What Needs to be in Your Next Corporate Retreat
According to the Internet, most corporate retreats suck. After all, many senior leaders aren’t even great at running effective meetings, so why would a group of us be awesome at designing and delivering what is essentially a multi-day million dollar…
A Travel Haiku
Travel to learn. Culture. Knowledge. Connection. Oh, and lobster rolls. – A travel haiku written to reflect on the Horn family’s recent awesome trip to Nova Scotia
Six Professional Game Changers from Improv
I’m part of a team that is delivering a big piece of work using agile methodology, which I’ve written about before. With our project moving and changing so quickly we find ourselves reacting to new circumstances and having to improvise…
Five Ways to be a Human Being at Work
Work puts too much emphasis on process, transactions, technology, outcomes, outputs, and the bottom line. Even though we work with people we really like and respect, we often treat our colleagues differently on the job than we do our friends….
Prosocial
Being a prosocial human means acting in the best interest of our communities because serving the public good is more important than advancing our own agenda. Cooperative economist Stefano Zamagni argues that seeking to help the world is an emerging…
How to Break Toxic Culture at Work
Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, which was a record. More than half of Canadian employees would rather quit their job than return to the office full-time. As the Great Resignation rolls…
Where We Work Should Be Beautiful
When I was in Italy as a member of Vancity’s Co-operative Study Tour we visited a worker co-op called Kilowatt and I fell in love with the space and its people. The organization focuses on consulting, communication and education that…
The Five Ingredients of Healthy and Thriving Communities
Over the years I have developed deep expertise in building and leading teams that make work and life better for people. As a kid I had a knack for inclusion and always relished an opportunity to get strangers intermingling with…
12 Ways to Positively Disrupt Your Workplace
Whether you work somewhere with nine or 9,000 employees, we’ve all been frustrated by organizations experiencing the malaise of average. When people stay in the same role or team for too long, get too comfortable with “the way things are”,…
10 Ways to Add Value Like Italians
For the last two weeks I’ve been exploring the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy with my colleagues from Vancity. Our home base was Bologna, the region’s capital, which is the epicenter of the co-operative movement and in possession of Europe’s oldest…