Change Communications

Great Leaders Know They Lead Humans Not Robots with Denise Cooper

Leaders lead humans and people working together, not robots working together. Denise Cooper and I explore this topic in a very frank conversation. We’ve gone off course with leadership when we think that multi-tasking and motivating all employees in the exact same way is going to work in the 21st century.

Humans can’t multi-task; hell we’re not even supposed to have multiple priorities. (“Priority” was created in 1400 and “priorities” was created in the 1900s.) And each individual needs something slightly different to do their best work. But we still see leaders treating their folks like robots: same expectations, same hours, same communication, same motivations, multi-task everyday all day, and keep multiple plates spinning.

The most successful organizations of the future will choose their priority: what to focus on first. Listen in to learn more.

In this episode we mention a new kind of management framework that might be helpful for you to explore: Holacracy.

Action Can’t Get in the Way of Empathy with Don Monistere

Action and empathy move at different speeds in companies. Don Monistere is a longtime IT leader who has driven a lot of change. He’s led the acquisition and merging of several companies and freely admits that plans on paper sometimes sound great and play out in the real world in a terrible way. He cares deeply about his people and he has a strong bias for action. For those of us who have a bias for action (me included) it’s easy for us to run over people, push them out of the way, or dismiss their concerns because it slows us or the result down. Bottom line is that we end up with less people following us because they don’t want to keep up, can’t keep up, or think we’ve lost our minds.

Listen in as Don describes how he now prioritizes listening and empathy over action and how that leads to more buy in.

IT Needs to Say No Sometimes with Heather Darring

How to say “No” in IT is tricky. Heather Darring shares with us what’s even trickier: saying Yes too frequently, projects going out of scope, and then reading an IT audit that says, “You suck.” Okay, okay it didn’t actually say that she and her 1 colleague sucked, but it described missed expectations and she took it personally. Years later she’s able to share how that experience turned into an opportunity to reset expectations across the entire business, to grow, to learn, and ultimately expand her department and become the CIO.

Listen in to this episode with Heather, the CIO of an international nonprofit, as she shares what happens when IT doesn’t say No to their business colleagues (and should) and how they’re mortals like us not magicians! ha!