Last week I joined Marshall Goldsmith and others as one of Success Television’s experts on leadership and employee engagement. Former CNN executive Helen Whelan, Success Television’s founder and CEO, is developing an excellent platform to provide corporate training via online, dvds and videos. Success Television’s website is currently featuring an article I wrote about Truth, Beauty and Goodness in Leadership. You can learn more about it by clicking on Success Television.
Tag Archives: teams
Webcast: John Timmerman, Corp. VP Operations, Ritz-Carlton
John Timmerman, Corporate Vice President of Operations at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C. (click here for his bio) was my guest on a recent webcast on Brighttalk.com’s Leadership and Employee Engagement Channel. You can see the webcast by clicking on employee engagement.
During the webcast John identifies a variety of Ritz-Carlton practices that hep make it a Connection Culture including:
MichaelLeeStallard.com Recognized
Last week I received an email notifying me that my blog was selected as one of the top 100 leadership blogs by Bestuniversities.com.
Challenger Disaster Documentary a Tribute to Truth Tellers
In Fired Up or Burned Out, I wrote about the lack of Knowledge Flow (or Voice) at NASA and how it contributed to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. National Geographic produced an excellent documentary about the Challenger disaster that’s available on Hulu.com. You can access it at Challenger: The Untold Story.
In most organizations there are truth tellers who have the courage to speak truth to power. In this case, Morton Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly and The Rogers Commission’s Richard Feynman emerge as the courageous truth tellers. Feynman appears in another chapter of Fired Up or Burned Out as the young supervising engineer of the Manhattan Project who asks Robert Oppenheimer to tell the supporting engineers the purpose of the project (which results in a tenfold increase in their productivity). Feynman also appeared in Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign (above).
Lessons I Learned from Stephen Hopson’s Adversity University
There is a lot of talk these days about focusing people on their strengths. Certainly there’s some wisdom in that but it’s not wise to focus on apparent strengths alone.
Recently, I met an extraordinary man named Stephen Hopson. His life story made me reconsider the wisdom of focusing on apparent strengths.
Stephen is deaf and has been since birth. If Stephen had focused on his apparent strengths, what would he have become? Probably not a financial executive on Wall Street, a motivational speaker or an airplane pilot.
Hopson became all of those.
A Culture of Radical Innovation
In a recent study of 759 public companies across 17 nations, Gerard J. Tellis, Jaideep C. Prabhu, and Rajesh K. Chandy concluded that corporate culture is a better predictor of a firm’s ability to capitalize on disruptive innovations than factors such as government policy and R&D spending. The study entitled “Radical Innovation Across Nations: The Preeminance of Corporate Culture” appeared in the January edition of the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing. These findings are consistent with what I argued in the changethis.com manifesto I wrote entitled “The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage” and in an article entitled “Encouraging Knowledge Flow” published in Perdido.
Employee Engagement During Difficult Times
Here’s another article I’m working on. If you have any suggestions, please email me at mstallard@epluribuspartners.com.
During difficult times it’s natural for anxious individuals to retreat into isolation, a state that nearly always results in diminished productivity. When it comes to the amount of effort employees put in their work, research by the Corporate Leadership Council has shown that emotional connections are on average four times as important as rational factors. Emotional connections arise when employees feel: 1) proud of their organization’s mission, values and reputation, 2) valued by their supervisor and colleagues, and 3) informed and that their opinions and ideas about matters that are important to them are considered by decision-makers before decisions are made.
Recently I visited an impressive organization that is poised to continue performing well even through the challenging economic environment we are presently facing.
Webcast with Charles W. “Willy” Moore, Jr. of Lockheed Martin
Please join me as I host a webcast with Charles W. “Willy” Moore Jr. on January 14, at 11:00 AM Eastern. When I spoke to a group of leaders at Lockheed Martin last year I heard Willy share his thoughts on leadership. He impressed me with his wisdom and extensive experience as a Vice President responsible for a major group at Lockheed and as a Vice Admiral during a distinguished 36-year career in the United States Navy. During his Navy career, Vice Admiral Moore served as a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Readiness and Logistics, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and Commander, U.S. Fifth Fleet (1998-2002). In this role VADM Moore commanded all U.S. Naval Forces throughout the Middle East and the Horn of Africa during a time of nearly constant combat. VADM Moore led his forces in combat operations including Infinite Reach after the 1998 Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Operation Desert Fox in Iraq and subsequent combat in the no-fly zone, Operation Southern Watch, Operation Determined Response after the terrorist bombing of USS Cole and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan fighting the global war on terrorism.
This is a webcast you don’t want to miss. To sign up for the live webcast or to hear a recording, click here.
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.