Last week I had the opportunity to attend the grand opening of Westlake Fish House in Montauk, NY (www.westlakefishhouse.com). What made the event even more special for me was that one of the owners of the restaurant is my brother, Larry Kolar. I’ve always known that my brother was a great chef. And, as many …
Sunday evening, April 27, marks the start of Yom haShoa – Holocaust Remembrance Day. Here is my annual re-post in memory of the victims and in honor of the survivors. Leadership begins with respect for all people and a desire to make the world a better place. Never forget. **** Leadership Lessons from Holocaust Survivors …
Achieving trusted advisor status is a primary goal of many leaders. Whether that status is with internal business partners, senior leaders, or customers, leaders don’t want to be seen simply as order takers. Instead they want to be viewed as a valuable resource in the other person’s decision making process. Having the wrong type of …
In the episode “Slap Bet” on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson loses a bet. As implied by the name, the winner of the slap bet gets to slap the loser across the face. Barney is given a choice. He can take ten slaps immediately or five random slaps sometime in the …
Quick math test. What is the percentage increase between “Strongly Agree” and “Agree”? How much more is “Very often” compared with “Neutral”? Is “Always” five times better than “Never”? You can’t answer, can you? You can’t do math on labels. They aren’t quantities. We all know that. Yet, at one time or another, most of …
Business conversations should be about issues, decisions, and actions – not numbers. However, sometimes it’s easy to go overboard and not provide any data. That’s not good either. If you don’t provide any data, it’s easy for your audience to assume you are just making stuff up. It’s important that the person to whom you …
Using Social Media to Engage Students. Ten Tips for Engaging Your Workforce. Are Your Customers Engaged? Creating Engaging Presentations. We are inundated with articles on creating engagement. What’s going on? Why is everyone so disengaged? More importantly, why are we all so boring? The answer is simple . . . to create engagement you must …
Let’s face it. Leader’s like to solve problems. As soon as an issue comes up in a meeting, there is often a flurry of ideas generated on how to solve it. That’s not a bad thing. One of the primary jobs of a leader is to make problems go away. This allows his or her …
Have you ever been in one of these conversations? Joanne: I’m really concerned about my team’s readiness for the upcoming change. John: My team has been ready for weeks. Julie: Do you think that we’ve done a good enough job communicating across the organization? Frank: I think people are just burned out It seems …
Read more “Up, down and flat – how well do you contribute to a constructive discussion?”
Trying to gain buy-in for a solution or recommendation can be maddening. Despite all of your effort, your thorough analysis and rich data set, sometimes you just can’t get people to sign up. Despite the increased calls for data-driven decision-making, data alone won’t sell your argument. In fact, data play a much smaller role in …