Jason Pankau and I recently did an interview on employee engagement and connection cultures with Alexandra Guadagno of Human Resources IQ. The interview was part of the HR Today Podcast Series. You can hear the podcast and download it on iTunes at this link.
Tag Archives: connection cultures
Employee Engagement Network Webinar and Slides
Employee Engagement and Connection from David Zinger on Vimeo.
Yesterday David Zinger and I held a webinar on Employee Engagement and Connection. You can see a recording of the webinar above and here is a link to the slides used during the webinar.
The webinar was hosted by the Employee Engagement Network, a 3,500 member online community founded by David. It was my good fortune to be the first speaker for the Employee Engagement Network’s inaugural webinar! If you are not a member of the Employee Engagement network already, I want to encourage you to join. David will be the host for future webinars on employee engagement-related topics that you will not want to miss.
New Research: Relationships Make Hospitals Great
The New York Times recently had an article entitled “What Makes a Hospital Great” that described new research concluding a hospital’s culture and the quality of relationships were the most important factors determining patient outcomes. This finding is consistent with our research that concluded leaders must be intentional about developing both “task excellence” and “relationship excellence” in order to achieve sustainable superior performance. If leaders focus on task alone the eventual failure of relationships will sabotage excellence.
Attend (Virtually) HCI’s National Human Capital Summit
This afternoon I’ll be speaking at the National Human Capital Summit in Atlanta. You can attend the event online at no cost by registering at the link below. Online attendees will be able to see my presentation as well as those of consultant and author Gary Hamel, Liane Hornsey of Google, Dr. John Fleming of Gallup, author Dan Pink, Vineet Nayar CEO of HCL Technologies and Suzanne Gordon of SAS Institute.
To sign up for this special complimentary pass into the live streaming conference, click on this link.
- If it’s your first time visiting the HCI conference registration site, click “register” and create a new account by entering your information in the required fields and choosing a password (again, there is no cost to do this).
- Please take the time to click the “Test Your System” icon and install Silverlight if you haven’t previously. If you need any help you may click “Live Chat Now” for instant, live support.
- When you exit the virtual conference, re-enter by following the same link but click “login” instead of “register” when you return and enter your username and password.
And because it is a live streaming event, you then will come back at the time of the talks that you want to see. Click on this link to see the virtual conference agenda. There are MANY great talks to choose from. All times listed are Eastern Time.
Tomorrow night I will attend the awards ceremony for the Management Innovation Exchange’s HCI Human Capital M-Prize. Congratulations to the ten semifinalists, three of whom are friends of mine: Lisa Haneberg, Steve Todd and Drew Williams, my pastor at Trinity Church in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Video Interview: Employee Engagement = Connections
George Washington, Worthy of Praise?
Today is Presidents’ Day in the U.S., a day in which we primarily celebrate our first president, George Washington. After reading the article “George Washington’s Tear Jerker” in The New York Times, one might ask, was Washington really the great leader he has been made out to be? I asked myself that question during the summer of 2002 and began a journey to unpack truth from myth. I went as far as contacting and speaking with Edward Lengel, the foremost historian on Washington’s generalship. After doing my own research I wrote the following which became one of the chapters on 20 leaders in Fired Up or Burned Out.
First in Their Hearts
Richard Neustadt, Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, observed the following about George Washington: “It wasn’t his generalship that made him stand out . . . It was the way he attended to and stuck by his men. His soldiers knew that he respected and cared for them, and that he would share their severe hardships.”
Staying Connected to Your Kids
The writer Jeff Benedict just emailed me some beautifully written and wise words he posted on his blog about staying connected with his son. I hope you’ll take the time to check it out at this link.
Alter+Care: Happiness at Work Podcast
Jason Pankau and I recently recorded a podcast interview on happiness at work for Alter+Care, the healthcare real estate company. You can hear the podcast at this link.
To Achieve Excellence
Michael Lee Stallard and Jason Pankau
K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues famously concluded that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are required to achieve excellence and expert status. Malcolm Gladwell popularized Ericsson’s 10,000 hour rule in his book Outliers. What many forget is that Ericsson’s research also concluded the experts benefitted from coaching and mentoring by people who told them the truth, even when it was painful to hear.
The point here is that no one becomes great at anything without coaching and mentoring. Do you have coaches and mentors in your life who help you learn, grow and develop into the person you want to become? Do you want to be better at exercising and eating healthy? Why not ask someone you know who is good in those areas to mentor you. Do you want to be a better listener? Ask a good listener you know to give you suggestions about how to improve. Want to be a better parent and spouse? Ask your children and spouse how you can improve.
Michael Lee Stallard is president of E Pluribus Partners. Jason Pankau is the president of Life Spring Network, a Christian ministry. They write, speak and teach workshops on leadership and employee engagement. Michael and Jason are co-authors of the bestselling book Fired Up or Burned Out.
Community: Often Overlooked Cause of Good Health
A couple years ago I had the good fortune to meet Malcolm Gladwell at a Rotman Business School event and tell him how much I enjoyed his work. One of my favorite stories in Malcolm’s latest book entitled Outliers is about Roseto, Pennsylvania. As it turns out, residents of Roseto were outliers in terms of their good health. A curious doctor set out to understand why. After a methodical study he concluded that it wasn’t diet or exercise that mattered. The reason Rosetans were living longer was the culture they lived in. As Malcolm wrote:
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
“I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you’d see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries,” Bruhn said. “It was magical.”
Thanks to The New York Times, you can read the wonderful story Malcolm wrote about Roseto, PA at this link.