Defend, deflect, deny!

I get it. When someone’s upset about something you’ve done, the immediate instinct for most of us is to defend our actions, deflect the accusation, and deny that anything was wrong. My husband and I recently encountered this at a local restaurant. We were initially (mostly) okay with the fact that service was slow because the dining room was clearly …

Got conflict?

If you’re trying to remove all tension and conflict within your team, you’re doing it wrong. Any attempt to create a bubble in which no one disagrees with anyone else never works. As General George Patton said, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” Squashing disagreement means squashing creativity, innovation, and problem-solving. It means potentially disastrous (and certainly …

If at first you don’t succeed…

Practice. It’s a word everyone loves to hate. Because it means we can’t just intellectually understand something. We have to do the thing, and in the beginning, we’ll do it badly – because that’s what it means to learn how to do it well. And leadership skills – practicing leadership – it’s scary. It’s vulnerable, and those who deeply want to …

How to give negative feedback to employees

Giving negative feedback is NOT fun. It’s something we just don’t want to do. But as a manager and supervisor, it’s something you have to do sometimes – even when you’re not sure how to handle performance improvement meetings. I’ve got you! In this video, I provide an overview of how to manage the constructive feedback process, from identifying exactly …

Conflict-avoidant? Get over it!

Last year, I was part of a family Thing. You probably know the sort of Thing I mean. Words were spoken that shouldn’t have been, and other words weren’t spoken that should have been. Then the situation devolved into a Bigger Thing because it wasn’t raised as a Thing until weeks later – by email. One of the participants is, according to …

Bridging the Gap – even when you disagree

This is a talk I did at a recent public symposium at the Fayetteville, Arkansas public library. (A beautiful space, if you’re anywhere in the area!) The overall symposium topic was “Discover the Power With(in).”  Eight speakers, of which I was (obviously) one, presented their perspective on personal power, the power we all have within us to create collaboration and …

Sometimes it just doesn’t work

You thought and wrote about what you wanted to happen till your pen ran dry and your hand cramped up. You practiced what you wanted to say till your voice got hoarse and your heart cracked open. But sometimes it just doesn’t work. My brother and I have been out of touch for a long time now. It wasn’t anything …

Do it now! 3 steps to hard conversations

Difficult conversations are, well, difficult. Hard. Challenging. Intimidating. Easy to put off. I’ve had several discussions recently with people who were trying to decide how to tackle a difficult conversation. In each case, the over-riding emotion was some form of do I hafta? combined with I’m dreading this! Of course I understand. I face my own sense of dread and …

The gentle art of conflict transformation

Some people avoid conflict. Others seem to relish it. Google “conflict management,” and you’ll get over nine million results – and a lot of autofill suggestions about conflict management styles, examples, process, and so on. Google “conflict resolution,” and you’ll see over 70 million results! Based on those numbers, it seems like a lot more people are trying to fix …

What do we do next?

This has been an unbelievably weird, wild, difficult year. An unprecedented number of catastrophic, profoundly painful events have caused immense loss and suffering for a tremendous number of people across the United States and around the world. Parallel to these in-the-moment events are revelations of long-ongoing acts of harassment and violence against various groups of people deemed “not like us” …