In my transition from practicing psychology to full-time consulting, I was asked to serve as a director of Human Resources for a 2000-person electronics firm in the Pacific Northwest. My initial reaction was “No. I have no training in HR and am not qualified.” However, after some back and forth with the company president, I […]

If I’m really honest with myself I feel pretty dismayed by the political debate in the country (USA) today. We have become so polarized and tribal, even in our local communities, that we can’t carry on a sincere conversation without people being offended and either shutting down or attacking those with differing opinions. How unfortunate […]

Stop over-managing and over-indulging your children and learn parenting skills to build trust, self-worth and personal responsibility.

By confronting a disruptive student I was able to help change his behavior so he became a positive influence within the classroom.

Do you manage people? If so then I want to let you know that I just launched a new, state-of-the-art video training course entitled: Performance Management: Confronting Poor Performing Employees. Many business owners, leaders, managers, and supervisors do a poor job of confronting problem behavior. They ignore or side-step sensitive issues hoping they’ll go away […]

A few years back I did some consulting work with a hospital that wanted to improve the quality of management across the entire organization (admin, doctors, and nurses).  They began by administering a survey to all employees, asking them to rate their managers on a number of management and leadership practices. From the results of […]

Stood Up A number of weeks ago my wife and I arranged a meeting with the president of the local religious congregation we are serving. We were to meet at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday afternoon to plan some upcoming meetings with his presidency and other leaders of the congregation. My wife and I arrived at […]

Definition of Leadership Many people have weighed in with different definitions of leadership. Mine is pretty simple—influencing others to accomplish meaningful results. Leadership is not only about what we do on our own but how we influence others to raise their standards and performance to accomplish results. The best leaders are collaborators who inspire, empower, […]

Last week my blog was an interview with a friend who was complaining about becoming a grumpy old man due to the increasing demands and expectations put on him by his employer. This is a pretty common phenomenon for a lot of people these days as companies cut costs and run lean, expecting their existing […]

I wrote a couple of blogs recently on the value of doing hard things. One of my readers agreed with my premise but also went on to share a different take on this theme. Here’s what he said: “I worked very hard when my kids were little. All of them have commented as adults about […]