Bring the team in as early as possible. Invite them to wrestle with the ideas and the change.

Organizational values should be the guiding principles that drive how an organization behaves, the work product it puts out, and how the internal culture operates. The words are just the labels.

You know that thing your company said it would do, but isn’t happening? The one that started with the best of intentions. Everyone agreed it was really important. It seemed like a no-brainer at the time. But when you look around, nothing’s really changed. I’ve got your answer. It’s. A. Game. Changer.

Without Roy there would have been no Walt. For every Jobs there was a Wozniak. For every Ford there was a Couzens. These famous visionary innovators didn’t actually do it alone. They had integrators.

Surveys aren’t the only way (or sometimes not even the best way) to collect the information you need. Here’s a list of my favorite ways to collect information instead of or in addition to implementing a survey.

CASE STUDY: “I had an amazing idea while I was on vacation and I need help making it happen.”  This invitation came from a client of one of my former organizations.

Something is not working. You see a better way. You change how it’s. Voila! Changed. Right?

There are some things that once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it. And you see it everywhere. That’s how it was for me with the MCG Framework.

The framework is simple. It goes in order Membership - Control - Goals. It can be applied to any setting where a group gets together - a professional conference, party, workshop, or any other group dynamic.

CASE STUDY: What if growing your business isn’t as much about taking on more as it is about letting go of more? That’s essentially the conversation I had with Corey when we were exploring the inner workings of her business and how to help it grow.

From the moment I started working, I dreamt of being at the top. It was a secret that I kept to myself for decades. But I never told anyone I wanted such a job. I was ashamed of it.

After listening to so many stories of intense struggles he experienced day in and day out, I was shocked to discover that the root of the problem had nothing to do with all the symptomatic elements I was taught to look for in Management school. No, the true problem, as best as I could tell was love. He did not love his boss and his boss did not love him.

A few months ago, I was sitting in a meeting and pulled up Doodle to work on scheduling something. I sighed and mumbled under my breath, “One day when I’m successful I won’t have to be the one to schedule all these meetings.” I didn’t mean much by it other than I find scheduling meetings to be an incredibly tedious and annoying task. My colleague sitting across the table from me looked at me aghast and said, “When you’re successful?”

In the fight or flight moments of life, my natural response is almost always flight. Well, not so much flight as crawl into bed and turn on Netflix. At times, when dilemmas in my life invoke fear, I have felt completely paralyzed. Flight.

Sometimes being a manager feels like being less human. I hate confrontation – so much so that I don’t even like uncomfortable conversations, let alone actual confrontation. Unfortunately, managing others calls on me to have uncomfortable conversations on a near-daily basis. But I believe in being human first. Can the two coincide?

I’ve always looked forward to this time when we were “settled.” But now I’m starting to see that vision of “settled” means sitting still, doing nothing new, routine day in and day out. In others words – boring.

Mohr’s response confirmed what so many of us know - that women are conditioned to feel this way. This isn’t just conditioned in us, but overtime perhaps became an actual survival instinct.

For women historically – how did we survive for most of our history? We didn’t have financial power; we didn’t have political power; we weren’t protected by the law; we didn’t have the physical might to overcome, you know, whoever we might need to. So, our primary available strategy for survival and safety was relationship – influence in relationship, likability, adapting to do what was approved of or tolerated.