Why it’s Worth Getting Input from the Misfits and Mavericks
Despite the cold scrambled egg breakfasts and ubiquitous power point presentations in my monthly networking groups, I try to stay alert to new ideas and intriguing new terms, like this one: “Integrated Marginality”. I googled it and found studies done decades ago on disenfranchised groups marginalized by race, language, socioeconomic barriers. These studies were largely […]
We Are All Elephants
You enter the meeting like a Ninja warrior. You are prepped, pumped and powerful. This time, you’ll really knock their socks off…. They have to sign on to this idea…it’s a no-brainer solution! You do the sales pitch of a lifetime – everything works! Impeccable timing! Laughter in all the right places! Great charts! Great […]
5 Ways to Get Your Colleague (You Know the One) into Presentation Training
He’s your content expert ….. and his personality disappears in presentations. She’s the smartest engineer on your team…and her body language radiates hostility in public settings…. Or, perhaps he’s the star IT techie so sure of himself in front of an audience that he talks “at” the group and turns people off with his arrogance. […]
What’s one thing we really CAN fix?
Amy Chen’s intriguing LinkedIn question seems simple on the surface: (If you could change one thing, what would it be? #FixIt) But how do you choose from the tsunami of possibilities? Here’s one behavioral issue that may underlie a host of other “Fix-this-NOW’s”: A tendency to assign blame to others and to see oneself as […]
Three Ideas to Get Your Group Unstuck
So your group needs to make a decision and here they are at the same impasse that has derailed the process before. Time to do something different. Three strategies you can employ right now: 1. Change the context to get everyone out of a predictable and often comfortable business-as-usual setting. This could be simple – […]
Group Soup: Getting closer to Umami with just the right diversity of “ingredients”
I’m excited about my third round as facilitator in a University training for Search Committees – those charged with hiring teaching faculty in this fairly large university campus. I have already done two highly praised facilitations and now I have a choice: I can go safe: do an opener that I know works or….something different. […]
Consensus Wins the Game
I’ll admit it right up front – I’m conflict avoidant. I’m often the peacemaker in the group, and a great collaborator, with a truck full of “people skills”. I’m patient to a fault. But what I gain in “niceness” by putting other’s needs first, finding common ground, (while too often saying “ok” when I mean […]
Voice Power: The Asset You Don’t Think About
We are such a visual culture: videogames, television, movies, i-Everything. It’s easy to lose connection with other parts of our experience, because we aren’t focused on what we hear, but on what we see. This has given rise to the dreaded, and purely visual, Powerpoint as a consistent method of disseminating information. There it is, […]