake it off” but that’s not so easy. We tend to remember criticism more than we recall praise — due to a phenomenon called the “negativity bias.” This universal tendency for negative emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones is evolutionary, in that it causes us to pay special attention to anything that might be a threat or put us in danger.
According to Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at the University of Queensland and co-author of The Power of Bad: And How to Overcome It, "Our ancestors who had that [negative] bias were more likely to survive.” However this tendency does not serve us very well on a daily basis. Baumeister believes that until we learn how to override the disproportionate impact of the negative, it distorts our view of the world. Of course, the impact of being criticized varies from person to person. But receiving and internalizing negative comments can increase stress, anxiety, frustration and worry, says Lucia Macchia, a behavioral scientist and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. "Dealing with these negative emotions has a great impact on our body as they can even create and exacerbate physical pain," she adds. The good news: Scores of studies have shown that people tend to look on the bright side as they become older. Scientists refer to this effect as the "positivity bias" and they think we start to remember positive details more than negative information from middle age. Baumeister believes this is because we need to learn from failures and criticism in our younger years, but that need diminishes as we age. To reduce our negativity bias sooner, it helps to remember that our genetic programming could be at the root of our ruminating about criticism. Simply recognizing this negativity effect can help us override undesirable responses — and it can also be useful to remember that some criticism says more about the giver than the receiver. Have you ever given more credence to a criticism than it probably warranted? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. We would really like to hear about your experiences. Learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication with our online learning programs.  Leaders consistently rate their own meetings much more positively than attendees do. When managers assume their meetings are going smoothly, they are less likely to solicit feedback and seek opportunities to improve. As a result, frustrations that attendees experience don’t get fixed (irrelevant agenda items, unnecessarily long duration, lack of focus), leaving employees disgruntled and disengaged.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Steven G. Rogelberg, Chancellor’s Professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and author of The Surprising Science of Meetings, helps managers improve their meeting skills. Among his tips:
What have you done to improve the caliber of team meetings? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, visit our online learning programs.  As any manager who has tried it can tell you, onboarding new employees remotely is a challenge. And a bad onboarding experience can have long-lasting negative fallout. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, James M. Citrin and Darleen DeRosa, co-authors of Leading From a Distance: Practical Lessons for Virtual Success, offer recommendations for companies large and small who want to make onboarding strategies succeed.
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