Culture at the Core – Place

This final installment in our three-part series looks to our surroundings as an important contributor to organization culture. The impact of environment is actually a little trickier to zero in on – a little less obvious perhaps – than things like getting information in a timely and usable way (communication), or having interpersonal harmony with colleagues or supervisors (conduct). It is no less relevant, though, and because it is subtle and simultaneously pervasive it is worthy of our attention. It…

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Culture at the Core – Communications

In this three-part series, we explore the building blocks of culture and provoke thinking around leadership’s role in cultivating an engaging workplace. Culture is a critical yet difficult-to-define element of every organization. While leaders may strive to create or foster a particular culture, culture is something that develops and evolves organically as people interact and circumstances change. It can be promoted and modeled, but not controlled. It is also interpretive, and as such is most intimately reflected in how people…

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Can You Gig It?

In a recent LinkedIn post, Detroit’s “Gig Economy” was showcased highlighting several freelancers and their experiences. Freelancing is a growing component of our national (and local) economy, fueled in great part by technology and globalization. This creates powerful opportunity, and nowhere is the value proposition for “gigging” more compelling for business than in the nonprofit arena. Several dynamics converge to yield a strong case for considering outsourced talent as a uniquely effective mission-booster. As with any proposition, there are pros…

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Wishful Thinking

Katherine Paterson, author of several beloved children’s books – most notably The Bridge to Terabithia – is credited with the quote, “A dream without a plan is just a wish,” which some attribute as a minor modification to French writer and journalist Antoine de Saint Exupery’s quote “A goal without a plan is just a wish,” preceding Paterson by several decades. Wherever it hales from, the idea is at the core of the challenge that many organizations face in moving…

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Moving the Pile

OF COURSE I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE EVERYTHING IS! The ringing in of the New Year in the US is accompanied by dramatic increases in testosterone resulting from the seasonal onset of Football Fever. College teams vie in Bowl games (44 Bowl games will take place in 2016), many with curious sponsorship-induced names (the Taxslayer Bowl?). Pro teams are in the thick of the playoff contention race, and the Super Bowl is roughly a month away. One of the situations you’re…

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Of Tribbles and Telephone

Organizations are deceptively complicated. Just how complicated they are becomes clear whenever a change to an existing process or policy is considered, or when a new process or policy is formulated and implemented. At the center of this phenomena is the essential role of communication, and in a fascinating irony organizations that invest in technology and marketing – brochures, websites, business cards, branding – rarely devote the same resources (sometimes they don’t actually invest any!) to understanding and improving their…

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