05
Feb

DON’T Bring your Empathy & Sympathy to Work?

Do we really need to offer more of ourselves at work? Do we really need to add sympathy and empathy to our list of work tasks? Or, can we all benefit from a few kind words? “We are all adults here, time to suck-it-up!” There are many thoughts and/or comments surrounding “emotions” in the workplace. “We are all adults here, time …
10
Aug

6 things leaders can learn from dog training

My dog, Piper, is awesome.  The reason she’s awesome: shortly after getting her from the local SPCA, I spent a lot of time training her.  I have continued training her over the past 9 years.  The more time I have spent training her, the more I have noticed parallels between dog training and employee training.  Here are a few principles that …
20
Jun

Listen Leaders! Show your people you value them

One of the most important elements of engagement is a feeling of being valued.  The problem is that many leaders don’t know how to show that they do value their teams. When I’ve discussed this essential need of feeling valued, managers often think that they’ve done all they can to make employees feel valued.  “I got business …
12
Jun

Do pyjama (pajama for my US friends) days build engagement?

I was chatting with friends the other night and one of them mentioned that morale was poor at their workplace, so they were having a “wear your pyjamas to work” day. Will having a pyjama party actually improve morale?  No way. In fact, my friend was dreading it, and thought it was somewhat impractical in a work environment where half of …
25
May

Fun gets results!

“The most wasted day is one in which we have not laughed” – Anonymous Some may scoff at this quote and insert “produces widgets/sales/results” instead of “laughed”, but fun can actually have a very positive impact on your business.   Take a look at successful organizations such as Zappos, SouthWest Airlines, …
09
May

Serving your Internal Customers

I think most leaders realize how important it is to provide great service to clients or customers. I often find, though, that some organizations forget about engaging and “serving” their internal customers – their employees. In fact, I would argue that the relationship that leaders cultivate with their employees is actually more important …
28
Apr

Storytelling to engage your team

I recently had an opportunity to participate in a webinar, led by Anecdote, a consultant firm out of Australia.  Anecdote specializes in storytelling to bring company’s strategies to life, and the webinar was about leveraging storytelling to build engagement.  I have never worked with Anecdote, so can’t tell you much about them but I can …