Thinking impacts behavior. This is true in all aspects of life, but its effects are particularly pronounced in leadership thinking about employees, where expectations and assumptions can create self-fulfilling prophesies — for both the better and the worse. Douglas McGregor, former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was one of the first business authorities to explore the impact …
Last week we explored the relationship between the above-the-line world of external actions, behaviors, and choices, and the below-the-line world of internal assumptions, beliefs, and values. The former, we suggested, invariably flow from the latter. Our actions are necessarily driven by our mental models and emotions. Our choices are shaped by the ideals and paradigms we hold. The concept is …
For years our seminars included an exercise that asked participants to think of the best listener they had ever known and describe what made that person so special. Most responses centered on techniques like maintaining eye contact, asking clarifying questions, and mirroring body language. But invariably someone would raise their hand and say that what really mattered was that the …
In the landscape of today’s working world, organizations are the fundamental and defining structures within which we work, produce, and get things done. Very few people now work outside of an organization. The pervasiveness of organizations in our society is now so complete that we take them as a given and no longer question the rationale behind their existence. In …
“In no other area have intelligent men and women worked harder or with greater dedication than…on improving communications in our organizations. Yet communications has proved as elusive as the Unicorn.” These words are as true today as they were in 1973 when Peter Drucker first wrote them. Communication is an area in which many organizations struggle and even more fall …
All of us listen. From morning to night we listen to spouses, kids, clients, friends, coworkers, and employees. But the very fact that we do it so much fools us into believing that we do it well. The reality, of course, is that our superficial and often scattered attention is no more listening than communication is simply telling people stuff. …
All below-the-line beliefs and biases held by leaders influence the functioning of human systems. But few are more important than those concerning human dignity and worth. These qualities address our basic sense of place in the world. They speak to our most fundamental right to exist. And because they are so central to human self-identity and self-conception, they are effectively …
Content communication — the whats, whens and whys of day-to-day interaction — is extremely seductive in its tangibility. But leaders cannot afford to underestimate the impact of relational communication in the functioning of any human system. To understand the enormity of this influence, put yourself in the shoes of a woman working in an office full of men who …
Communication can be divided into two broad categories: content and relational. Content is the what of any message. It is the facts and figures, the ideas and opinions that we transmit through e-mails, conversations, memos, or notes on the bulletin board. It is anything that can be expressed in words. Relational communication pertains to the who of any interaction. Though …
Many factors can inhibit the establishment of conditions that tend to characterize superior-functioning organizations .Leaders’ own below-the-line beliefs, values, and assumptions, however, can be particularly problematic. Consider, for example, the following: Unexamined assumptions that one is already communicating sufficiently with employees A failure to establish formal mechanisms to assess the quality of organizational communication systems Need-to-know approaches to communication and …