Just love them

What do you do when you have conflict with someone at work? Just love him. What do you do when your employees lack motivation, insight or good judgement? Just love them. In my first book, I define Business Love (Bizlove) as the act of intelligently sharing your intangibles to promote other people’s growth. What are …

Let others speak

No one likes a conversational bully. They don’t pause to allow others to speak. The ignore questions and continue to make their point. When someone tries to get a word in edge-wise, they say, “I’m not finished. Let me make this one other point.” They seldom, if ever, improve relationships through conversation. Have you been …

Grab the Santa opportunity

I’ve always been raised to believe that there are certain days, or times of year, where you have a license to perform random acts of kindness. If it is someone’s birthday, you have a platform to show them how much they mean to you. If it is Christmas week, you have an excuse to give …

Network with finesse

If you are not connecting, you are not networking. Networking is not a matter of introducing yourself to someone and then finding out how they can help you succeed. Most of the time, it can be highly interruptive and obnoxious, especially if the person you are ‘networking’ with isn’t in the mood to network. I …

Give thanks

Today is an opportunity to be thankful and grateful to those you work with. Tomorrow, we’ll all give thanks, but today you should thank your team. Thank them for what they’ve done for you this year. Thank them for being a positive part of your life. Recommended: Seek out two people at work today and …

Hang out with the Strengths crowd

You are who you spend time with. Their outlook rubs off on you and becomes a part of who you are. When Norman Vincent Peale said, “Get rid of all negative people in your life”, in the The Power Of Positive Thinking, this is what he was talking about. Sometimes negative is packaged as ‘constructive’. …

Say Happy Birthday!

Yesterday was my 46th birthday. About two dozen very thoughtful friends and business associates sent me notes, wishing me a happy birthday. When I look at them, as a group, I notice that all of them are “relators”, such as in Marcus Buckingham’s strengths-finder work from his great book Now Discover Your Strengths. Relators have …

Pull a practical joke

Cool people always get over a good practical joke. Uptight people usually can’t. That’s why I like to pull practical jokes on people in my business (and personal) life. I don’t do it often, and when I do, I really think out the gag. Here’s how I do it: *It’s always a one on one …

Audit an e-relationship

Sometimes you can turn a great working relationship into a broken one over email. Think about how many emails you exchange with your partners at work. Take, for example, the last fifty emails you’ve sent your right hand person (if you have one). If you isolated them, and just read what you wrote, should you …

When you are wrong, run a correction

I spoke at a publisher’s conference in 2004 and had a chance to hob nob with several major newspaper editors. At a lunch, I asked several of them as to how the policy of front page corrections came about. What I found out was not only interesting, it was insightful. Newspapers run corrections on the …