Currently I’m in the middle of reviewing an excellent book by Sarah Lewis – Practical Appreciative Inquiry: A Toolkit for Applying Appreciative Inquiry to Organisational Challenges, Opportunities, and Aspirations. (Astute readers will have noticed that it has the same main title as my own book. Apparently the publishers decided on the title before mine came
These simple steps will stop you jumping to the wrong conclusions about others – and make it less likely that others will do the same about you One of my Practical Appreciative Inquiry students recently shared this article from the Axios website on LinkedIn: Simplest workplace principle: Assume positive intent The title pretty much gives
How to prepare yourself for any work conversation, even the difficult ones Here’s a very useful little nugget I picked up from a recent episode of the Rebel HR podcast, where the guests were Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres, authors of Conversations Worth Having, which is one of the best books about Appreciative Inquiry and
Here’s the most effective way you can reduce speculation and combat anxiety in your team during the coronavirus pandemic.
You will have come across the idea, which probably originated with NLP, that ‘every communication should have a desired outcome’. You might want to change someone’s mind, to get them to do something for you, to sell them something, or to stop doing something that inconveniences you. You might even want to help them, to
Email as a way of communicating has certain ‘traps’ baked into it, which can obscure your message, mess up your working relationships, or if you’re really unlucky even end your career. These pitfalls are easy to avoid – and yet we still see managers making obvious mistakes every day. Here’s how to save yourself from
The ‘Golden Rule’ or ‘ethic of reciprocity’ – essentially, ‘treat others as you would like others to treat you’ – is one of the foundation stones of morality, not just in Western thought but in religions and cultures worldwide. It’s currently undergoing something of a revival among business thought leaders – as in this article
This is a simple 5-step process to for influencing people to change their minds. It’s not the only way to do it, but it does give a step-by-step process that I trust you will find useful. The process is derived from NLP, but if you’re not familiar with that area you can slot in whatever
Bearing the principles for delivering emotionally intelligent feedback from the previous article in mind, here are the steps for actually delivering the feedback. As a reminder that what you should be doing is stirring the recipient to change their behaviour, it has the acronym STIRS: 1. Set the stage Make sure that you are in
Some research from Dr Robert Cialdini’s excellent Inside Influence Report for May 09 suggests that the emotional state of an audience affects how receptive they are to particular kinds of messages. To save on processing effort and stave off information overload, our brains rely on simple rules or ‘heuristics’ to make decisions. Two of the
Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley last week successfully teased the uplifting emotion, stimulating the vagus nerve, from lab subjects after playing them Barack Obama's victory speech. The subjects reported "a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat." Past attempts to elicit the emotion failed. Vistas of the Grand Canyon didn't cut it. Neither did reading poetry to test subjects.
Later in the same article, Haidt says something else that caught my eye:
At last…
(thanks to Sandy McMullen for bringing this to my attention)
