FieldNotes
Our daily Field Notes email is just the kind of jumpstart you need. A fast read. Maybe less than a minute. Because sometimes it just takes one insight to change the trajectory of the day.
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The Transparency of Individual Compensation Is Fraught With Danger
Transparency in organizations creates buy-in and engagement. Team members feel more accountable, responsible, and connected when they are invited to discuss decisions and strategies openly and candidly. Contemporary leaders purposely expose the workings of the organization to build trust, fairness, and alignment. The benefits of sharing and discussing such issues as capital expenditures, promotion criteria, performance ratings, financial health,
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How to Interpret the Candor of Things Said in Anger
People say the meanest things when they are angry. Anger removes the filters people use to edit themselves. It creates a conversational urgency, giving people a sense that something they are thinking or feeling must be said now.
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What Shouldn’t Change About the Culture?
Just like people, organizations sometimes lose their way. Because of poor leadership, organizations can drift toward mediocrity, underperformance, and dysfunction. To revive them, leaders need to reset the culture and establish a new way for team members to work together. Transforming a culture takes time and focus.
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The Leadership Skill of Anticipating Resistance
Team member resistance makes everything harder. It consumes energy, focus, and trust. The friction resistance creates redirects effort away from results and goals and shifts the focus from productivity to managing emotions and reactions. It stalls progress, destroys momentum, disrupts alignment and coordination, feeds uncertainty, and makes execution more complex and less effective. That’s why
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High-Status Leaders Who Do What They Ask of Others
Jim Fish likes to ride along with trash crews and attend 1 a.m. safety briefings. Which might seem a bit odd for the CEO of the largest waste management company in the United States. But Fish knows something about leadership that is worth remembering. The more status a leader holds, the more important it is…
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Your Spam Is Hiding Important Messages
But I don’t like Spam!
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Tune Into the Five Indicators of Team Health
When leaders examine team health, they typically track lag indicators, such as engagement scores, attrition, and missed deadlines.
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You Have to Show You Care Before Delivering a Tough Message
Saying difficult things in such a way that people like you after the conversation is among the rarest of leadership skills. It isn’t intuitive for leaders to know how to deliver a tough message with sensitivity, nor is it normal for those on the receiving end to feel good about the messenger afterward. Tough messages
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When Emotions Run Too High in the Workplace
Humans are born with the ability to feel basic emotions. Infants across cultures show similar emotions of fear, joy, anger, sadness, and surprise when exposed to the same stimuli. This proves that many emotions are biologically built in. The human nervous system is hard-wired to produce emotions automatically in response to certain stimuli. While the
