A senior manager at a mid-sized healthcare organization once described her team’s dysfunction this way: “We have all the right processes on paper. The problem is nobody trusts that anyone will actually do what they say, people are afraid to speak up when something’s wrong, and half our decisions get made on gut feeling and office politics.” She wasn’t describing […]
A few years ago, I was driving to a client meeting, half-listening to TED Radio Hour, when Margaret Heffernan said something that made me pull over and write it down. “Culture is the accumulation of everyone’s actions.” Seven words. I sat with them for a minute. Then I turned off the radio and drove the rest of the way in […]
A few years ago, I was working with a mid-sized healthcare organization that had just completed a grueling Joint Commission accreditation visit. Their quality director — a smart, exhausted woman who had spent six months preparing — leaned back in her chair after the surveyors left and said, “Thank God that’s done for three years.” I didn’t say anything in […]
A few years ago, I was working with a mid-level manager who was, by every external measure, succeeding. Promotions on schedule. Strong performance reviews. A team that consistently hit its numbers. But in a conversation that started as a routine check-in, she said something that stopped me cold: “I don’t know why I keep coming back.” She wasn’t burned out […]
Dan Goodman said it plainly in a recent LinkedIn post: “PIPs suck for everyone.” The employee wrongly being managed out through fabricated documentation. The manager forced to manufacture performance claims to justify a decision already made. The HR professional doing leadership’s dirty work. He’s right about all of it. But here’s where I’ll push back: PIPs don’t suck because they’re […]
Three weeks into a major project implementation, a junior staff member caught me in the hallway after a meeting. She started to say something, hesitated, then said, “Never mind. I’m sure you’ve thought of this.” I was busy. I had the answers. I let it go. Three weeks after that, we hit a critical issue that pushed the project back […]
Over the past forty years, I have participated in, conducted, or sponsored hundreds of team-building exercises. Most were successful and accomplished their purpose. Some were flops. But one has been requested over and over again. It consistently boosted morale and productivity. The activity? Group painting lessons. As the Administrative Services Manager for a large department in local government, I regularly […]
It’s been my experience that applicants tend to overcomplicate their responses when applying for a Baldrige-based award. This can be discouraging and is harder to communicate to staff, customers, boards, etc. And examiners — myself included — sometimes get so deep into the criteria that we forget what the framework looks like to an organization seeing it for the first […]
In October 2020, I had the privilege of hearing Tim Wise speak at the City of Tallahassee’s annual race relations summit. Wise is a prolific author and one of the most incisive thinkers on race, language, and institutional behavior in the country. He said something early in his talk that I have not stopped thinking about since: “The words you […]
Drafting your first Baldrige feedback comment is hard. Even experienced examiners sometimes stare at a blank page, knowing what they want to say but not how to structure it. And on the other side of the process, organizations receiving a feedback report often wonder how the examiner arrived at what they wrote — and what they could have put in […]
