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Building Team Performance:
3 Lessons I Learned from Musical Theatre

Team engagement. Maximizing team performance. Building leadership capacity within your team.
Organizations, large and small, know how important it is to build the capacity and leadership skills of your team. It is essential to staying competitive, to building lasting and loyal customers, and to retaining and attracting top talent.

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Creativity

Learning and Leading:
3 Lessons from The Stage

One of my greatest joys to be part of the Riverdale Players, a local community musical theatre groups that has performed together over the past 6 years in support of an international children’s charity. This rag-tag band of amateur theatre aficionados brought down the house in this year’s production of “Naughtyham”. Imagine a mash-up of Robin Hood and the Merry Men, meeting up with Monty Python’s Spamalot, with a dash of Saturday Night Fever and some of your favorite children’s fairy tale characters, like Rapunzel or Little Red Riding Hood, sprinkled in, and then you’ll be in the general vicinity of the plot of this year’s theatrical offering!

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Communication

3 Essential Principles of Meaningful Client Care

Client care is supposed to be what happens when a client needs support in resolving a problem, right? It’s not supposed to be an example of irony or sarcasm.
Whether your business had tens of thousands of customers or just ten, the customer care experience speaks volumes about whether you value the client relationship or just the sale. It’s part of your ongoing marketing strategy to keep your clients happy, resolve any areas of dissatisfaction, and hopefully even turn your customers into happy ambassadors for your products and services.

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Creativity

3 Reasons to be a Grateful Leader

Gratitude is defined as “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.” The practice of gratitude is something that is so helpful in getting in touch with the present moment. Taking stock and appreciating what is working is a quick way to step out the mental swirl of future catastrophizing or mourning the “good old days” when life was simpler.

But why should a busy leader want to add a gratitude practice to their already long list of responsibilities and challenges? Aren’t they already so busy just getting the work done and keeping the team motivated that we shouldn’t put one more expectation on them?

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Communication

Make Your Conversations Count:
3 Facilitator Faux-Pas to Avoid in Your Next Meeting

Have you ever been in a meeting where important issues were supposed to be discussed and decided, but you left the discussion with more questions and confusion than you had when you walked in? Or perhaps you’ve sat through meetings or retreats where a few outspoken people dominated the conversation to the point where you just gave up trying to have any input?
The pace of change is accelerating every day. The new norm for organizations, both private and public sector, is to be able to expect and adapt proactively and resiliently to that change.

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Engagement

3 Leadership Lessons from Outside the Comfort Zone

For many of us, the ability to lead others them to take action, even into places that are unknown or outside their traditional comfort zone, isn’t a talent that many of us are born with – but that doesn’t mean those skills of persuasion and vision can’t be learned.

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Leadership

3 Tips for Discovering the Unexpected During Change

When things get bumpy, the natural human tendency is to hold on. This is a great strategy if you’re on a roller coaster ride, of course! But when you’re going through change at work or at home, it’s a tactic that can limit you, be costly and actually hamper your ability to adapt to change. There are unexpected strengths and solutions that can emerge from change, but you need to let go of the familiar first to discover them.

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Engagement

Make Your Meetings Matter

Engaging people in meaningful discussion in your meetings, retreats, Town Halls or offsites isn’t easy. One of the biggest challenges is gaining, and then keeping people’s attention long enough to have a useful dialogue and build the commitment you need to make change happen.

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Engagement

How Great Intentions Can Lead to Not-So-Great Impact

Meetings. Whether you love them or hate them, having conversations with colleagues is the most effective way we can work together to solve some of the challenging, complex problems organizations of all kinds face.
But how many times have you been in a meeting, or even a workshop learning something new, and…nothing happened afterwards. Research by Gallup asserts that 70% of change initiatives fail.

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