Psychologist, Author, Consultant, Teacher, Trainer and Restorative Practitioner
Picture this: as a leader, you’re a real go-getter. And then there’s that team member who always needs to analyze everything to death before finally getting into action. And the other one who is such a perfectionist that they never get the job finished. Why do these co-workers manage to get under your skin? And more importantly, how do you deal with your irritation?
Continue reading “Dealing with difficult team members”
As an organization, as a leader, sustainable performance is key to build and maintain an excellent organization. Sustainable performance means coworkers do excellent work without falling into the traps of burnout or workaholism. Sustainable performance means your organization efficiently and effectively provides quality products and services, is blessed with low absenteeism and low staff-turnover. All of this is good for the bottom line.
Continue reading “The Key to Sustainable Performance”
Good performance is good for the organization; it promises quality results in the future. It’s about more than only the outcome: how the result was attained in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and collaboration is equally important. Performance feedback entails it all: information on how and how well a task has been executed. In this post I deal with how to let coworkers know their effort is meaningful, good, or excellent. Continue reading “Feedback Loops for Excellent Interpersonal Communication”
Colleagues need to feel free to tell each other what they observe and from their expertise make critical comments, without chopping heads off or having their own heads chopped off. Safety also lays the basis for positive relations with one another. So how do you create safety?
Continue reading “Excellent interpersonal communication requires a safe environment”
When you order a sandwich, is it about the two slices of bread or what’s on the sandwich? The sandwich technique for feedback is a way to package something unpleasant: First start with something positive, then the criticism and round off with something positive. The negative stuff is sandwiched between the good stuff. Sounds good, so why do I say: Never, ever use this technique. Continue reading “Never, ever sandwich your feedback!”
Without communication, no organization. An organization’s achievements are directly and indirectly influenced by interpersonal communication. This is true in all three directions: top-down, horizontally, and bottom-up. If you want an excellent organization, you will need excellent communication and, by extension, excellent interpersonal communication. But why? And what do you need to do to implement it? Continue reading “Achieving Excellent Interpersonal Communication”
If you truly understand resistance, you seldom need to deal with it: You manage its cause before it even manifests itself!
The leader understands the source of resistance and deals with it adequately. Some typical sources are: Continue reading “Using Resistance to Lead Effectively”
In my post Once You Understand Emotion, Motivation Is Easy, I laid the link between Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory and current emotions.
In this post, I will briefly expand these ideas and then focus on a specific emotion from a communication and leadership point of view: Anxiety. Continue reading “Anxiety, Communication and Leadership”
One of the most powerful theories on how to motivate people on the work-floor is Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory. In my post ‘Effective Communication Is About Understanding Emotion’ I dealt with the idea of Observational Listening and how that way of listening focuses on emotions people are currently experiencing. These two concepts together make a powerful combination in which motivation takes current emotions into account. Continue reading “Once You Understand Emotion, Motivation Is Easy”
Imagine a world in which you wouldn’t experience any emotion whatsoever. What would your life look like? Drab? No, it wouldn’t be drab, as that’s an emotion. Nor boring, peaceful or any other state of mind which implies an emotion is being experienced. This means, therefore, that emotions are necessary for you to be able to experience anything at all. It goes a step further: Emotions are adaptive, they increase your chances for survival. Take fear, for example. If you didn’t ever get scared, you wouldn’t be aware of danger and would do silly things, like not jumping out the way when a car comes barreling down the road towards you. Emotions tell you what is important, what needs your attention and what action is required. Only when something is important enough does it capture your attention, this all thanks to the emotion that brings it to the forefront for you. And you only learn something when it is important enough to be able to react appropriately to such a given situation. In other words, emotion not only tells you what is important, it also is the motor for your learning. Emotions are primary. Emotions motivate. Continue reading “Effective Communication Is About Understanding Emotion”