Employees’ moods, emotions, and overall dispositions have an impact on job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, teamwork, negotiations and leadership. … employees’ emotions are integral to what happens in an organization, says Professor Barsade, who has been doing research in the area of emotions and work dynamics for 15 years.
Everybody brings their emotions to work. You bring your brain to work. You bring your emotions to work. Feelings drive performance. They drive behavior and other feelings.
Many companies and organizations are dealing with multiple changes right now to adapt to the huge shifts in our economy: layoffs, salary reductions, and freezes, office closings, budget cuts, etc. My CEO executive coaching clients are making painful decisions, managing personal stress, communicating more often with employees, customers, and suppliers. All of that is useful and important.
I also find it useful to remind managers that change is not quick or easy for companies.
Leaders, especially the most dynamic, creative, and entrepreneurial, must keep in mind that stability is in the nature of organizations. That’s why we call them organizations, rather than alterizations or adaptizations. People, especially in groups, need (more…)
For a group of people to work smoothly together, each member must understand what constitutes agreement. This understanding is often left in the background, unexamined, as everyone assumes their standards match those of other people. Fundamental to the success of the executive off sites I conduct is helping the group make these assumptions explicit so that everyone is playing by the same rules. If, in fact, everyone has the same standards, we finish this step quickly. If not, time invested early to clarify the ground rules saves a lot of time (and upset) later.
There are two essential parts: clarity and verity. First, everyone must be clear on what is being agreed. Second, the group needs a way to know if agreement has been reached.
The news item below is a bit technical, so here is the gist:
Every cell in our body is continually sensing and responding to tiny chemical, electrical, and temperature changes created by nearby organisms without physical contact. As a result, cells alter their physical structure in response to the presence of other living things, including reshaping themselves to move toward or away from their neighbors.
A single atom or molecule, without even touching the cell, can move it.
When great big bundles of such cells get close, as in (more…)
Years ago, when I was new to being coached, I experienced a fundamental attribute of transformational coaching. I was completing a fantastic call with my coach, Mary Arzt. I had done a lot of venting and whining. I had seen some new possibilities. I, ultimately, had gotten clear and excited about the steps I would take into my future. A fantastic coaching call. I thanked my coach for the generosity of her listening and the power of her insight.
At which point, everything had been said and there was nothing left to say. The coach let the silence continue and we sort of basked in that rare space of nothing to do and no place to go: just perfect. At some point, my ego started to second-guess the just completed conversation. My ego realized that I had revealed (more…)
My mother, my wife, my sister, and Oprah recommended Ellen Foster to me. Ellen Foster is a very young, very mistreated Southern girl who tells her story in simple, compelling language. She takes us energetically into her world and lets us see adult behavior through her worldly but never cynical eyes. Her saga is funny, clever, and heart-rending. But most of all, it is a true human experience.
I developed this talk for the initial meeting of executive coaching groups to prepare them for the slow, sometimes difficult aspects of their work. I have used it many times to great effect when launching teams into other long-term projects. Some of my coaching clients have even adapted it for their own presentations.
Integrity is usually a major conversation when I coach groups of executives. It almost always comes up in the context of arriving to the meeting on time or returning promptly from breaks.1 This leads to a discussion of consequences, by which people mean punishments for not being on time: fines, humiliation, etc. This opens a powerful examination of monitoring, enforcement, and integrity throughout the organization.
Consequences come in two flavors. Imposed consequences are punishments contrived by an authority exerting its power to compel behavior. Natural consequences are what reality delivers in response to actions. If I (more…)
I was angry. My business day had barely begun and I was livid. I had an important presentation and my whiteboard was not installed. The office manager had promised several times over the past month to get it done but there it sat, useless on the floor. I was calculating whether I had time to drive home to get my own tools when she (more…)
“With such an abundance of information available simultaneously at all levels, micromanagement can creep unnoticed into the chain of command and pull it apart. For example, if a general is able to follow an ongoing firefight through email and IM, and he is inclined to believe he knows what’s best for the units in contact, then he very well might start directing those small units from afar, consequently eliminating the need for his colonels, captains, and sergeants to do any thinking of their own.
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“a commander may be dismayed to find his soldiers have become too heavily reliant on headquarters for critical decisions. That’s dangerous, because sooner or later headquarters won’t be available. Equipment will break; signals will be lost; communications will go down, and almost certainly at the worst times. That’s when the commander will wish most that he had cultivated his men’s initiative rather than tamped it out through incessant electronic directives or rebukes for mistaken decisions.”
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Many companies and organizations are dealing with multiple changes right now to adapt to the huge shifts in our economy: layoffs, salary reductions, and freezes, office closings, budget cuts, etc. My CEO executive coaching clients are making painful decisions, managing personal 
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