Years ago, I bought my dream car: a three-year-old 1984 BMW 528e. Suddenly, I started noticing other BMWs just like mine on the road everywhere.
Psychologists tell us that this is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This occurs when the thing you’ve just noticed, experienced, or been told about, suddenly seems to crop up constantly.
Although not as glamorous as the President’s annual address to Congress, a State of the Company address is no less important. Delivered regularly to the workforce by your Visionary or Integrator, the SOCA is a critical part of sharing with everyone your vision and your plan to achieve it.
Once your leadership team discovers your company’s Core Values, it’s time to start using them to lay the foundation of your organization’s culture. To do that, you must have a compelling Core Values Speech.
When the culture of a business begins to decline, many leadership teams are tempted to blame their employees for their own failures instead of recognizing that the solution begins with the team not only taking ownership of the issues it has created, but also in taking ownership of solving them.
To be an effective business team, every member must be bold enough to enter the danger, engage in constructive conflict and repair the damage.
What do you say when one of your team members asks you to keep something confidential? There’s a dangerous workplace situation that all leaders and managers find themselves drawn into from time to time. I call it the “confidential complaint” trap.
This happens to me when I’m working with leadership teams. Someone will stop me in the hall during a break and say, “May I talk to you for a minute, NOT in the room with the group?”
There’s a natural inclination to say yes to this kind of request. As leaders, we all want to be approachable. We may also want to find out what’s going on inside our organization. But promising blanket confidentiality for run-of-the-mill complaints can be a dangerous slope because it is diametrically opposed to creating a healthy workplace culture.
