Here’s a collection of the best blog posts over the last month written by top leadership bloggers. Thanks to Dan McCarthy over at Great Leadership for organizing it.
We Need More “Heart and Soul” in the Age of “Mind and Strength”
Wise organizations distinguish themselves from competitors by developing their heart and soul. Organizations that have heart and soul enrich their owners, customers and communities in both economic and non-economic ways.
What do I mean by heart and soul? Let me explain.
While out running errands one day when we were relatively new to town, my wife stopped in at one of several jewelry stores on the main shopping street. The cases were filled with beautiful pieces, new and heirloom. The salespeople, however, were more than aloof. They ignored her. No eye contact. No smile. No “hello, my name is X, may I help you?” This lack of connection made her feel as if they thought she was unworthy of their attention. Not surprisingly, she has never gone back. These salespeople lacked the qualities I describe as heart and soul.
The absence of heart and soul in the workplace is not unusual. This is the age of mind and strength. So often we focus on the tasks of our work and neglect the relational aspects. As human beings we have emotions, hopes and dreams, a conscience, and deeply felt human needs. Research from a variety of fields has shown that when we recognize these realities and treat others in ways consistent with them, we thrive. When we don’t, it is damaging to our mental and physical health and to the health of those around us.
Get to Know Colleagues’ and Customers’ Stories
Here’s a stirring video from Chick-fil-A to remind us that every human being has a story. In our endeavors to develop Connection Cultures we encourage people who work together to get to know one another’s stories and to reach out and learn customers’ stories, if at all possible. Learning the stories of the people in your life is just one aspect of Human Value, the second element of a Connection Culture. When you know a person’s story, it helps you empathize and connect with them. It’s also more difficult to grow extremely disconnected with someone when you know their story.
Speaking at the New Canaan Society
Here’s an article entitled “Worker Engagement Holds Key to Success” that appeared this morning in The Connecticut Post, The Greenwich Time, The Stamford Advocate and The Danbury News Times. The article briefly describes the “Connection Cultures” we wrote about in our book, Fired Up or Burned Out, and mentions that on Friday morning, November 5, I’ll be speaking about how Christians can help improve the workplace at the New Canaan Society’s Darien Connecticut Chapter. Breakfast begins at 6:30 AM and my talk will start at 7:00 AM. For details, click here.
The New Canaan Society is a group of men who meet to encourage one another to live out Biblical values. It was founded in 1995 by Jim Lane, a partner at Goldman Sachs, and has grown to 30 chapters across the United States.
On a related topic, Jason Pankau will be speaking at the New Canaan Society’s New York City Chapter in Manhattan on January 19th and at NCS’s Annual Retreat at the Homestead in Virginia on March 4-6. You might also be interested to know that in the coming weeks, Jason and I are doing a series of webinars on leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation for Linkage, the Human Capital Institute, the DNA Global Network and the New Talent Management Network. The webinars are free to the public. Details and sign-up information will be posted in the upcoming engagements section on the left-hand side of the front page of our book website at this link.
Vince Lombardi on Broadway?
It takes guts to bring a drama to Broadway these days without a megastar playing the lead. To top it off, the producers of the show Lombardi promise to reveal why the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers football team was so successful. Lots of luck with that, I thought, when I first read about the show. My curiosity got the best of me, however, once I learned that Lombardi was based on one of my favorite sports biographies, David Maraniss’ When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.
Do Women Bring More Happiness to Families, Greater Effectiveness to Organizations?
A participant in a recent session Jason Pankau and I were teaching on Connection Cultures and employee engagement shared that she connects with her sons by talking about sports. She follows sports, not out of a love for it, but because it gives her a language to connect with her boys. By contrast, her conversations with women tend to be about what happens in their day-to-day lives.
Her comments reminded me of a recent article in The New York Times entitled “Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier.” The article noted research has concluded families with sisters are happier. The article’s author believes this is true because women initiate and sustain conversations more than men.
This is consistent with my own personal observations.
MichaelLeeStallard.com on Newstex
Newstex just added MichaelLeeStallard.com to its sources of authoritative content. The organization provides real-time news and commentary collected from the world’s best online and offline sources to customers who need information but don’t have time to gather it from a myriad of places. Today, Newstex offers aggregated news and full-text feeds from thousands of premium blogs as well as Twitter, audio and video content from editorially-selected, authoritative news, corporate, and independent publishers.
Free Download: Best-Selling Book on Leadership, Employee Engagement
For those of you on today’s webinar and readers of the articles Jason Pankau and I write for Crosswalk.com, here is a link to sign up for our email newsletter and receive a free digital version of our book Fired Up or Burned Out. (Note: To save it on your computer you will need to click on your browser’s “file” and “save as” menu options.)
Servant Leaders Outperform Because They Connect
Servant leaders connect with the people they lead and create Connection Cultures that are essential to achieve sustainable superior performance. Connection is defined as a bond that exists among a group of people based on shared identity, empathy and understanding that moves self–centered individuals toward group-centered membership. Here’s an example of a servant leader that brings the force of connection to life.
Retired CNO Admiral Vern Clark was formerly the chief of the U.S. Navy from 2000 until 2005. When Admiral Clark became the chief, first term re-enlistment didn’t meet the Navy’s goal of 38 percent. Within a little more than a year, it soared from under 38 percent to 56.7 percent and the Navy had more sailors that it needed. Although I don’t have space in this article to tell you all of what Admiral Clark did, his actions can be summarized in three words: Vision, Value and Voice.
Connecting with Patients
Check out this great article from The New York Times entitled “A Physician Revives a Dying Art: The Physical.” It’s about Dr. Abraham Verghese, a doctor at Stanford who really knows how to connect with patients. I’ve previously written that connection is critical to health care and cited the examples of Dr. Herb Pardes at New York-Presbyterian and my own observations during my wife Katie’s battles with breast and advanced ovarian cancer. Katie is cancer free today.