“Managers should never be allowed to abdicate their management accountabilities and authorities by having HR do what is their job!” I learned this from management guru and past president of Forrest & Company, Nick Forrest (no relation) several years ago when I had the good fortune to work with him briefly. Why mention HR when in a discussion about Risk …
Why We Talk Past Each Other at Work: The 7 Decision Languages
I recently sat through a meeting where the discussants, all intelligent people who care deeply about the work under discussion, argued deeply and long without much actually happening. You’ve been in these, too, and you’ve also been frustrated by how people don’t understand when you start talking about what we need to do. But I now don’t have to live …
Teams are about who is in them: The Imaginist
What does a team do? It depends on who is in it. The Imaginist decision maker sees teams as “teams of persons”. You can’t determine what is should be done until you analyze who is going to do it. Work cannot be separated from who does it because, for the Imaginst, it’s all about the person. Lots of ex-programmers seem …
Talking about Teaming: The 7 Languages of Action
As I try to get “team” better defined, one of the biggest problems I have — and one shared by Requisite Agility as a whole — is that people use words differently to talk about decisions about action. Teams, as I have started defining them, are all about doing something together, working to a purpose. How we talk about decisions …
ANN: Recording new video classes
Tomorrow I am going off to a decent site, with hopefully some better mics than I have, to record a couple of new videos for sale at the store. I will do at least one that is pretty much what I give my coaching clients to start these days. It will be priced low enough to be accessible to everyone …
Does Fluid Intelligence / IQ Matter?
(This continues our discussion about intelligence / IQ testing. Read part 1, Intelligence Testing & IQ: What it is, isn’t.) The big issue with intelligence tests is this general mental ability (GMA or g) that they measure. This is mostly “fluid intelligence”. It means how quickly you can solve a unique problem. You would think that it would correlate with …
Finding Average Pastor Salary Harder Than You’d Think
“Could you believe the gall of that guy?” We were coming out of a rather dreadful sermon on giving in our small, startup church. We were a congregation of mostly low earners — even me at the time — and money was going to be tight, even if everyone did their Biblical 10% (even pre-tax). The pastor decided it was …
Is there a Seminary Education Bubble?
Jerry Bowyer has written a very popular pair of blog post at Forbes.com on what he sees as an overlooked piece of the education bubble he has written about for years: the Seminary Bubble (and part 2). It’s interesting here because (1) it’s a bubble that because it has a restricted market illustrates the general problems for MBAs, law degrees, …
You Change Your Mind – And That’s Not Normal
If you’re old enough to bother reading this, you likely can look over your life and see the points at which you have changed your mind. Or finessed one of your pet theories of life. To you this seems like a normal process, one that comes with aging and growing. It’s not. You’re weird. And it makes people see you …
The Power of Mentoring (And Why You Didn’t Get It)
[updated 2013 August 29] Did you ever think that the reason why you didn’t get a mentor was that it was almost impossible to mentor you? A good mentoring relationship requires you to share a growth trajectory in how you handle complexity. Most people’s capacity for handling complex work issues increases over time along predictable paths once in their 20s. …