Team & Culture Building
Celebration: It’s Not Just for Holidays Anymore
West Michigan celebrated the 4th of July with some spectacular fire works shows! How great it was to see people gathered in celebration once again. Celebrations certainly have a way of bringing people together around the positive accomplishments we share. They also stir a feeling of inspiration as we look to the future and ponder…
Read MoreWiring – Keeping It In Perspective
(This post was first published here on January 23, 2017.) The DISC behavioral assessment tool was instrumental in my earliest efforts to understand myself and intentionally grow as a leader. That was around 25 years ago, and I can still remember how helpful and powerful the learning from DISC was for me. It awakened my…
Read MoreA Safe Space to Innovate – More Prevalent than Ever?
Many organizations have some sort of defined innovation processes. They each use their own language and bucket the steps a little differently, but the main concepts and the flow are often quite similar. Leading by DESIGN’s steps, for example, look like this: Identify the opportunity Discover as much information as possible about the opportunity Incubate Generate…
Read MoreLeading Change Reprised
Suspense. Is it a bad thing or a good thing? Some people won’t watch a suspenseful movie or read a suspenseful book. Others won’t read or watch unless there IS suspense. Suspense is that sense of fear and excitement we feel when something is unknown. When we don’t know what’s next—but want to know—we have that…
Read MoreThe Power of Belief
You may find this hard to believe, but there is one thing that is so powerful that it can destroy everything good you have learned from LEAD 24/7. And this powerful thing with such destructive capability isn’t hiding in the cubical next to you. It isn’t in your smart phone. And it isn’t in your…
Read MoreLeaning Into Healthy Conflict: A Second Short Story
After writing back-to-back posts on what I believe is our most important topic for West Michigan leaders (Leaning Into Healthy Conflict), I shared a fictional story about the use of this conflict model last week . This week I’m going to share one more short story about conflict. This time it’s a real one, though…
Read MoreLeaning Into Healthy Conflict: A Short Story
I recently wrote two back-to-back posts on what I believe is our most important topic for West Michigan leaders: Leaning Into Healthy Conflict. That topic is still on my mind, so I’m writing another piece on it today. However, this one’s a little different. This one is a short story in a conversation format. I…
Read MoreThe Lenses We Wear
The first time I became painfully aware of the lenses through which I see the world was during an anti-racism training the organization I worked for at the time held for staff and other key leaders. I was twenty-seven years old. Most of my memories of the training have faded, but a very important one…
Read MoreInnovating Innovation, Part 3
This is the third in my mini-series on creating new value, also known as innovation. The first post took a deep dive into the concept of value—what it is and how it should be core to the existence of every organization—especially for-profit organizations. The second post took a deep dive into into the first of…
Read MoreInnovating Innovation, Part 1
You may know that we’ve been redesigning some modules of LEAD 365 this year (along with changing its name to LEAD 24/7). Some of you went through a version of the program before we even started exploring innovation. Over the past two years some of you participated in our innovation session, which was taught, at…
Read More