Michael Lee Stallard

New York City’s WCBS News Radio 880 ran portions of an interview I did with daytime host Pat Farnack.  Here are links to the segments and full interview:


Is your workplace killing you?

Worse than Toxic

Snakes in Suits

Nick the Doorman

How to Flourish

Full Interview (14 minutes)

Connecting with people requires empathy i.e. you feel the emotion another individual feels.  This is different from sympathy where you recognize the emotion but don’t feel it.

In Fired Up or Burned Out, I wrote about the company Cranium and how it designs “high five moments” into its games.  High five moments are times when people connect via the shared empathy of joy (remember that we define “the force of connection” as shared identity, empathy and understanding).  When you are interacting with people you want to connect with, feeling and expressing emotion helps.  When you feel someone’s joy or pain, it connects.

In the news

Here are a few recent articles related to connection that you might enjoy:

Walter Isaacson wrote about leadership lessons from Steve Jobs’ life for Harvard Business Review.  In the article, Isaason addresses issues relevant to Connection Cultures including the elements of Vision, Value and Voice.  Jobs was brilliant when it came to Vision, terrible when it came to Value and mixed win it came to Voice.  Fortunately, there are other members of Apple’s senior leadership team whose strengths helped overcome Jobs’ weaknesses.

David Brooks just wrote a column for The New York Times entitled “The Relationship School” that touches on aspects of Connection Cultures in schools.

The Atlantic had a piece entitled “Stress Makes You Sick: Exploring the Immune System Connection.” The article explores how stress weakens the human immune system and mentions the link between stress and connection. (Remember I shared with you that recent research over a 20-year period showed people who work in cultures with supportive relationships had mortality rates that were 2.4 times lower than people who worked in cultures with weak relational support. This supports the longstanding view that lifestyles with little relational support produce chronic stress will kill you.)

While teaching seminars on leadership and Connection Cultures at the Darden Graduate School of Business, Professor Marian Moore introduced me to the work of her colleague Jonathan Haidt, a social psychology professor at the University of Virginia.  Haidt just wrote The Righteous Mind.  Here’s a well-written review of the book entitled “Why Won’t They Listen?”  The book review clearly shows it addresses issues related to the Connection Culture elements of Value and Voice.  I’ve ordered a copy but not read it yet.

Finally, I recently spoke with Jim Blasingame about the competitive advantage of culture on his nationally syndicated radio program entitled “Small Business Advocate” that you can hear at this link.  Also, I wrote an article on the  ”Science of Engagement” for Training Industry Quarterly.

Tomorrow I fly back to the U.S. after a 10-day trip to Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Edinburgh where I taught seminars for the Institute for Management Studies, spoke at ITV, saw several friends and spent a couple days on vacation with my wife, Katie.

While here, I learned about several new items of media coverage related to connection. Several items came from my friends Sean Witty and Jay Morris. Here are the items below.

Dr. Suzanne Zeedyk’s research on the importance of connection to babies and their ability to connect

Mental Heath Foundation of the UK report on rising loneliness and declining connection in the UK

UNICEF summary report on meeting children’s need for connection in the UK, Sweden and Spain

Article in Entrepreneur magazine “Forget Networking. How to be a Connector”

Center for Creative Leadership article on introverts who connect well with colleagues

Dr. Stephen Jones on the need to connect with others to keep your mind and memory sharp

In the workshops we teach, we use stories of great leaders in business, government, the social sector and sports who inspired people to do what’s right.  This is a best practice to strengthen the positive effects of an organization’s identity (i.e. mission, values and reputation).

Happiness is much sought after these days. Book stores and magazine stands are full of titles that promise to unlock the secrets of happiness.  Positive psychology courses are all the rage on college campuses across America. Recognizing that happiness gets attention, I recently decided to title a chapter I’m writing “Should Leaders Care About Employee Happiness?” The chapter will be included in the American Society for Training and Development’s new Handbook of Management.

In my view, the primary reason happiness is on the decline in America and in many market democracies around the world is that we’ve become “achieve-aholics” who, as a result of our achievement-seeking lifestyles, lack sufficient human connection.  Lacking connection, we eventually dysfunction. As achieve-aholics move through adulthood, they feel a sense of boredom, emptiness and meaninglessness.  Many are mis-diagnosed as having depression when in fact they are just lonely (I wrote about this in an earlier post on the rise of loneliness in America). To feel better, achieve-aholics oftentimes seek illegitimate thrills (e.g. sexual affairs, pornography, extreme sports and extreme business risks) or they self-medicate to numb the pain, which leads to substance abuse. In my opinion, this is why America, with a mere five percent of the world’s population consumes half of the mood-altering pharmacological medications and two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs (a point that Joseph Califano, head of the National Center on Substance Abuse at Columbia University, made in a video interview on the Atlantic’s website).

The bottom line is that we are human beings, not machines.  As I consistently present on this blog, and all the science makes it abundantly clear, we need human connection to thrive. Read more »

Apple is now the most valuable company in the world in terms of market capitalization and U2′s recent tour just became the highest grossing of all time, crushing the previous record held by the Rolling Stones.  Learn about Apple’s remarkable rise in market cap in this New York Times article and learn about U2′s claim as the greatest band of all time in this article from the Atlantic magazine’s website.

Apple and U2′s continued success begs the question, “what’s their secret?” Read more »

A leader I know and much admire is Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks North America and Starbucks International. Howard tells about the time 14 years ago this month when he received a call in the middle of the night at his home in Seattle alerting him that three Starbucks employees at the Georgetown store in Washington, D.C. had been shot and killed, including an 18-year who had just recently begun at Starbucks, his first job.   Behar immediately called Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ CEO, who was in New York on vacation at the time.

What Schultz didn’t do, says a lot about his character.  He didn’t call Starbucks’ public relations people or lawyers.  Instead, Schultz chartered a plane and headed straight to Washington, D.C.  When he arrived, he spoke with the police then proceeded to the store to get the addresses of the three murdered Starbucks employees. He went to each of their homes, told their families he was sorry and shared in their tears.

Howard Schultz’s heart was broken.   He showed courage by expressing the grief he felt. Doing so contributed to helping the victims’ families, friends and colleagues. As awful as grieving the loss of a loved one or friend is, it’s far worse to grieve alone. Read more »

My friend Alexander Kjerulf, aka the Chief Happiness Officer, will be giving a free seminar in San Francisco on August 4 from 7-9 PM.  The free seminar will be limited to the first 100 individuals who sign up. You can read about the seminar here and sign up at this link.

My friend David Burkus at LeaderLab is working with the University of Oklahoma on research to assess ethics in the workplace.  Please consider participating in David’s survey by clicking here.

Today I’m teaching a two-hour webinar entitled “Outstanding Individual Contributors” for Executive Development Partners and its client the McKesson Corporation. As part of the webinar, I’m offering a free download of the digital version of Fired Up or Burned Out.   You can access the digital version (a pdf file), save and print it at this link.

Now for more good news.  We are seeing unprecedented opportunities to speak about developing virtuous leadership, employee engagement and unity in business, government and social sector organizations.   My colleague Jason Pankau recently returned from speaking at the largest leadership conference in Asia.  I recently taught a one-day workshop in New York City where leaders were present from a wide variety of business and government organizations.  Jason and I were just hired to teach workshops for the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and for the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, one of the largest and most well-respected cancer centers in the world.

On September 13, I will speak alongside CNO Admiral Vern Clark (Ret.) at breakfast and lunch meetings sponsored by the Harvard and Wharton Alumni Clubs of D.C. Admiral Clark was chief of the U.S. Navy from 2000-2005.  Admiral Clark and I will be speaking about virtuous leadership and how it unites people in an organization to give their best efforts and pull together.  (Read what Jason and I wrote about Admiral Clark’s leadership in an article that was published in the Leader to Leader Journal.)

We are grateful to the individuals who continue to help us raise awareness of the importance of human connection at work and in life. There are several ways to do this including reading and recommending our book Fired Up or Burned Out, and/or bringing us in to their organizations to give keynote speeches and/or lead workshops through our leadership training and coaching firm E Pluribus Partners