The Culture+ Blog
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High-performance teams come from high-performance cultures
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Leaders: Share the promise not just the business case
The deep breaths were getting louder. I was sitting nearby. I could see his feet fidgeting under the curtain that separated us. The breathing continued to get louder. The medical tech finally entered. "We've got five to do. Which arm would you prefer?" I could feel the young man's anxiety swell. But then something shifted. I think the tech caught on to young man's anxiety. He initiated just a bit of conversation. He got the young man talking. Nothing elaborate. Nothing over the top. But the...
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Old Work is prescriptive and New Work is creative
One of the problems with New Work--the phrase I use to describe the work we are transitioning to as the result of digital transformation--is that the initiation of work is different. Compare New Work to Old Work. Old Work was about showing up to our place of...
Leaders reassure
He made a mistake. An obvious one. One you can't shove under the carpet and ignore. That one mistake led to several more. Flustered, the mistakes seemed to intensify and compound. He made these mistakes in front of 200 audience members. Some in the audience were his...
How big is your “right zone”
How big is your "right" zone? Years ago I used to eat errors in the name of keeping the system running. Sometimes that meant literally eating errors. I would drink wrong coffee drinks, or settle for drive thru orders that had missing food or the wrong food. At some...
Listening to the whole message
I listened to the engineer tell the woman about the standards found in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. You should have seen the look on her face. The engineer could tell she wasn’t getting it, so he decided to dig even deeper into his engineer toolbox...
They are unclear is because we are unclear
Watched ‘The Art of Coaching” over the past couple of days on HBO. This documentary gives us a glimpse into the long relationship between head coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots and Alabama’s head coach Nick Saban. So many details to note for leadership...
From repetitive tasks to discreet projects
Work is forever changing. The essence of the change is that a person’s work is irreversibly transitioning from repetitive tasks to discreet projects. Many jobs now and in years past required the worker to show up and repeat one task or a set of tasks throughout the...
Doing versus achieving
Measuring productivity used to be easy. Years ago I had a job changing customer’s addresses in our system after they mailed us a change of address card. Eight hours a day I was doing data entry. My supervisor could see my production because I would start with a big...
Do you want the best? Start being the best
We all want the best. Right? We want the best people on our team. We want that team of “best people” to create the best products. We want to offer the best services. We want the best outcomes. Often, though, we don’t have the best. We don’t have the best people, the...
The translation genius of Generation X
In the past 10 years Generation X has developed a master skill. That skill? Translation. For so long we (Generation X) listened to our older and wiser leaders and then attempted to make sense of what they were asking. Now, this isn't unique. Everybody does this. We...
How to protect future you
If not right now, then never. If you can’t imagine having lunch with that person right now, don’t schedule it for later. If you wouldn’t want to attend that meeting this afternoon, forget about scheduling it for next week. If the event will bore you to tears today, it...
A moment of inefficiency traded for long term acceleration
It will take longer than you think it should. There will be more questions than you anticipated. The result won’t be as good as you could have produced. It might cost more. Somebody higher up the food chain will make a comment. So why not just do it yourself? Because...
Stop reducing risk
Reduce risk! Feels good, right? You've heard this sentiment over the years. Your spouse, your boss, your financial advisor want to decrease risk for you (and ultimately for them). If we can de-risk something like a job, a project, an investment, an interaction, then...