Wouldn’t you like to have mind control over people? Wouldn’t it be great to have them do what you want? The idea of getting of a potential dating partner to take notice of you, getting your children to behave, having your boss promote you, getting people to help you succeed in whatever you…

A few days ago a friend of mine posted (on Google+) that nobody is listening on Twitter anymore. He offered his specific help to promote someone’ blog post there but got no answer. Obviously, because the other part wasn’t even listening. This story made me think about how people are consuming social media. Nobody will…

Hell, said French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. For all our good intentions in life, there are people who just seem to get under our skin, who go out of their way to sabotage our efforts — often without even knowing it — or to whom we just can’t relate. At…

A commenter on my blog sent me this little morsel: A project manager was running a piece of work with a geographically dispersed team. The team leader was tasked with communicating some bad news to the team members in another city, so he phoned them all and had a conversation with them. A couple of weeks later…

Recently an area director for a non-profit asked me if I would do a Malama session for a work team that was struggling to communicate with each other. He valued everyone on the team individually, however he could see that together they were not very effective. Malama is the value of caring, compassion, and…

In this, the alive and well revolution of blogging and print-on-demand publishing, censorship is something we think of as very dark ages; surely it doesn’t happen anymore! That may be true in the freedoms of your personal, unshackled life, but how about at work? The freedom of self-expression is one we say we cherish most of all…

There’s a common saying that human beings were given two ears (and two eyes), but only one mouth to show that they should listen (and look) at least twice as much as they speak. I think that for managers and leaders that ratio is far too low. Looking and listening should happen maybe ten or…

Suppose someone asked you to list the most important qualities you would find in an outstanding leader. What would you say? Toughness? Authority? Decisiveness, perhaps? Tenacity? You could make a case for all of these. Today’s conventional thinking about leadership tends to stress the more active, resolute qualities in a leader. Leaders are expected to…

Winning new customers and keeping current ones happy isn’t helped by trying to work too fast. Customers are rarely as impressed by sheer speed as they are by clear evidence that you are trying to understand their real needs and make sure you can deal with them fully. The easiest way to make anyone feel special…

One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has got to be unpopular with the self-seeking, personal agenda of most of us these days. The habit is number five, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” This principle is at the heart of empathic listening. Listening is essential to…