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When Leaders Live the Vision

Vision Road Sign with dramatic blue sky and clouds.

Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital, a part of Northwestern Medicine, is an elite performing healthcare organization in terms of patient satisfaction, employee engagement and financial performance. Marianjoy is composed of a network of 500 inpatient medical acute/sub-acute beds and outpatient rehabilitation services delivering a full range of multispecialty services to adults and children in the greater Chicagoland area. More than 50,000 patients receive care within the Marianjoy service network annually.

Marianjoy is led by Kathleen Yosko, its president and CEO. A life-long learner, Ms. Yosko, in addition to being a nurse by background, has earned M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees. Ms. Yosko is a source of inspiration to the people she leads. She is an example of a leader who communicates an inspiring vision and lives it, as can be seen throughout her remarkable career.

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3 Ways to Encourage Knowledge Flow

Disengaged employees explaining employee engagement to their boss

In June of 2000, the combative Durk Jager resigned as CEO of Procter & Gamble after a tenure that had lasted only seventeen months. When he left P&G, its stock had declined 50 percent, it had lost $320 million in the most recent quarter, half of its brands were losing market share, and the firm was struggling with morale problems.

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3 Practices to Improve the Contribution of Your Core Employees

Business Professionals

The prevalence and extreme nature of star systems in organizations today contribute to widespread employee disconnection and disengagement, particularly among core employees.

Employees can be regarded as stars, core employees, or strugglers. Stars are superior performers. They are either a part of senior management or on track to move up the organization’s hierarchy. Core employees are valuable contributors but not stars. Strugglers perform poorly, some for temporary reasons and others because they may not fit well in their roles or with the organization.

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World’s Greatest Leaders Tap Power of Connection

Business Lunch to Stop Burnout

It’s encouraging to see more leaders identify connection as a primary factor contributing to their organization’s sustained success. Fortune magazine recently recognized Theo Epstein, President, Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs of Major League Baseball and the Cubs organization, as #1 on its world’s greatest leaders list. Last year the Cubs won the World Series and broke the franchise’s 108-year World Series title drought, the longest in professional sports.

I had the privilege of contributing a guest column to a recent issue of Business Standard, a leading business publication in India. The article tells the story of how Admiral Vern Clark used the principles of Connection Culture to lead a turnaround of the U.S. Navy. Read the article.

Date: March 16, 2017
Appearance: Guest Column in Business Standard
Outlet: Business Standard
Location: Mumbai, India
Format: Newspaper

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jim Blasingame, host of the The Small Business Advocate radio program, about the increasingly popular “brutal honesty” management practice and why “tough love” is a more productive alternative. Listen to our conversation.

Date: March 14, 2017
Appearance: Interview with Jim Blasingame: The Difference Between Brutal Honesty and Tough Love
Outlet: The Small Business Advocate
Format: Radio
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3 Practices Help Protect You from Premature Aging Related to Job Stress

Man suffering from job stress

On Christmas day in 1984, Carol Grieder, Ph.D., then a graduate student in the University of California, Berkley lab of Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., stopped by the lab, curious to see the results of an experiment that had taken place several days earlier. Eight months of research and variations of experiments had led her to this point. There, in an image on x-ray film, was evidence that an enzyme existed that helped protect people from premature cellular aging. Ecstatic, Greider went home and danced around her living room. Fifteen years later, Blackburn, Grieder, and another scientist, Jack Szostak, Ph.D. were awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering the enzyme they named “telomerase.”

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Beware the Brutally Honest Workplace

People yelling at each other in brutally honest workplace

An old fad is making a comeback: the “brutally honest workplace.” From my vantage point, interacting with your colleagues using “radical candor” or “radical transparency” is a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—form of verbal assault that seems to be spreading, given the success of firms like Bridgewater Associates, and contributing to the rise of incivility and insensitivity today. Proponents of this approach sometimes say that offering constructive criticism should come from a caring mindset but, from what I’ve seen, it merely gives the arrogant and the bullies permission to verbally attack others in the name of honesty. Fortunately, recent research shows the foolishness of this approach (in fact, even mild expressions of rudeness have been shown to impair team performance).