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Do You Have to Quit Your Toxic Workplace?
If you or someone you care about feels trapped in a toxic work environment, the most obvious move is to quit. But quitting is often not the only (or the best) option. And in some cases, it’s not an option at all. Here are four options for what to do when you find yourself in a toxic situation at work.
How to tell if you have a toxic work environment
The Great Resignation is on. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to evaluate the level of risk our teams and organizations are facing. Has your workplace become toxic? Should you expect a spike in resignations? This article provides a framework and examples to allow you to assess the warning signs and to anticipate whether turnover is about to be a major problem in your team or organization.
8 Techniques to Make Meetings More Effective (Part II)
In my previous post, I provided four techniques you can use to set your meetings up for success. Today, I’m back with four facilitation strategies that will improve the quality of your discussions and the likelihood that your meeting creates meaningful progress.
8 Techniques to Make Your Meetings More Effective (Part I)
Why are we passively walking into meetings that we know are going to be a complete waste of time? What if we were to resolve to make our meetings better? This post will give you four things you can do to set your meetings up for success. In the next post, I’ll get into the facilitation techniques that ensure you’ll get the best outcome once you’re together.
Seeing Through Diverse Lenses
It is too easy to let your ideas and perspectives become limited by the milieu in which you live and work. Doing so constrains your thinking, which has an impact both on your work life and your personal life. Today, I’m taking account of all my defaults and committing to diversifying the lenses through which I’m taking in the world. I’d love to hear the spots where might want to search out new voices.
We are planning all wrong
Just because you’ve got fancy-schmancy planning software doesn’t mean the universe will fall in line. Planning for 100% capacity is a recipe for dissaster. Here’s what mathematicians tell us is the right amount of slack to leave in the system.
End Your Meetings Properly
Failing to close your meetings properly short-circuits alignment, reduces accountability, and threatens trust. Do these 4 quick steps to “stick the landing” in your next meeting.
Stop With the Generational Jokes Already
Generational jokes are a hit at the company conference but they’re doing us all a disservice. Here’s how to reframe what you’ve been calling generational differences and why it’s important that you make the change.
Prioritize Means Deprioritize
Is your team great a prioritizing? And by that, I mean adding more and more tasks to the list of priorities? How are you at de-prioritizing? Not so hot? Yeah, I know the problem. Here are a few tips on how to get just as good at taking things off your plate as you are at adding to it.
Too Many False Alarms
Does your team jump all over issues, eating up valuable meeting time and disempowering the layers below you? Leadership teams add more value when you focus on patterns, not points. Here’s a look at the cost of too many false alarms.
Design by Committee
Does your team try to design processes by consensus? You know the old saying, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee,” right? Delving into design as a team is usually a bad idea but forsaking your obligation to steer core processes is not the answer. The answer is to spend time envisioning. Here’s what that entails…
Stop Solving Problems
Does your leadership team love to roll up your sleeves and start solving problems? If so, you’re doing it wrong. Leadership teams are not well-positioned to solve the majority of problems. Attempting to do so wastes time, yields ineffective approaches, while simultaneously disempowering the people whose job it is to address the issue. Here’s what you can do instead.