How to communicate with your remote team

Get out of email: we covered that in the last blog post.  And you can’t just pop your head around the corner and ask a quick question since you are all working in different locations.  The question remains: how do you replace these communication methods and still maintain good communication habits? While you can’t simply…

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Four Simple Rules For Successful Remote Teams

How many times have you heard the phrase: Remote working is the new normal. Do you know what the new normal actually is?  The New Normal is knowing that we could have to adapt our work practices very suddenly, at any given moment. The New Normal is the realization that we can’t predict disruption and…

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How Rocky Balboa Handles A Crisis

In the first four Rocky movies, he fights three different opponents. While, admittedly, the narrative arcs of the movies follow similar lines, the training plans differ significantly from one movie to the next.  In each film, he has different strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, a hit to the eye damages his peripheral vision for the…

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Start New Habits Today

Goals, Success, and Growth don’t come about with plans alone: they require good habits. Habits — or behaviors — that produce the right results.  But habits, we all know, are hard to break. This means they are also hard to form: for every new habit we must break an old one.  Here are a few…

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Why Should I Care About Branding?

A question I have heard many times, though expressed in different ways.  It might be:  “A brand is a logo and colors, right?” Or else: “I am my brand, what else do I need?” It is not always clear what a brand is, or why it matters to a business.  Branding is everything you do…

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2 Key Lessons From A Global Crisis

“Will our current self-isolation change business forever?” The question everybody is asking. People want to know if things will ever “get back to normal” and what life will look like when it does. Will it be a new normal? In two particular ways, we can hope that it will. One: Risk is real  The next…

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From Risk to Opportunity

Risk and opportunity must coexist in business every day. Focus only on risk, and your business will become stagnant. Ignore the risk for opportunity alone, and you will outpace your resources. Somewhere in between Kodak and Pets.com lies the successful business. Right now, COVID19 is doing its part to highlight the risks. Let’s also address…

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Effective Efficiency

We all want to be effective, and we all want to be efficient. Too often, these two qualities do not play well together.  To be more efficient, businesses cut resources and steps. Then, struggling to achieve results (i.e. seeing their effectiveness decrease), they throw money or time at the quickest fix available.  It is the…

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How To Run A New Team Meeting

After my recent series on internal business meetings, a reader asked me for advice on running a first, team-wide meeting.  This reader has a growing business and decided to start team-wide meetings from the new year, and his question is, quite simply: “Where do I start? How should I run my first and subsequent team…

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How To Write Your Meeting Agenda

Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash

What are meetings? Meetings are about multiple people contributing to an idea, a question, or a decision.  Once you have determined your meeting topic and structure, you get everyone to the table… and then what? How do you make sure the conversation stays on topic, and that everybody is able to share new ideas? Enter:…

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