Category Archives: Management

How to Manage Conflict at Work, Part I: Assessing the Dynamic

From time to time, we all experience conflict on the job. Just the act of trying to coordinate activities with others — or, actually, any attempt at working together — can trigger conflict, even if in the big picture, everyone involved cares about the same things. Conflict often arises because silos exist within the organization [...]

Reapplying the Platinum Rule: How to Coach Your Boss

“How about if Part III gives advice for those with managers who fit these descriptions?” A discerning reader posed that question after reading my last two blogs, A New Element of Management, Part I: Three Scenarios of Employee Disengagement, and Part II: The Platinum Rule. Both blogs focused on executives Silvia, Ophelia, and Felix, each [...]

A New Element of Management, Part II: The Platinum Rule

Remember Silvia, Ophelia, and Felix, from last week’s blog — the senior execs who were turning off members of their staffs? This post will show how we adjusted these execs’ behavior to match the realities of their staffs’ experiences. See if your view of the underlying through-line matches what really happened; to refresh your memory [...]

A New Element of Management, Part I: Three Scenarios of Employee Disengagement

All in the same week, I had the opportunity to deal with three very different senior managers. Each was responsible for a different organizational function, and each had a different leadership style. And yet all three senior managers — we’ll call them Silvia, Ophelia, and Felix — behaved in characteristic ways that unintentionally undermined employee [...]

To Err Is Human; to Help Employees Improve Is Humane

Many companies use some kind of program for “measuring quality,” but the results of these assessments are typically expressed as “error rates.” Error rates are pretty worthwhile when they’re used to identify process steps that have broken down or reveal inaccurate procedures that don’t account for the way things really happen. Examining what’s gone wrong [...]