After a particularly long doctor’s appointment with our seven-year-old, the topic of his prescription (he has epilepsy and takes a medicine to control his seizures) came up. The nurse practitioner came back in to say she had sent it to the pharmacy electronically. My husband said, “We need it written in 500mL increments.” She looked at him like who do you think you are, trying to tell me how to write a prescription. I looked at my husband and tried to telepathically tell him, “Explain to her why you are making that request.” I may or may not have also
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” Max DePree Feedback is a critical to any successful performance management and development process. With trends in feedback moving leaders towards less formal mechanisms of feedback and away from a formal performance appraisal, we still need to be thinking about how to define the current state of someone’s behavior and performance in order to direct what we want to see. And sometimes we can formalize things and still make them feel “casual”. A way to do this is to have a 1. Start 2. Stop 3. Stay session. To do this:
One of my clients is a small retail chain in North Alabama. Each month I send out an email communication to their store managers and I always include an article that I feel is relevant to their business to give them some food for thought. This month the topic was “If your store were mystery shopped, would you pass?” and the article included a sample mystery shop survey that has 35 questions. I challenged them to “shop” their own store and be brutally honest in their answers. Would they pass the test? And if not, what can they and their
“Expect the unexpected.” -Zig Zigler During a recent hike on Rainbow Mountain with my three boys and two dogs, I was gently reminded that even when you expect the unexpected, you can be caught off guard. Multiple times during our hike when my oldest was leading the way, I reminded him to go slow and watch out for snakes. Then about half way through the hike we stopped to take a break. The boys sat down on a large rock and I sat down about ten feet ahead of them. Almost as soon as I sat down, I heard the
My first professional mentor was a man. In college, I helped him with his research and he helped me grow as a human being in too many ways to count. It was no big deal for us to have one-on-one discussions in his office with the door closed. I never thought anything of it. I suspect he didn’t either. Nor were my parents concerned. They are as grateful to him for the positive influence he had on me as I am. This mentor often spoke truth with directness to the situations I was dealing with that I found myself getting