As a youth, I showed horses. The judge would stand in the center of the arena as we rode around and at the end of the class, riders would line up in the center and winners would ride forward to receive their award as the audience clapped. For many years, I stayed in the center of the arena and left … Read More
How to Define Organizational Values in Your Workplace
Excerpt from The Culture Question: We find Patrick Lencioni’s book The Advantage particularly insightful, and much of what we write here is inspired by his ideas.4 In our work with clients around defining values, we focus on the following two categories: DNA values: Values that make an organization fundamentally unique. Target values: Values that an organization wishes were true, but … Read More
Why Alignment with Purpose Yields Great Results
I recently rented a car and got a powerful lesson in alignment as part of the deal. Not wheel alignment, but alignment with purpose – at least that’s the way I interpreted it. The person who served me did several things incredibly well: she greeted me in a friendly and genuine way, and then went straight into business. She had … Read More
What If Your Organization Didn’t Exist?
Purpose should matter not only to employees. It should matter to our customers, clients, and the broader community as well. Every organization needs external people to be invested in its purpose in order to survive in the long run. Throughout history, businesses, not-for-profits, and government agencies have come and gone. Some have been missed for a moment, but most have … Read More
The Importance Of Aligning Purpose
In the same way that a pure profit motive divorced from a greater purpose leads to unhealthy organizational practices, so does working solely for a paycheck at an individual level. We have seen time and again how poorly people perform when all they care about – or all they have left to care about – is the paycheck at the … Read More
Do You Have to Like Your Colleagues?
As a workplace mediator I’m sometimes asked, “Do I have to like the people I work with?” I’m always tempted to tell them “No” – that they just have to do their jobs – but that wouldn’t quite be true. I say this because effective communication requires positive interactions among team members. Imagine that Adrian and Bobby work for you, … Read More
3 Leadership Choices for Creating a Culture of Safety
At ACHIEVE, we believe that everyone should be able to like where they work. People can only enjoy their work when they feel welcomed, included, and safe in the presence of leadership. We know that leadership impacts every aspect of an employee’s experience. We hear over and over again that people don’t quit organizations, they quit their bosses. If we … Read More
Performance Reviews – Really?
I’m shocked by how often I hear friends and colleagues express frustration about annual performance reviews. Given the amount of complaints I’ve heard, it seems that organizations are still investing an inordinate amount of time in an often-unhelpful process. What follows are two ways that organizations get annual meetings wrong, along with some ideas on how to improve the process … Read More
How to Build Employee Engagement
In Aesop’s fable, “The North Wind and the Sun,” two forces of nature demonstrate their very different styles of influence. In the story, the wind and the sun make a bet as to which of them can make a lone traveler take off his jacket. To demonstrate its strength, the wind blows and blows, but the man only grows colder … Read More
Doing Work That Matters
One morning as I, Eric, left the house, I said to my preschool-aged daughter, “Have a fun day on your field trip!” She replied, “Have a fun day at work!” Her reply made me smile. It was such a natural response coming from a child. Who doesn’t like to have fun? Yet I couldn’t help thinking that, while I like … Read More
