“For how long have you known that having seventeen people reporting directly to you was a bad idea?” I already knew the answer. As a coach, sometimes I purposefully ask questions I already know the answers to. In this case, I wanted to do two things: Turn up the pain on the situation so my…
The following may offend you—if you feel strongly about your right to not be offended. One of the reasons accountability in business languishes these days is because of how political correctness has gone too far in our world. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m a sensitive person with high standards for maturity and respect. Political…
Talk to any manager long enough and you’ll hear them say something like, “I can’t get my people to….” While I’m prone to rant about the deficiencies of our education system, there’s something most of us already learned that can help. In high school social studies, you probably came across Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development.…
What is your company’s most important asset? Your people? Your brand? Your intellectual property? What if it’s none of these things? What if the most important assert were your culture’s relationship to truth? By this I mean, generally speaking, how honest people are with themselves and others. Honesty is a quality that people tend to…
“I think therefore I am.” Most people have heard this pithy piece of philosophy, but have little idea what it means, much less how it sowed the seeds for myriad management problems. Today, you get to blame the 17th-century French philosopher who coined the phrase, René Descartes, for all your troubles. By understanding what he…
I learned an amazing thing about accountability during my time as an executive at EMyth that is about to transform the way you manage. We interviewed every exiting client to see how we could have improved. We found almost every client wanted to be held more accountable. Their coaches, of course, were shocked. There are…