Finding The Truth

If we can't agree on the truth, let's agree on the possibility.

Do you ever struggle with someone over the truth of a situation? It may not be that anyone is concealing anything, you just disagree on the facts, and that impacts your feelings.

Leadership brings with it responsibility to keep focus. To achieve a set of ambitious goals requires steady agreement on who will do what and to what purpose. Sometimes details get in the way. Sometimes people don't even agree on what the truth is.

If we start with the premise that it is possible to agree on the truth we can begin a dialogue that gets us there. It all starts with the possibility.

Can you agree on the possibility of mutually agreed truth?

Is there some place today that you could explore this?

-- Douglas Brent Smith

Learn more in the workshop: Communicating for Results

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A Promise or A Plan?

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How are you at keeping up? Change is so rapid that adjusting, and evolving, has become a full time job. We roll with the changes, we drive new changes, we let go of the old. It's not getting easier, and it's getting faster. I work at it. I keep learning. I keep adjusting, and still... By the time I have it figured out it's time to try something else. Instead of getting frustrated, here's how I like to look at it: change is growth. Faster change is faster growth. Getting better is growth, so the more change the better. Are you with me on that? Because the alternative is slow-motion decay, and we don't want that, do we? -- Douglas Brent Smith

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It's better to be considered tough and show up tender than to be thought tender and show up tough. -- doug smith

Make the Hard Choices

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Is Micro-Management Ever The Answer?

I found something I'd never seen before in a job ad today. It's something to think about. Listed as a job requirement, it said that the job candidate must have: "The ability and personality type to work in a micro - managed environment until you have built up a trust level with the people you support." What kind of work environment does that imply? It certainly gets points for honesty. Any new hire will know exactly what to expect: specific instructions, close direction, careful follow-up, and tight requirements. But wait -- while a seasoned professional might not need that level of micro-management, and while transformational, participative leaders allow lots of autonomy and choice, let's consider the needs of a new employee. Someone new to an organization may not be ready for unsupervised decision making because they're too busy adjusting to the culture, learning the job, creating new relationships, practicing new skills, and doing important tasks. Maybe

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