Articles

Employees Wired for Self-Interest: You Go First and Get Me Right Did you realize everyone, including your employees, is wired for self-interest? Okay, consider the perspective of your employee, who’s thinking: “I need you to go first, ‘get me right,’ then I will happily focus on my teammate’s welfare. This feeling of connection comes from […]

The Science of Smart Decisions: How Decision Science Transforms Leadership Development Most of the time, others yield to the highest-ranking person in the room to make the safest decision and play it safe themselves, too. Making the right decision based solely on past experiences could be a mistake. It could be heavily biased thinking, or

Mastering Conversational Intelligence for Strategic Leadership Have you ever felt like you were required to collaborate with the enemy who happens to be your peer or internal customer, and you are both cross-functionally dependent on each other? You feel that you’re working hard to make connections, learn the business, or get through your to-do list,

Discernment: A Critical Leadership Power for Upgrading Decision-Making I always tell my child that being a parent does not come with a how-to user manual, even though it would have been nice to reference standard operating procedures (SOPs) just once—more specifically, as my son ascended into adolescence, where the stakes were higher. Much like parenting

Vital Business Practice: Closed-Loop Communication Have you heard of two-way radio communication protocol in the military where certain etiquette must be followed in the dialogue exchange? Team members follow tight closed-loop communications to ensure messages are receieved when stakes are high and stress is heavy, just like on the battlefield. Utilizing this protocol improves the

Six Steps to Designing Thriving Relationship Connections in a Digital Social Exchange Did you know that 95% of your purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind? Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman’s research indicates that we humans enter every buying decision from a personally perceived frame of reference. From my research, this frame of reference is

14 Key Steps to Become a Better Team Player at Work As a member of a team, you have a responsibility to help your co-workers, just as you’d expect them to offer assistance when you need it. However, when we’re all busy with our own responsibilities, we may not always be mindful of the challenges

Opening Locked Doors: Social Isolation in the Conversational Space Have you ever felt less than your best at the end of a conversation? Frustrated because you could not fully communicate the genius of your ideas or concern? Perhaps you had no opportunity to participate as someone else’s competitive power in the conversation space created dominance.

Command-and-Control Leadership Can Feed Your Ego; Instead, Aim for Cocreation Peter Drucker once said, “The leader of the past knew how to tell. The leader of the future will know how to ask.” As leaders, it’s time to slow down and deeply examine how you converse with others and influence them. Leadership happens in the conversational space first

Why Are Women Absent From So Many Strategic Conversations? Did you know that both males and females speak, on average, 16,000 words per day? Most of us believe that words are just words, so we tend to use them without much regard for the dynamics at play in the conversational space. We, humans, have an unconscious