Minute Motivation

Tomorrow morning I’m getting in my car and driving east until I get to the ocean. I have a goal of visiting all 50 states in my adult life. I’ve currently been to 46. So when I saw that I have a long weekend, I decided to take a road trip to hit Delaware and New Jersey – two of my remaining four. That just leaves Nevada and Hawaii. One of the important tasks of a leader is setting goals. The goals you set guide your actions every day. A blog from mindtools.com says this: “If you want to succeed, you need to set goals. Without goals you lack focus and direction. Goal setting not only allows you to take control of your life's direction; it also provides you a benchmark for determining whether you are actually succeeding. Think about it: having a million dollars in the bank is only proof of success if one of your goals is to amass riches. If your goal is to practice acts of charity, then keeping the money for yourself is suddenly contrary to how you would define success.” ...

In the spirit of the holiday, I share this blog from Tameka Williamson – leadership lessons from Rudolph. Join in and sing along with me……. Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny nose. And if you ever saw him, you would even say it glows. All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names. They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games. Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say, “Rudolph with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?” Then all the reindeer loved him, as they shouted out with glee, “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, you’ll go down in history.” Oh, the memories of sitting down and watching this classic TV show every year as a child. Well, this week marked the 50th year of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. As I tapped into my inner child and watched this TV classic, the following leadership lessons began to unveil themselves in my mind. I immediately thought about how there are multiple lessons we can glean from Rudo...

We are three days into the Pulse Survey, an opportunity to evaluate employee engagement and the results of the action plan implemented after the full survey this past spring. We sometimes hear comments from employees who feel there are too many surveys. They don’t want to take another one, as they say they haven’t seen anything change since the last one. Alexis Croswell addresses this concern on his blog, Culture Amp: “There are some key factors to understand when deciding on your overall survey cadence and how often to use pulse surveys. First, knowing that it’s a lack of action that causes survey fatigue. As Culture Amp CEO Didier Elzinga says, ‘The most typical reason people don’t want to fill out your survey is because you haven’t done anything since the last one. They don’t have survey fatigue; they have lack-of-action fatigue.’ The rule of thumb to combat this fatigue? Only survey as often as you can take valuable action on the results.”* With this in mind, now woul...