Today, as I lay on ice to help aleviate my chronic back pain, I felt just a wee bit sorry for myself.  I was scanning my in box and I had an email from coach Jim Vuocolo, who had received this from a friend, and felt compelled to share it with his friends.  He didn’t [...]

  This morning at our weekly MAC Toastmasters Meeting I was asked to give a short recap of my Saturday breakout session “Pumping Mental Iron”. One of the things I didn’t get to do on Saturday, since my time was shortened (read my last blog post) from 50 minutes to about 35-40 minutes, was to do [...]

If a job could talk, what would it say about itself?
What would it say are the behaviors, key motivators, and personal skills necessary for superior performance?
 
Job Benchmarking is a process that tells you that very thing, about any position in your organization. 
 
80% of turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions, and a job analysis is the most [...]

   Growing your Business without Hiring Anyone New 
Yesterday we talked about Strategy, Today we’ll talk about Efficiency, and Tomorrow we’ll talk Viabillity
 
Part Two: Efficiency
 
·       Systems, Processes, and Standardized Procedures. When these are not in place, or inadequate or outdated,  your organization is wasting so much time.  The average worker spends up to 20% of [...]

Recently at a continuing education class on Co-Dependency, I was given a handout I found hilarious.  It is most funny if you are familiar with the twelve steps of any recovery program, which are, by the way, not just good recovery steps, but excellent steps to follow in daily life in your business and personal [...]

“OMG, Here she goes again with the EQ stuff!  I’m focused on the bottom line and don’t have time do deal with all this ’soft stuff’…”
I know, but here’s the deal. It’s all soft stuff.  Yes, that’s what I said.  It’s all soft stuff.  Just imagine, you show up at your office, and find out all [...]

I just returned from Phoenix, where a few hundred of the world’s top management consultants were gathered for our annual conference.  The theme of workplace engagement kept coming up; so much so, that we decided that our February 2010 theme is “Re-Engaging the WorkForce”.
As much as you might be thinking “What?  Anyone with a job in today’s [...]

As leaders, how can we promote and encourage our workforce to stay productive in these crazy and stressful times? Stress is defined as a general and non-specific response to a “threat”.  That response to a threat frequently appears in the form of fear, disengagement, diminished cognitive ability, lack of creativity, loss of emotional control, fatigue, and eventually chronic pain and illness. The source of [...]

You are a passenger on an airplane.  You look out the window of the place and the wing is on fire.  The oxygen masks drop down.  The flight attendants make an announcement that the pilot is going to have to make a crash landing on water.  You hear yelling: “Brace…Brace”.  People around you are starting [...]

All of us need to improve our decision making abilities in this business environment. 
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) measures your overall general intelligence. EQ (Emotional Quotient) measures your emotional intelligence: your ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of emotions to facilitate high levels of collaboration and productivity.  This is how effective leaders [...]