Leaders Empower Their People

In these difficult times it’s important to remember that your most important asset goes home to their family every night. As Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, said in this Sunday’s NYTimes:

"You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses’ goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more. Because they can make it easy for me to get information...

"Life is always about contracts that you make with people. Very few of them are written. Most of them are implicit, and most of them evolve out of a course of dealing and understanding. And if you are good for your people, they’ll be good to you, and help you and help propel you up in your career.

"By the way, being good to them doesn’t mean you pay them more or you’re more liberal, or you let them get away with things. Most people, what they want is to be better. They want to work for a great organization. They want to feel good about themselves. They want to not so much get promoted, as be promotable. They want to evolve. And if you’re the kind of person that they think will help them do that, they’ll give you a loyalty that’s the most sincere kind of loyalty." - Lloyd Blankfein

(Read the entire NYTimes Interview)

Healthy Relationships Improve Productivity

It seems to me that the real work of management is relationship -- relationship with vendors, customers, those whom you manage and those who manage you.

Savvy business leaders have always known what scientific research has now proven beyond dispute: from the executive office to the assembly line, employees who have healthy relationships are more productive. What's on the flipside of that coin? The downstream effects of unhealthy relationships include loss of productivity, absenteeism, noxious attitudes and even accidents on the job.

Could your company benefit from a program that makes it possible for your people to get along better on the worksite and, at the same time, enrich their home life?

No one need settle for a toxic relational environment--on the job or in the home. The hazardous waste of noxious relationship dynamics can be cleaned up. Your workplace can become a delightful place to be. This is my specialty.

Contrary to what most people believe, healthy relationships do not happen by chance. They happen when people have the required skills and attitudes, and when they consistently make a choice to speak and act in ways that promote healthy relating. We now know that people can learn communication skills that foster individual and corporate excellence.