Category Affective Leadership

2. Top down initiatives are viewed as personal attacks December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence One comment

Top down initiatives viewed as personal attacks

When confronted with a need for change either personally or professionally most people don’t differentiate “what they did” from “who they are”. Instead of focusing their creative resources to battle an outside enemy people view a “demand” for change as a judgment against them personally. Lasting transformation within complex social systems cannot and should not be dictated from the top down or outside in...

3. Transformers resist positional power December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership One comment

Successful change initiatives don’t require everyone, but they do need the situational leaders within the ranks. In describing the transformation to an “Employees First” culture of the 50,000 employee multinational IT Company HCLT, CEO Vineet Nayar believes his employees fell into three distinct categories, lost souls (Zom-Bees), fence sitters and transformers. To accomplish their transition he focused on the transformers.

These were not the happy “go along to get along” type but often t...

5. Success lies not in the validity of our answers, but the quality of our questions. December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership, Astonishing Service, Emotional Intelligence, Positive Deviance No comments

The best solutions are not told or sold, but encouraged and elicited. In the example cited in Transformers resist positional power the HCLT leadership team developed a Facebook style collaborative tool called U&I. Their intention was to share the goals and accomplishments of the organization with all employees. What they discovered was that the “Transformational” team members did not want to be told “what had happened” they wanted to be involved deciding “what would happen”...

The Science of Emotion December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Peer Powered Performance, Positive Deviance

Leadership is a Science

Leadership used to be referred to as an art. Now it is a proven science. Every component of this process has a purpose. Like the endless lines of zeros and ones in binary code, it is not only the content of each component but the space between that produces the results.

Humor with a purpose

laughing_audience In live presentations I am most often described as a humorist, but my purpose is not laughter. I use humor to share difficult lessons in an entertaining way...

Fearless Conversations or Fearful Conciliation’s? December 15, 2021 Affective Leadership, Association Insights, Emotional Intelligence, Keynote Keys, Peer Powered Performance, Training

Using Unrelated Stories to Overcome
Unreasonable Defensiveness

I was recently asked to come up with an approach to safety concerns at one of the largest concrete structures in our country.

The request, as usual, was to be funny, fix the problem, and get out. You have 45 minutes. An impossible objective, but it is entirely my own fault. I am a victim of my own creation. For two decades I have been most widely known as a keynote humorist...