Posts by Gwen Voelpel
Why good efforts fail in execution: five cascading communications drop-offs to avoid
The conference room. The classroom. The living room. No matter where you look, you may notice poor communications. That can include a lack of communications, poorly crafted communications that don’t take the audience into account, and communications that are far too one-way. It’s frustrating. Poor communications from the top of an organization can be more…
Read MoreSoft Skills and Hard Work: Four Ways You Can Start Creating a Better Team
Want to create a great team on your own? Good luck! Just kidding. It’s not impossible for one ethical, well-intended, authentic person acting alone to help turn around a team. How? To create a great team, first you have to be a great teammate. Developing a truly strong team that trusts and respects each other,…
Read MoreLeadership Teams Are Team #1
How to recognize your top team to improve workplace culture Every member of the leadership team is an expert. They know their lines of business. They hire and develop their work teams. They inspire their people to greater and greater personal and professional accomplishments. And they fail, time and time again. Why is the leadership…
Read More3 Ways to Overcome Obstacles to Achieving Your Team’s Vision
People want to follow leaders who have a vision. Although team members may respect what Yogi Berra contributed to baseball, they aren’t interested in a leader who leads the way forward using Yogi’s famous quote, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yet even the best vision for your team’s work is…
Read MoreHow to Boost Employee Morale: What’s a Manager to Do?
When we talk about how to boost employee morale, it’s critical to understand what actually we mean by morale. It’s difficult to improve what we cannot clearly define. Morale doesn’t perfectly equate to motivation, but to a much broader and sweeping attitude about the work we do. The first thing that’s important to understand is…
Read MorePeer-to-Peer Accountability in the Workplace — You Don’t Have to Rely on the Boss
Let’s talk about the 4th level of the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team™ — accountability in the workplace. To recap your team’s progress to this point: Your team has become more cohesive and is making great strides in developing trust. They are engaging in constructive conflict and debate focused on key issues and eliminating…
Read MoreChanging Organizational Culture: 5 Ways to Effect Lasting Culture Change in Your Workplace
Changing organizational culture can seem like a battle, like a trudge up an enormous hill with seemingly no end, especially when you’re not sure where to begin. Most HR folks who are trying to figure exactly how to change company culture in a meaningful, lasting way, struggle to come up with a clear method that…
Read MoreDon’t let inertia stand in the way of progress
Everyone gets into a rut… We become so comfortable in our relationships—workplace and otherwise—that we start taking them for granted. This is the best we’ll get, we think. We’ve reached the pinnacle of our effectiveness working together. There’s no more room for improvement…..NOT! We can always learn new ways to improve, to work more collaboratively…
Read MoreCommunicating with the C (Conscientiousness) Personality Style
They get it done right! If you need someone to double check your work, to ensure that every “i” is dotted and “t” is crossed, look no further than your colleague who is a C or Conscientiousness style on the Everything DiSC Workplace® model. That includes those who have secondary styles such as CS and…
Read MoreCommunicating with the S (Steadiness) Personality Style
They keep the peace! The meeting is getting tense. People are talking over each other. And then someone calls a time-out and says, “can we just step back for a minute? I think we have some common ground we’re missing.” Chances are that person will be an S (for Steadiness) on the Everything DiSC Workplace®…
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