Montgomery Community Media

“Imagination is more important than knowledge”. – Albert Einstein Let’s imagine that you take a staff climate survey of your organization, and discover that 80 percent of your people are unhappy.  Unless you work in an industry where it literally makes no difference how unhappy or disconnected your staff is, you’d more than likely assume […]

High blood pressure has no symptoms.  For many people, the first symptom of undiagnosed high blood pressure is a stroke or a heart attack. Work teams are no different.  Sudden crises in a work team – an erupting conflict, say, or a nasty accusation that throws the group into chaos – are very often the […]

It’s probably a fair assumption that most of us want to be successful at work.  We want to do well.  If there’s a preferred group or favored clique that gets special things, we’d like to be in it.  If there’s a little “club” of people who get all the best opportunities, we’d like to be […]

Are you an ENTJ?  Good for you!  That’s the best MBTI personality type to have.  You have leadership potential.   You’re bound for the fast track.  And those INTJ people?  Well, they may have bad personalities, but they’re great on detail.  They’ll make good clerical staff. If you know what I’m talking about, then you, too, […]

Or – Why Teleconferencing Will Never Be The Answer We hear a lot about teleconferencing, telepresence and telework.  And there’s nothing wrong with any of it.  I just hosted a webinar, I Skype with colleagues all over the world and my company could not survive without telework.  So I’m as connected as anyone.  But to […]

You’re in a meeting.  Maybe it’s useful, maybe it isn’t.  But presumably, if you all could just focus for half an hour, you might reach some conclusions. That’s when the first cellphone rings.  Someone stands up sheepishly, gives the universal “What are you gonna do?” gesture, and steps away from the meeting table.  Not so […]

Teambuilding sucks. Leadership development doesn’t work at all. Stupid “games” work teams have to play in teamwork training sessions, and all the platitudes they’re forced to listen to, are nothing more than a way of making consultants rich. Why are we so afraid of honesty? And if everybody thinks it, why can’t we say it? […]

Don’t shout it from the rooftops, but most managers and most employees in a workplace have good intentions. Really. And one of the commonest good intentions of bosses is to do what they can for employee wellbeing. So why does it so often go wrong? Why do good intentions end up as eye-rolling “teambuilding” sessions, […]

    Perhaps it was easy to have a strong opinion if you were Ben Bradlee. The late, legendary journalist and seventies-era Washington Post editor was known for his muscular views on such things as journalistic independence, but by then he was already a legend – especially after the Watergate scandal broke in 1972. Some […]

It’s time we got real about the Carrot and the Stick. All the management books tell us about “motivation”, as though it’s a transitive verb, as though it’s something I can “do” to you – or you to me. The only thing worse is “incentivization”, the idea that we can predicate the vision and dedication […]