Hearing about Donald Trump’s recent meeting in which he made disrespectful comments about immigrants and other countries reminded me of an incident I witnessed over 20 years ago, while facilitating a corporate leadership strategy session. I watched – paralyzed – as the CEO of a global company literally screamed obscenities and personal abuse at his […]
Right before Christmas, we discovered we had been lied to by a sales rep at our cell phone store and, furious, we went back in January to return some unwanted merchandise we’d been told we “had to buy.” But the “lead” customer service rep who was processing our return – despite knowing we’d been lied […]
Respect can surprise us in interesting ways. How many of us would have the courage to deliberately lose an important race to an opponent who’d made a mistake? In December of 2012, in an extraordinary show of respectful sportsmanship, Ivan Fernandez Anay – a long-distance runner from the Basque region of Spain who was running […]
There’s an old saying in business and it goes like this…”You don’t have to like someone to work with them.” I agree, there are many people that we work with who we don’t necessarily like, and we sure wouldn’t want to hang out with them on a personal basis. But, when we do work with these […]
I’m disturbed by some publicly disrespectful behavior we observed in a department store recently. While checking out, we noticed a little girl – perhaps 2 years old – running around behind the checkout lines while her mother, her aunt and grandmother, paid the cashier. The child ran right behind a store Associate – a girl […]
What’s the difference between disrespect and bullying? According to a recent post by the author and workplace bullying expert Valerie Cade, the difference appears to be about self-awareness and intention. Most of us who aren’t bullies have been unintentionally disrespectful toward a co-worker at one time or another (I know I have and I’m not […]
Last year I was coaching a mid-level manager named “Ted” who admitted he was having trouble “making small talk” with his team. Some of them even said he was “unapproachable” in an anonymous employee survey. So, when I asked him about it Ted came clean, “I come in Monday mornings and head directly for my […]
If you’re like most people, you’ll hold a door open for a stranger when entering or leaving a public space like an office building, coffee shop or retailer. And, if you’re like most people, you’ll say “excuse me” when you bump into someone in public. And, you’ll say “bless you” when someone sneezes. These are […]
It’s fairly obvious the American political scene is red-hot right now. Many of the candidates are making statements about social issues that are designed as “red-meat” for their base voters, but which may be off-putting or even upsetting to those who don’t agree. But from a teamwork and collaboration point of view, keeping politics out […]
About ten years ago, while I was on the road leading corporate diversity and inclusion training with my team of professional actors, I made a disrespectful comment in public about actors being all about emotions and not have much business sense. One member of my team, Andy Fox – one of the finest actors I’ve […]