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.

Employee Engagement Webinar: The Power of Connection

David Zinger and I will be doing a 45 minute webcast on the power of connection to boost employee engagement.  David is host of the Employee Engagement Network. During the webinar, we will include:

  • a five minute presentation on connection;
  • 3 poll questions for participants;
  • dialogue between David and your’s truly;
  • invited text questions from the audience; and,
  • 3 tips for connection action.

The session has limited enrollment but will be taped for future viewing. Sign up for the webinar at this link. Better move quickly though.  Half of the webinar capacity was filled in the first day it was posted on the Employee Engagement Network website!

Video Interview: Employee Engagement = Connections

Here is a video from YouTube of a conversation I had about leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation with Dr. Homer Erekson, Dean of TCU’s Neeley School of Business.  Our conversation occurred as part of the Tandy Executive Speakers Series.

George Washington, Worthy of Praise?

george_washington_428x269_to_468x312

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.”

My Blog on LeadershipDigital

Leadership Digital

Recently I was invited to include my blog content on LeadershipDigital, a topic hub that collects, organizes and finds the best posts and articles that provides an edge to leaders and managers. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregate content from a variety of sources, organize that content around keywords in the topic domain, and support both manual and social curation of that content.

The goals of the site are:

Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content as defined by the community.

Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.

Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.

Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites. Most users are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.

I hope you will check it out by clicking on the LeadershipDigital badge at the top of this post.