Three Steps to Personal Goal Setting for Leaders

By Ron Price

Most leaders have completed their organizational plans for next year, communicated with specificity and enthusiasm to their employees, and appropriated the necessary resources to lay the groundwork for a successful year.

However, I tend to find in my work that few have applied this same discipline to creating and implementing their own individual performance plans for the year. Sometimes this is nothing more than an oversight; other times it is because the leader doesn’t feel accountable to the same disciplines imposed on others, and sometimes it is because of deeper feelings of insecurity that produce a subtle but lingering fear of failure. Read More

5 Ways Vulnerability Can Be An Asset

By Dave Clark,

I did something very out of character for me one day last week. In fact, it was something I don’t think I’ve ever done in a 30+ year career in the workforce – I admitted to my manager that I simply just didn’t have it that day. My mental gas tank had gone dry. 

A confluence of internal and external pressures created a perfect storm of mental chaos. Sleep deprived, overextended, and trying to keep up with my self-inflicted unmanageable schedule led to elevated-stress levels that pushed me over the edge. My will to conquer the world was put on hold – even if just for one day.Read More

The Power of DISC Language

Improving Communication During High-stress Situations and Making Performance Evaluations More Meaningful

Debbie Cronin is an administrative manager responsible for directing a busy 30-person department at St. Peter’s Health, where she works with a diverse team of professionals from a variety of practices. When Debbie is on the floor, she wears many hats, acting as is the admin of the day, the house supervisor, the wound and ostomy nurse manager, and the float department manager. Not only is she accountable for the floor, but she also has to contend with a multitude of personalities, work behaviors and communications styles throughout her day. All of this, coupled with a non-stop stressful work environment, can be a challenge to say the least. Read More

Restraint – The Key to Improving Emotional Intelligence

By Dave Clark,

You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you, that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass. – Warren Buffett.

I saw this quote scrolling through social media recently and it really caught my eye. I think the message is absolutely pertinent in today’s society where people’s tempers seem to flare at the slightest urging, from battles on social media to recurrent road rage incidents. Read More

Acres of Diamonds at Work

By Ron Price

There is an old story about a fellow in the ancient world, who upon learning about diamonds, sold his successful farm and spent his fortune traveling the world in search of the gems. Several years after he died, having never found the diamonds he sought, others discovered the largest diamond mine ever found—on the farm he had sold to begin his quest.

Just for a moment, let’s pretend there was a special machine that took a retina scan of every employee in your business and, based on this scan, it could tell you exactly what each employee was capable of becoming in the future. You could then create a customized development program that resulted in the most profitable and fulfilling use of every employee in your business. Would you use such a machine, if it were available? Read More

5 Ways to Avoid Making a Bad Hire

By Justice Council,

It seems like a very simple and basic concept, that people are the lifeblood of any business. Businesses will succeed or fail based depending on the quality of its workforce. Yet, how many business owners view their workforce as the resource they actually are, and take the time to ensure they have the best of the best?

Ultimate success for a company comes from constructing a well-rounded and synergistic team. It starts with understanding the real cost of a bad hire. If you ask a business owner, what keeps you up at night? A likely answer may be the ability to hire and retain the right people. Well, at least it should be the answer. Read More

Think Differently About Competition at Work

By Dr. Francis Eberle

Every spring I get reacquainted with my bicycle. For me cycling is recreational, social, competitive, and great exercise. While riding, cyclists talk, solve the problems, reminisce, “take a turn” at the front and wait if someone lags behind. The first group rides of the year often take a slightly different tone. The pace quickens when the road is flat, or someone will likely push themselves hard up a hill to get to the top before everyone else. On these rides everyone is checking their fitness in comparison with others as the season begins. Most do this to note their own personal expectation of fitness and not to try and beat someone else. It is a ritual that is repeated over and over at almost every level of cycling. Read More

“DISC Is a Swiss Army Knife”
How Elizabeth Roberts Uses DISC to Help Start-Ups Succeed

When Elizabeth Roberts, Partner and Head of People at Ulysses Holdings, took the DISC TriMetrix HD Assessment over three years ago, it made an immediate impression on her.

“I thought, ‘I don’t really understand this, but I feel like they might have cameras in my house’,” she jokes.

She had taken assessments before, and hadn’t been overly impressed. She hadn’t bought into the idea of an algorithm telling her about herself and had been put off by tests that attempted to tell her who she was. “Different tests told me I was an introvert, an extrovert … and the feedback was never in a language that I understood.” Read More

The Four Commitments of Inner Circle Coaching

By Whit Mitchell

My favorite method of executive coaching (and by far the most impactful for my clients) is called Inner Circle Coaching. It is a team effort that relies on feedback and partnership from a leader’s inner circle to help that leader see his or her blind spots, and to create long-term success and changed behaviors.

Why do it this way? In order to create change, I’ve found that it is extremely effective to involve the people who work directly with the leader I am coaching. The leader’s inner circle has better access to the leader, which gives them invaluable observations. The person being coached chooses five or six people as their inner circle—bosses, peers, direct reports, colleagues. These are people whose opinions matter to the leader. Read More