On Friday, January 23 at 12:00 PM Eastern Time, I hosted a 30 minute webcast with Tim Sanders, Author of the newly released book Saving the World at Work. Tim also wrote two other outstanding books entitled The Likability Factor and Love is the Killer App. Tim has deep experience in cutting-edge businesses and marketing. He was the Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! and later their Leadership Coach. Prior to his senior positions at Yahoo!, Tim created and led the Yahoo! ValueLab, an in-house “think tank” which delivered futuristic insight to the company’s partners and clients. To hear the webcast click here.
Category Archives: Connection Culture
New York-Presbyterian Recognized for Employee Engagement
Congratulations to New York-Presbyterian Hospital for being recognized as the top academic medical center in terms of employee engagement. I wrote an article about New York-Presbyterian entitled “Strengthening Human Value in Organizational Cultures” that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Leader to Leader. You can read about it in a blog post of mine entitled “Amazing Things are Happening Here.”
Jim Blasingame and I discuss employee engagement on his radio program
Last Friday I was a guest on my friend Jim Blasingame’s nationally-syndicated radio program entitled “The Small Business Advocate.” In the interview Jim and I talked about employee engagement and why leaders need to clearly communicate their vision and values to the people they are responsible for leading. This is especially important during difficult economic times. You can hear the interview by clicking on the “listen now” below.
New Video Clips on Relationship Excellence, Criticism, Difficult Times and Imbalance
Athenaonline.com sent me links to several video clips I filmed for its MyQuickCoach product that was voted one of Human Resource Executive magazine’s top training products of the year. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Relationship Excellence and Performance
Free E-book on Connection Culture and Employee Engagement
Today, Athenaonline.com sent out an email newsletter to its clients to make them aware of the recent training videos I filmed for its MyQuickCoach program. In the email AthenaOnline included this video clip of me discussing the importance of Connection Cultures.
Athenaonline was voted one of Human Resource Executive magazines top new training products. It includes thought leaders such as Marshall Goldsmith, Ram Charan and David Allen on topics like leadership training and development, employee engagement, team building and time mangement .
For the AthenaOnline clients who are clicking through to check out my blog, I want to make you aware of the free, downloadable eBook I wrote that was published by Changethis.com. You can download it by clicking on employee engagement.
Sad for Siemens’ Employees
Last week Siemens paid a $1.6 billion fine for its bribery violations. The New York Times’ writers Siri Schubert and T. Christian Miller wrote an excellent article about it entitled “At Siemens, Bribery Was Just a Line Item.”
Corporate identity is a source of pride in the best organizations. It is a factor that contributes to connection and employee engagement. When a company’s identity is tarnished like Siemens has been, it rubs off on employees’ identities too. Siemens’ leaders can recover provided they develop a culture that places a high value on integrity, honesty and justice. If they do, it will improve employee and customer engagement. If they fail to do this, I would not be very optimistic about Siemens’ future.
Employee Engagement Connects with Ritz Carlton’s Culture
I wrote about the Ritz Carlton’s Connection Culture in Fired Up or Burned Out. Here’s a great article from Gallup about it entitled “What’s behind the Ritz-Carlton Mystique?“
How to energize your organization
I just discovered a fascinating article that appeared in the Sloan Management Review about how individuals increase energy in organizations. Several of the practices are germane to employee engagement and Connection Culture Theory. Here’s a copy of the article what-creates-energy-in-organizations
Note: The free download of this article was available on co-author Professor Wayne Baker’s website at the University of Michigan.
Pixar: Keeping Its Eye on the Ball
I’m in San Francisco this week filming SmartBytes for Athenaonline.com, speaking at ALI’s social media conference, doing a television interview and meeting John Walker, a producer at Pixar Animation. John was the producer of “The Incredibles” and pre-Pixar he produced “The Iron Giant.” John’s the business guy in a partnership with director Brad Bird.
Presently, I’m working on an article about Pixar Animation and why it has been so successful. My thesis is that Pixar has a Connection Culture that provides a competitive advantage. I also suspect that there is so much pressure to produce results that the risk to Pixar is that it focuses on task excellence alone to the detriment of its Connection Culture. To sustain its success, Pixar must keep its eye on maintaining both task excellence and a Connection Culture that produces relationship excellence. When organizations fail to maintain relationship excellence it ultimately sabotages task excellence because disconnected workers don’t give their best efforts to their work and stop communicating (which leads to ill-informed decisions.)
I’m pulling for Pixar and believe as long as it stays keenly aware of this risk and actively maintains a Connection Culture, it will continue to be the shining star in the dismal motion picture production industry.
Q&A from My AMA Webcast on Employee Engagement
During the recent webcast I did for the American Management Association, participants submitted more questions than we were able to answer in the allotted 15 minutes for Q&A. The AMA sent me the questions so that I could answer them on my blog. Although I am not able to answer them all at once, I will continue to chip away at the list and post all the answers below.