Feb 12, 2015 | Business, Coaching, Diversity & Inclusion, leadership
At the heart of any relationship, business or personal, is our ability to communicate. Our best communicative platform has always been in the form of live conversations. Fewer and fewer conversations take place these days in part because of the expediency and efficiency of things like email, texting and other forms of social media. “It’s just easier and quicker.” We are being engaged in sound bites. These online forms of communicating are akin to fast food, they keep you moving, fill an immediate hunger but are not always effective if what you really want is nourishment and fulfillment.
Staying with the food analogy, a good meal is memorable and complex in that there is more to the taste than what can be seen on the plate. Good food is to be savored and so should a good conversation, they both have the ability to transform our thinking, our careers and our lives.
Ingredients of a good conversation:
- thoughtfulness
listening- silence
- nuance
- diversity
- ideas
- challenges
- mutual respect
- learning
- freedom
- an open mind
- fullness/completion
- authenticity
- harmony between the words, the body language and the tone of voice.
Conversations add to our understanding and appreciation of what it takes to be able to make good decisions and build better relationships. For high performing teams, knowing how to have a conversation, a form of “committed communication”, that includes the above characteristics is one of the core ingredients behind what makes their team successful.
A good conversation, like a good meal, can be complex when there is more to the taste than what can be seen on the plate.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Feb 4, 2015 | Diversity & Inclusion, leadership
Treating Students like Customers
I believe that education is behind the times in the United States in part because the standards for what constitutes a “good education” is embedded in a set of archaic principles from the last century, e.g., the big R’s. New ideas or concepts like CSS (Customer Self Serving) and ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth) have had an impact on how many companies market and interact with their customers. With a few exceptions (higher education models like Udemy, Edx and Coursera) interactions with students – the educational institution’s customers – have been top down. Treating students like customers is a research and marketing mainstay for corporations who consult young people often about their products and services. Movies, music, video games, clothing, computers, smartphones, sports and athletic accessories industries are going after this young market for their ideas. These same demographics are often ignored when it comes to what it is that they want in an education. Instead the decisions are left up to their parents and school administrators. We live in a marketing-oriented world. All of our institutions must perform according to a need and/or problem to be solved. How best to know what the needs are for students? Do what marketers do…ask them. Treat them like the ultimate customers that they are.
[Tweet “How best to know what the needs are for students? Do what marketers do…ask them. “]
A Disruptive Technology: Ideas
Our young people are tasked continually with managing their own future from the days of “and what do you want to be when you grow up?’ to the end game when they discover no matter how much they tried to project into their great unknown, they didn’t learn what they needed to learn in order to have a successful life – a whole life – let alone what their purpose might be. Ideally, their education should have given them the opportunity to decide what tools they would need early on in their lives; tools that could fuel their imagination, that would take them to concepts and places that fire up their ability to dream and big.
Any generations’ students/youth have different ideas about the world than their parents and teachers had. For today’s students we are an older gen, so we are guessing that what resonates with them are diversity, technology, win win, big data and transparency. That they are concerned about equality, rights (animal, human and the planet) different cultures and happiness. They understand that data is better at telling us what happened then it is in predicting the future and therefore they are not overwhelmed by the past when it is time to be creative about future. Perhaps…if they were asked they might say something entirely different to the educational institutions they learn in today. Assuming that is where “quantum leap educations” are occurring.
Imagination + New Ideas = Change
Like this:
Like Loading...
Dec 11, 2014 | ageing, Business, Diversity & Inclusion, Women
Equality is “the state or quality of being equal; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, or ability” and has always meant this. We notice that there is no exception in this definition. Any person treated differently than another is being denied equal treatment (under the law in the United States). After the 1960s and 70s the hope was that our institutions, organizations and governments would find a way to balance the scales and treat people, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, military service, religion or culture, equally.
Equality is “the state or quality of being equal”
Recently there have been efforts to rescind the gains made towards equality achieved through the civil rights movements and laws of the 1960s for African American and Women. Some of us have forgotten or are totally unaware of what the “fight” was for. The documentary SHE’S BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE’S ANGRY helps to refocus what Women’s Liberation was and is still about. As one person in the film says, “We are not allowed to retire from women’s issues.” Amen to that.
What does equality mean for you?
Like this:
Like Loading...
Nov 22, 2014 | Business, Diversity & Inclusion, leadership, transformation
One of our most powerful abilities as human beings is that of creativity. By the use of our imagination, we have been able to create incredible products, services, and relationships that were thought to be impossible. We are creating something, always, and often it is a mixed bag. This is where leadership comes in. The way to think about leadership is that in order for leaders to be successful…
- It is imperative they recognize the need for collaboration;
- That they have access to a diversity of thoughts – from different cultures, economic situations, gender, and races;
- That if everyone has authorship, then everyone has a commitment to getting whatever it is done;
- That leadership and collaboration is about creating the impossible,
- That the best aim high.
Creating something thought to be impossible like “Philae Space Probe” landing on a comet takes tons of work by a team of people who have something at stake.
We are creating something Positively Powerful, join us.
Positively Powerful – Triad West Inc. has developed programs that tackle diversity and leadership in meaningful ways for both small and large groups. If you or your organization is confronted with the challenge of how to have a creativity problem-solving breakthrough write us using the form below.
Like this:
Like Loading...
