Joy at Work Thinking
The survey lands in the employees’ email boxes, and you can almost hear the rise of groans across the office. Another survey, another extraction of brain power with too rarely something in return.  Managers often think of surveys as an easy way to get clean data, but to employees, it often feels li...
We live in a world awash in data. Most of us walk around with devices that are radiating and receiving signals from cell towers, satellites, Bluetooth, near field readers, and more. Organizations have inputs from clients and suppliers and operations. There is no shortage of data. For many managerial...
There is an insidious problem that pervades many attempts to analyze business progress. Somewhat counterintuitively, this problem grows as the availability of data increases. The impact is dramatic. Analysis stalls and initiatives can fail because the insight is not there. The dynamic is the draw to...
Written by Ed Cook
Exploring the question, “Are you a great Change Leader?” is an insightful exercise. The personae that tend to emerge, in response to the question, break in one of two directions: Lawyer or Scientist.
The Lawyer will begin with a recitation of the available evidence underlyi...
 Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
Despite the gobs of money spent on employee engagement programs, globally in 2024, employee engagement has declined to just 21%, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, “quiet quitting” describes half the U.S. workforce, and “job-hugging” indicates employees are stayin...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
You spend days, weeks, sometimes even months recruiting new people to your organization. What if you used some of that energy on your current team? Consider the potential impact of re-recruiting. The clear value is that it will take far less effort to keep your ...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
You've just walked out of a meeting where leadership announced a major change. Your team will be looking to you for direction, but inside, you're struggling. You weren't consulted. You don't agree with the decision. You might even think it's a terrible idea.
An...
Written by Roxanne Brown
Even if you're lucky enough to be working for a company that's investing in your growth, it's still up to you to own your talent. It's up to you to own your career. That may not be a terribly groundbreaking idea but it's way too easy to forget. Not remembering means you can...
Written by Ed Cook
The questions to ask to make the mentor or coach choice clear
The words coach and mentor are often used interchangeably, making distinctions between them murky. This is unfortunate because the value of each can be tremendous for a person’s career, but where and how that val...
Written by Ed Cook
The words leader and manager are often used interchangeably, and with that slipshod usage, their individual meanings can be lost. Â Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis are often quoted as saying:
“Management is doing the things right and Leadership is doing the right thing.”   ...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
A common refrain in many conferences or conversations about Change Management is “people don’t like change.” On the surface, this is understandable. Change Management Professionals and Change Leaders will encounter people who actively push back on a Change or qu...
Written by Ed Cook
Humans walk about the Earth trying to make sense of it. Karl Weick introduced the concept of "sensemaking" to organizational studies in his 1969 book The Social Psychology of Organizing. His work described how humans understand the world in the face of uncertainty and labeled hum...
