Dear Steve, How do I convince a colleague that her preconceived assumptions are producing the negative responses she expects? When we travel together, she assumes people in the travel and service industries are incompetent and unmotivated. She believes that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and that airlines, taxi companies, restaurants, etc., are …
Dear David, I work in a unionized workplace. I have great respect for unions and the intent of protecting frontline workers. However, once you are no longer considered a frontline employee you no longer have union rights/representation. This can create a pocket of employees, foremen in this case, that are not executive leadership, but are …
Dear Joseph, I recently married a person who told me he is a recovering sex addict. I believe he is really trying to change his ways and is a good man. However, over the past couple of months, he has started to lie again, sent inappropriate text messages to women, and may have had an …
Dear David, What should I do if I believe I have reached my “peak” in my company and professional growth is stagnant? I posed this question to HR and managers only to receive dull feedback, which makes me feel they have no ideas or suggestions. I suggested I earn another bachelor’s degree in a field …
Dear David, My husband and I have been together for about five years. While I noticed his tendency for piles around his own place prior to our marriage, this propensity has gotten much worse since we have been married. I’m no neatnik, but there is an uncomfortable level of clutter in our home; I have …
The biggest impediment to success is rarely a lack of ideas or strategies—it’s an inability to influence people to carry out those ideas or strategies. In others words, it’s a failure of leadership. Leadership is intentional influence. It is a systematic process of influencing the behavior of others in order to achieve important results. If …
Dear David, We’re tasked with continuing to build our hospital system into a national brand, but our CEO doesn’t see our nurses as a part of the brand equation. Our senior leaders see them as entirely replaceable, and accept high turnover as part of our culture. I’ve heard that the answer is better training, but …
Dear Joseph, Our twenty-five-year old son is living on his own for the first time. He has a good-paying job but still lives paycheck to paycheck and frequently borrows money from us. We have bailed him out a number of times and just can’t do it anymore. He has asked if he could move back …
Dear Crucial Skills, Over the past year, my wife has developed an unhealthy pattern of caring less and less about her physical appearance and is now considerably overweight. Whenever I try to discuss the potential impact on her quality of life, she becomes very defensive and says, “You don’t love me anymore.” I counter and …
Visit the Crucial Skills blog to read David Maxfield’s answer to this question: Can you share some additional thoughts on motivating people who know their positions will soon be cut?
