Swinging for the Fence to Slow Productivity

We swung for the fences and came up short…Yeah, you win some, you lose some, it ain’t always home runsAnd that’s just the way life plays…Morgan Wallen A few years ago, I was facilitating a DiSC training session with one of my colleagues. We use a motivation checklist tied to the DiSC Personality Model to emphasize that different things motivate different people. We always encourage people to ask a peer what they think motivates them. Based on the behaviors you observe in another person, “What do you think makes them tick?” is the question we ask. I asked my colleague

Open the Door. Literally.

It is 5:34 in the morning, and I am opening my front door to welcome a 17-year-old from Costa Rica.  She’s seen her parents and brother off at the airport to return home, but she is staying. She will be living with us for almost three months.   We first met her when she was a sweet seven-year-old who spoke better English than I will ever speak Spanish. Over the course of ten years, we’ve grown to love her family and the prison ministry work they do in Costa Rica. On our trip to Costa Rica last summer to visit, she

Effective Delegation: Closed Doors Lead to Open Ones

As we begin our series on the theme for the year, “Open the Door”, we realized it was important to also consider that in order to open doors, you also need to know how to close them.  The first step in effective delegation is to identify where closing a door for one person or organization is opening one for another.  As we sat around a table brainstorming our 2024 theme at our annual company retreat, we realized we were all in somewhat of a state of transition and so were many of our clients.   We often work with people, organizations,

4 Ways to Convert Values into Behaviors

Last week to kick off the new year, we discussed starting with a focus on creating or revisiting individual and/or organizational values.   Values are a great place to set an ideal, but how do you make that a reality?   As Brene Brown says about values:  One reason we roll our eyes when people start talking about values is that everyone talks a big values game but very few people actually practice one. It can be infuriating, and it’s not just individuals who fall short of the talk. In our experience, only about 10 percent of organizations have operationalized their

The Best Place to Begin a New Year

Resolutions, Goals, Plans, and Turning Over A New Leaf.  This is the stuff that New Years are made of.  For individuals and organizations, the new year is always a natural place to think big and aim high.  And there is nothing wrong with this.  As 2023 came to a close, a theme we saw over and over again was the challenge many people were having in leading well. They were aiming high, but totally missing the mark. They had lost the people they were leading as well as themselves in the process, chasing some ideal they couldn’t even name.  So