Behavior
Looking for something specific? The following topics address a wide range of business needs and challenges.
Balancing the Carrot and Stick: The Role of Negative Approaches in Leadership
Over the past several years, I’ve noticed that people and organizations are shifting away from using primarily negative approaches to influence behavior. Instead, they are embracing more positive…
An Example of (Safety) Leadership Success: Narrowing Focus to Create Results
The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. This eighth blog discusses one leader’s intentional push to move away from everything is important right now to a narrowed, organization-…
Culture, Language, and Positive Reinforcement
Increasing cultural diversity is adding a richness to the work world. Immigrants (like many non-immigrants) are often hardworking, loyal employees, however cultural diversity can present safety…
Sustaining a Culture of Engagement with Behavioral Science
If you manage a team or hold a leadership role in an organization, you may already know the benefits of maintaining high engagement. Highly engaged teams are correlated with lower rates of attrition…
An Example of Leadership Success: Creating Bench Strength
Want to go fast, go alone. Want to go far, go as a team. This sixth blog is dedicated to a leader’s determination to develop the bench strength of her team. Pat’s effort led to an organization-wide…
Teaching Persistence Without Overdoing the Pain
A headline about Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, wishing pain and suffering upon Stanford students caught my attention recently. I took the bait and clicked to find out what he might be getting at.…
The Case for Conducting a Behavioral Lean Maturity Assessment
Organizations that embody continuous improvement are exemplars within and outside of their respective industries. Ironically, we measure nearly every key metric critical to the forward progress of…
Behavioral Lean: The “Best of Both Worlds” Approach to Cultures of Continuous Improvement
Creating a culture of continuous improvement is an aspiration for many organizations. Continuous improvement cultures bring to mind industries such as commercial space flight. Only 55 years ago…
Examples of Leadership Success: Leading through Positive Accountability
Leadership Success Blog SeriesFor this next blog series, I will be highlighting successful examples of critical leader behaviors I’ve seen. The goal is to share leader behavior(s) and why they are…
Common Leadership Errors: Failing to Help the Human Thrive
For the last blog in this series, I decided to take a broader and holistic topic that is commonly seen in organizations. While this topic does not lend itself nicely to short examples of leadership…
Common Leadership Errors: Failing to Develop People
In 1969, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull authored the book, The Peter Principle. To summarize their research findings and developed principle, their concept sounds like this: in many…
Common Leadership Error: Failing to Evolve
The world around us is constantly changing. The markets we operate in, current economic conditions, world events, access to material goods and competition are all things leadership considers when…
Will This Behavioral Stuff Work With My Kids Too?
A reoccurring question I get while facilitating in-person workshops is whether the strategies and tactics discussed in class can be applied to other settings—be it spouse, kids, or family dog. While…
Common Leadership Errors: Focusing on What You Don’t Want
The role of leadership inside organizations is to help achieve the mission, vision, and business objectives. Leaders define what winning looks like. They then are responsible for creating momentum,…
Common Leadership Errors: Retraining Fixes Everything
What happens in your organization when a human error occurs? By human error I mean an undesired behavior that could, or does, lead to some undesired consequences for the performer, people around them…
Complacency Is Not a Root Cause
Complacency as a concept in safety has been around for some time. That said, I’ve noticed an uptick in client discussions highlighting employee complacency as a contributing factor in recent…
The ABCs of a New Year’s Resolution
Many people make New Year’s resolutions dedicated to making themselves better in some way. Whether it’s to lose weight and get fit; become a better leader; or be a better spouse, parent, or friend.…
Productivity Theater
Productivity is a big concern for managers who have people working remotely. Will they actually work as hard as they would in an office? This fear has been called “productivity paranoia.” I recently…