If you have ever wondered if passion is more important than purpose (or vice versa), there is a SIGNIFICANT difference in the way they impact you - at least at work. Here is an excerpt from Stanford’s Dan and Chip Heath’s new book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments have an Extraordinary Impact that contains breakthrough new research about the relationship between passion, purpose and performance. Ready for it? University of California Berkeley Professor Morten Hansen [...]

If you’ve grown weary of all the employee engagement rhetoric and the pressure to measure and move the needle there, join the ranks!  This topic has been hot for a long time, yet with very little to show for it – except frustrated employees who hate annual surveys, and who stopped being honest a long time ago about it.  Maybe it’s time for a change! Most employees don’t give a rip about employee engagement, even [...]

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Is it possible that what the world teaches as weakness is in fact our greatest virtue?  What if this same supposed “weakness” is not just our greatest virtue, but also a greatest source of strength?  One brilliant videographer postulated these ideas, and I’m curious what you think.  Watch this brief clip, and share your opinion about it in the comments below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF1dvq3Qu2Y&feature=player_embedded For the record, here’s an opinion for you to consider. Human beings crave [...]

Imagine becoming so frustrated you put both hands up in a gesture of surrender and say, “I’m done!” You can probably relate to that moment of utter frustration, as you’ve no doubt experienced this.  Communication is a part of building and navigating healthy, robust relationships and it’s a life skill you must hone if you want to have harmonious, engaging and productive interactions.  This is especially true of teams who, for the most part, come [...]

Take a moment and get a crystal-clear picture in your mind of a relationship with someone you don’t get along with. What’s it like? How does it feel? Think of the tug and pull you experience, and its impact on you to be part of that energy-sucking, life-draining interaction. Think of the blaming, the criticism, the defensiveness and ignoring that happens, sprinkled occasionally with sarcasm or even subtle putdowns that really kill the relationship and [...]

You crave it, maybe even without knowing it!  It can feel like a burn inside of you, woven into the very fibers of your DNA.  Its presence is utterly transformational, both to the teams you’re in and the results you create.  And without it, you may feel alone, de-energized, and find that your motivation to be at your very best suffers.  What is that almost-magical difference-maker? If you live in North America, you see a [...]

Increased performance! Improved performance! Better performance! Faster, better, bigger, best.  If you’re like most people, that’s what you want for the performance of everything from your car’s engine to your employees at work. For good reason, particularly inside your organization. Especially given that increased performance directly affects corporate bottom lines, innovation, and opportunities. This awareness has led organizations for decades to focus on measuring and improving performance, even though this attention on measurement has not [...]

Interdependence may be the truest hallmark of interpersonally competent people, and the most distinguishing characteristic of high-performing teams.  In fact, you can guarantee that any business consistently performing at the top of their game is made up of world-class interdependent teams.[1] This begs a question:  Is your team among the power-house teams that are setting the world on fire?  Just in case you really wanted to know the answer, here are five sure-fire signs that [...]

Think of the best leader you know, a person who really knows how to intelligently influence others to be more effective, and to move toward meaningful purposes and goals.  Who would you choose, and what makes them a leading-edge leader? Here are a few things I’d bet that your chosen influential leader is not. I bet you did not identify someone who operates like a general on a hill.  You know, the kind of person [...]

In our most recent Engagement blogs, we’ve outlined the challenge and opportunity to improve engagement of employees within organizations. We’ve highlighted the common organizational engagement solutions and their limited success. We’ve also outlined the People Acuity approach, how it differs from traditional approaches and the results it generates. Let us now share a case in point. This is an example of an organization that took the principles of People Acuity, applied them to their company, [...]

Study after study shows that engagement in life and work benefits you, your team and your organization. Yet, the engagement problem remains, the sorry result of too many organizations wanting their employees to be engaged, but not finding success through programs, leadership, and initiatives. One reason it may remain near the top of the list every year is that organizations and leaders may be focused on the wrong solution and often, mis-diagnose the root of [...]

U.S. workers don’t love work and struggle to love life. And it shows. 70% of U.S. Workers are not engaged at work and of those, 18% are actively disengaged, meaning they are “emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive.” (1) As we have all heard and probably seen, employee engagement affects employee turnover, absenteeism, productivity, customer loyalty and more. This is why employee engagement has been part of the business conversation [...]

Your biggest competitive advantage is a little thing, one you may overlook way too often. It can destroy your business. Or, it can elevate it to heights that may astound you. Nick Greer, a self-made millionaire and highly successful entrepreneur, shared the secret with a group gathered in Prague to hear his keynote at last year’s global entrepreneurism conference. When it was time for him to deliver his one-two punch, his “don’t-forget-this” statement, he offered [...]

Engagement vies for the top spot each year amongst leaders’ worries and concerns. And, for good reason! In spite of twenty-plus years of research, and millions of dollars of too-often-failed solutions, employee engagement remains the elusive problem to fix, nut to crack, and silver bullet to find. While some organizations have made improvements, overall engagement remains frightening low, even though there has been a concerted focus on this troubling challenge for the past two decades. [...]

Imagine you are in this situation: your wise, wealthy father is nearing the end of his life, and he wants to make sure he has passed on his most important legacy to you.  He calls you to his bedside, and as you visit together about life, and what you’ve experienced together, he lets you know that he wants to include you in his inheritance. But, you have a choice about what you will receive, he [...]

Did you know that today, you experience as much information in ten days as a person did in their entire lifetime just a century ago?  You might also be curious to know that in this era, a college degree becomes obsolete in about three years, unless you continually challenge yourself to forge into the frontier of the unknown.  Our world is changing at the speed of light, and new ideas are emerging so quickly that [...]

Imagine this: you are on fire with a dream!  It keeps you up at night.  You are excited, on a mission, and you have over 12,000 people around the world joining your rallying cry.  You’re alive with it, and the burn inside you fills every single day with high energy, enthusiasm, and the highest productivity and performance you’ve ever had in your entire lifetime.  Not to mention, that you are surrounded by the most brilliant [...]

You may not realize this, but every relationship or team you are part of is in the process of an evolution. Sometimes, you get stuck in the process, and can’t quite see how to get to meaningful connection with others in a way that simply leads to a high energy and high performance experience. But what if the answer is more simple than you know? The truth is that it is quite simple.  In fact, it [...]

There is a wave quietly sweeping the globe. It steadily grows in stark contrast to the sorrows being created right now in Syria, the atrocities this past year of Belgium and France, and the self-preoccupied focus that permeates so many homes, governments, and businesses around the world. You may be part of this wave without even knowing it, or even realizing the importance of your adding to it every single day. You may be a meaning-maker, [...]

If you are like most people, at one time or another you have likely asked questions like, “Where do I fit?” or,” How do I create ‘fit’ with my spouse, or with a boss who is so different from me?”  You may have encountered the frustration of not knowing how to connect in meaningful ways with those who are important to you, or additionally, to feel like your work “fits” you.  If this has been, or is now [...]