Over the past few months, there’s been a number of thought leaders and CEOs who’ve found themselves embroiled in a heated controversy as a result of expressing their opinions on various sociopolitical issues. Regardless of the topic, in every situation there was a polarization of distinct groups around the issue, with each side clearly determined to vilify the other in the hopes of amassing the most public support, if not attention in the media and online social channels.

As a result of these controversies and debates, some pundits have been pushing the idea that CEOs and other leaders should refrain from sharing their opinions on any issue and instead, limit their focus or attention to matters that impact their organization’s bottom line.

But is this really the best way for leaders to guide their organizations which employ a growing multicultural, multi-ethnic makeup thanks to shifting demographics, not to mention communication technologies that allow for collaborative efforts to stretch past conventional geographical boundaries?

If organizational leaders are expected to keep silent on issues that matter to them, what is the example they present to those they lead who may have a divergent opinion to those they work with? How can organizations use the diversity of thought and opinion that so many recognize as being key to our ability to innovate and grow if our employees don’t feel comfortable expressing that diversity?

Of course, this doesn’t mean a free-for-all, anything-goes attitude. Rather, what it means is Click here to continue reading »”3 Keys To Successfully Leading Today’s Evolving Workplaces”

When it comes to writing a blog, one of the unfortunate realities you have to deal with is addressing online plagiarism (for those who aren’t familiar, online plagiarism is when someone posts your content on their site without proper attribution for who created it). In most cases, this occurs because some malicious site owner wants to use the content you created in order to increase traffic to their own site.

However, as is the case with most interactions, sometimes the line isn’t so clear and it’s hard to know whether the offending act was done intentionally or merely out of a lack of awareness. It’s this kind of situation that a friend and fellow blogger recently found herself in and which she sought my advice about to figure out what she should do to address it.

In this case, my friend had come across a website which had taken a recent post of hers and re-published it in its entirety on their blog without her permission. What’s more, the only attribution given for the post was a vague ‘article source’ link – something few readers would bother to click on in order to find out who wrote the piece.

Following our conversation about this situation, she contacted the site owner and thankfully, ended up with a satisfactory resolution for both parties.

Of course, bloggers and others who create content online are not the only ones who have to deal with this problem. Indeed, most of us have at one time or another faced a similar situation of having someone take advantage of our contributions or worse, taking credit for the work itself. And unfortunately, few of us are lucky enough to see these situations resolved in an amicable fashion that reinforces our sense of teamwork and fair play.

So how do you address a co-worker whose taking credit for your work without creating a new source of conflict within your team and workplace? Here are three steps you can take to ensure a successful and mutually-beneficial outcome. Click here to continue reading »”How to Handle A Credit-Stealing Co-Worker”

How do we stop or curb drama in the workplace? That’s the basis of my conversation with Marlene Chism in the fifth episode of my leadership podcast show, “Leadership Biz Cafe”.

Marlene is a speaker, author and founder of The Stop Your Drama Methodology, an eight-part empowerment process to increase clarity and improve productivity and personal effectiveness. Marlene has a master’s degree in HR Development from Webster University and is the author of “Success is a Given: Reading the Signs While Reinventing Your Life”, as well as recently published “Stop Workplace Drama – Train Your Team to Have No Complaints, No Excuses and No Regrets”.

Over the course of our conversation about how to manage workplace drama, Marlene and I discuss:

• Learning to appreciate the difference between the drama that arises at work and the drama that comes out from your reaction to that situation.
• How a lack of clarity leads to workplace conflict and what we can do to regain clarity when our perspective about what’s going on around us becomes obscured.
• How to identify the gap between your goals and where your team is and the relationship this gap has in creating drama in the workplace.
• Why we need to take responsibility for what we can control in order to resolve workplace conflict.
• That workplace drama in itself isn’t the real problem; that it’s something more personal and more within our control that we can address.

As I mentioned at the end of the show, Click here to continue reading »”Leadership Biz Cafe Podcast #5 – Marlene Chism On Stopping Workplace Drama”

There’s a common saying that the one thing we fear the most is speaking in public. Given the number of conflicts we’re seeing between various parties in sports, business and political circles, it’s not hard to imagine that the next thing most of us would dread is having to negotiate a deal.

Indeed, it seems that most negotiations today tend to erupt into conflicts between the vested parties, thanks to there being a greater interest in escalating talks towards a showdown than focusing on trying to ascertain where some common ground can be found on which to establish an agreement.

According to William Ury, co-author of the best-selling book “Getting to Yes”, the reason why we’re seeing more conflict in negotiations today is due to the fact that “we’ve been used to a pie that was expanding. Now it feels like the pie is shrinking, and that engenders finger-pointing, unproductive behaviors and lose-lose-lose outcomes that make things worse for both sides and for the surrounding community.”

Ironically, those who are most successful at negotiating understand that it’s not about proving that your position is right, which understandably leads to defensive posturing from the other party, if not also allowing for escalating emotions to enter into the fray. On the contrary, to be successful in your negotiations requires one to be attentive and aware of the needs or concerns of those you’re negotiating with and understanding how your own position impacts those factors in order to create a mutually-agreeable solution.

So how can we keep conflicts out of our negotiations so that both parties can achieve what they’re after from the interaction? In her article “You Want What? Four Tips for Civilized Negotiating”, business strategist and author Barbara Findlay Schenck shares four steps to take to ensure both a conflict-free and successful outcome from your negotiations.

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