Musings on a Monday Morning from Mike Mullin…

The weekly Newsletter of Without A Vision Consultancy LLC

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December 9, 2019 – Snow in Minnesota

Good morning!

Magical snow falling this morning in a frigid clipper band running from Southwest to Northeast across Central Minnesota.Magical if you don’t have to drive in it… shoveling is free exercise on the other hand…The last of our kids made it back up to Duluth a week ago to be greeted by more than 30″ of fresh-fallen snow and mostly impassable streets, bridges, and avenues.Adventure, memories for the young and young-at-heart.

• Barsade and O’Neill, who led a study on the impact of emotional company cultures, found that employees who feel they work in loving, caring environments report higher job satisfaction and teamwork. 

• Perhaps most important to point out is that these findings rang true across industries — from health care to financial services to real estate.  And, spreading the love at work doesn’t necessarily mean offering hugs to your team members or sending them heart-eyed emojis every chance you get.  It could simply mean exhibiting empathy (my emphasis) toward a stressed-out colleague, expressing caring and affection toward a teammate, and showing compassion when things aren’t going great — inside or outside of work — for someone you manage.  (Credit LinkedIn Post)

• How important is it each of us goes to work each day?  What if everything stopped, even for just a day?
  • Gross domestic product:  The GDP in the United States is somewhere North of $21,000,000,000,000 ($21 trillion) right now.
  • Remember your grade #4 economics class?  GDP is the total value of goods and services produced.
  • Have some fun with it, do some math.

• Back to our pre-Thanksgiving primer on change:
  • Since change is an essential component of effective leadership and organizational health, we don’t want to rush through the subject with some pie-in-the-sky formula.
  • There also tends to be a perception that change is easy or a simple matter of following a recipe; the truth is it is hard, complicated, frustrating, difficult.
  • More than 70% of attempted changes fail — largely due to the lack of a shared vision — and transformation of that vision into sustained reality.

• This morning and over the next two weeks we will finish introducing the five stages of change one at a time — as suggested by two of the world’s leading authorities on this subject, Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger.
  • Remember stage one and stage two?  (Aspire – Assess) — they’re all a’s, get it?
    • #3:  Architect — What do we need to do to get there?  (This is where most good intentions come to a screeching halt.)
    • Draft a bankable plan — define the initiatives — fulfill skill requirements — sequence actions (time line) — reallocate resources.
    • Reshape the work environment to influence needed shifts in mindsets and behaviours by hard wiring health interventions into performance initiatives…

What are you reading?The Overstory (Powers, 2018 — won the Pulitzer).
When will you give yourself the greatest gift of all, the gift of time?Schedule a no-obligation, no-cost initial exploratory visit with Without a Vision Consultancy today.

April Ice

April 30, 2018

By Michael A. Mullin

The venomous ice latently stalks its prey with not a thought of mercy.

The tightly coiled snake rattles a warning, but not the ice.

Arbitrary ambush is its tactic.

It tricks even the experienced, confident, unsuspecting hiker.

One misstep is unrepentant victory for mere water in disguise.

The experienced hiker longs to take long strides with vision to the horizon;

She longs to look and plan more than just one more errant step.

Ice patches produce a tentative hiker;

Widespread ice is paralyzing

©2018 Michael A. Mullin

Everyone loves taking little quizzes; here’s one for you right now:  could you benefit from leadership coaching?

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