I once put on about 30 articles of clothing in a matter of a couple of minutes. My team won. I once had to build a wooden tower while blindfolded and being instructed by others what to do. My team lost. I did these things (and many more) at a previous employer where we had morning meetings and every Friday was Fun Friday. We’d forego the regular meeting content of financials, project updates, and announcements every Friday morning to have fifteen minutes of fun. It was the weekly meeting everyone looked forward to and usually, we all walked away laughing
“….But the most helpful advice is not a painting. It is instead a box of paints and a set of brushes. Here, the best team leaders seem to say, take these paints, those brushes, and see what you think you can do with them. What do you see, from your vantage point? What picture can you paint?” from Nine Lies About Work A few weeks ago, we talked about how neuro research shows us that for learning to happen, insights have to be created. We talk a lot about giving and receiving feedback in the workplace and how necessary it
Most HR professionals and business leaders today are concerned about finding and keeping talent. If you are going to focus on one, I’d suggest you start first by focusing on retaining talent. Broadly, the best way to retain talent is to create an environment where people have key needs met. These needs are described in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. They are 1) The need to direct their own lives 2) The desire to do better for ourselves and our world 3) To learn and create new things. But given these three things, what are some practices that can actually be
In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week. Her
I remember thinking, how am I going to do this? I had just started my first full-time job out of college, and I was getting married that year. I had been given two weeks of vacation for my first year that I had to earn throughout the year. If I wanted to take a honeymoon and be off a day or two before the wedding, I really had almost no time left to take off. And a couple of my good friends were getting married that summer too, and I was in their weddings out of town. Was I going