On Connection

Essentiality is a powerful skill that helps you be clear, with yourself and with others, about what is most important. When you practice getting down to the very essence of what you need others to hear from you, or what others need you to hear, that is an act of valuable communication and an act of care. Communication - the quality of conversation we hold ourselves to and our sense of timing - is...

Our current working definition of Power is "the capacity or ability to direct or influence others or the course of events." Power impacts the way organizations are behaving, making decisions, and the conversations they're having. It's also something we aren't often talking about explicitly, and beginning to engage with it consciously can reveal a new understanding of how we c...

According to Gallup, there has been a steady decline in employee engagement over the last few years, with only 32% of employees in the U.S. falling in the "engaged" category and 18% "actively disengaged." Of the factors contributing to those statistics, most are not new concepts or surprising ideas. So, why is it that organizations still don't know how to address the engagement challenge?  In...

On this event preview, we consider what place love has at work and why we think it matters. Love isn’t a passive cultural feature; some would argue it’s a powerful business strategy. Join us as we start a conversation on love and leadership. Learn more & register for the virtual event: https://lnkd.in/g2gSB4wg

Most simply, choice means “an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities.” In an organizational context, however, there’s a lot more to it than that. The opportunity and capacity to make a decision for oneself is an act of agency and autonomy, one that sustains a commitment to contribute to a shared purpose. We believe this opportunity to choose to commit to so...

Decision making is a critical part of moving projects forward and leading success for any team or organization. While there are numerous frameworks, processes, and methods to pick from, the best method is the one that gets you to have the conversations you need to have. The conversations ARE the work of decision making, and it's through those conversations you generate alignment, increase shared u...

Time is something we all struggle with, and many battling stress and overwhelm feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. We tend to hunt for productivity hacks, time management techniques, and methods of working that will solve the problem, but there is no one-size-fits all solution. For any method to be effective, it must be designed to clearly serve a purpose and set of targeted resul...

Dr. Debra Clary began passionately researching curiosity a few years ago after being asked if she thought it was something that can be learned. Since then, she has become a thought leader on the connection between leadership and curiosity and has shared her expertise with over 10,000 people. She has discovered that curiosity is not only able to be learned but is a contagious state and a predictor...

As leaders and businesses prepare for 2023, "recession" is on everyone's minds. It's a responsibility of leadership to consider what pressures and challenges may be on the road ahead. Holding the reality of uncertainty along with a hopeful vision for the future is a skill, and one that can be compromised if we allow fear to dominate.  Fear has a tendency to cause retraction – tightening of bu...

Talking about love in the context of leadership, organizational development, and strategy execution is not common, but we’ve decided it’s a worthy area of research. We have found that it is a uniquely human superpower, in a time when the human side of work is increasingly an area of strategic focus for business success. How would your approach to leadership change if you led with love? What experi...

Our Anniversary episode!! The first year of this podcast has been a great experiment and success, and we are so grateful to the community of people that makes it possible. Thank you to all that have listened, joined as a guest, shared an episode with a friend, or sent us a note about how the show impacted you. It wouldn't be a success without you! Even when things are going well, occasions and mil...

Most organizations in the world are experiencing dynamic change and facing uncertain futures. At the same time, their people are stressed, overwhelmed, and facing dynamic change and uncertainty themselves. Businesses face challenges of increasing complexity, which require high degrees of connection and collaboration to successfully navigate. Stress and uncertainty generally make human beings contr...

Michelle Wonsley joins us for our second episode on Inclusive Leadership Design. This time we ask, what do we mean when we say the words "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice & Belonging"? They are so often used now, but are we on the same page about how we define them? And if we don't have a common definition, how can we know we're making meaningful progress in any of those domains?  Th...

For many reasons, sponsoring an “ownership mindset” is a popular topic for organizational leaders. Increasingly, leaders want (and need) teams that can be self-supervising and take independent action in service of strategic goals. Given that distributed and hybrid work are here to stay, and belt-tightening across industries means fewer hands for the same amount of work, increased efficiency and tr...

It’s not uncommon today for leaders and employees to place significant importance on workplace culture. Culture and work environment is a major deciding factor for job hunters, hiring managers are tasked with assessing “culture fit” when hunting for talent, and increasingly caring for culture is considered a strategic imperative for business success. This word gets used so often and is weighted so...

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion has made its way into the priorities and public commitments of countless organizations across the US and globally, with more and more companies creating jobs and initiatives dedicated to the challenge. While this may show up as progress on paper, the reality is that most of those efforts have failed to make a meaningful impact. As the world continues to learn what...

For any working professional there are times engagement and motivation are down, and calling it quits sounds like a good idea. Before we start editing our resumes and looking for greener grass, we think it’s smart to try a few things that just might get us re-enchanted with our work. If you’re in the leadership or HR world it isn’t new news that plenty of studies show a sense of purpose and meanin...

We are living through a time of massive disruption, and one of the symptoms is what many are calling an “epidemic of burnout.” The term burnout has been used increasingly over the last few years, along with other concerns around stress, overwhelm, and mental health. So much so that 4 in 5 organizations globally have reported that mental health and well-being is a top priority. There are lots of ex...

The work of linguists, sociologists, and psychologists reveals just how complex the science of language can be, but to be essential: it matters. It’s a powerful thing that we tend to take for granted. How we speak, what words we choose, and how we listen and interpret are all important parts of human interaction, and no less important at work. At the heart of truly valuable communication is an awa...

Love may be a many-splendored thing, but it isn’t something we often talk about at work. Love falls into that category of soft, personal things we’ve traditionally shoved in a box and left at the door in order to be “professionals.” We think that when we leave love at the door, we’re leaving a whole lot of other valuable things with it. So, should we talk about love at work? Our guest on today's e...

We hear from leaders and executives all the time that they want to increase accountability on their teams and across their organizations. Building cultures of accountability sounds like the right strategy for lowered supervision costs and increased efficiency and performance... but what does it mean to build a culture of accountability? Accountability is deeply tied with trust, and we’ve found thr...

It’s not uncommon, both at work and in the rest of life, for people to feel like they aren’t being heard. We’ve all experienced that frustration, where you feel like you’ve said something as many times and as many ways as you can think of, and this other person just isn’t getting it. Whether it’s your manager, your direct report, or your spouse, there are plenty of reasons for that kind of disconn...

Gen Z, which is usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, is expected to make up 27% of the workforce by 2025. And they’re coming into organizations led by people from older generations who already have well-formed biases and expectations about them (including Millennials). In this episode, we focus on the younger perspective. While Millennials have been represented on this podcast, we...

One of the hardest parts of human connection is managing disagreements. It’s easy to assume that a lack of disagreement or argument is proof of a strong and healthy connection, but that isn’t necessarily true. Disagreements are inevitable, at work and in the rest of life, and while it makes perfect sense that we tend to avoid and fear conflict, it can be really valuable. In today’s episode, Mickey...

Alignment is a term that gets thrown around a lot in leadership and org management, but how is alignment different than agreement? We think there’s an important difference, and hosting conversations designed for alignment not only increases value but will reduce disappointments, costs, and pain down the road. In this episode, Mickey and Robin join Emma Rose to talk about this distinction and share...