Instead of offering an inspiring story or informative tip, in this blog I want to let you know of a project that Luke Hohmann, a friend and colleague, is producing to help citizens engage with their government. If you are interested in collaboration at scale, this could be (more…)

We all make mistakes -- in our private life and in our professional life. Everyone makes them, no one escapes mistake making, but few people know how to fix mistakes and recover well fast. Here's the secret. Let go of denial, blame, excuses, and castigating yourself to earn their pity. Instead, acknowledge mistakes quickly so you can move to resolution....

[caption id="attachment_9528" align="alignright" width="358"] Scotty Bevill and Christopher Avery present The Chaos of Leadership (and The Leadership of Chaos)[/caption] Awareness. Intention. Integration. Confront. Contribution. These five words make up the foundation of my leadership study. Earlier this year, Christopher and Scotty shared a stage for the first time and spent time talking about these words and the concepts behind them....

Guest Post by Cathy Laffan Christopher Avery here. With pleasure I welcome Cathy Laffan again to this blog. Cathy is an innovative executive with a global financial services firm. She shares a love for responsible leadership. Read more about Cathy at the end of her post. Enjoy. You Need to Be Present To Win I work closely with a respected...

It is true, your ability to trust others depends less on what they do than on how well you can respond to what they do. Other people’s behavior teaches us how much we want to extend trust to them, but it has nothing to do with how much we can trust in general. How much we can trust has everything to...

Stand for Something When I kick off product teams, one of the many things I do with them is play a game called Product Tree. Product Tree is a game created by Luke Hohmann (Innovation Games®) where you use a metaphor of a tree to envision the different aspects of a team or product. You start by drawing a big...

Starting on a new team can be difficult, even more so when the rest of the team has been working together for a long time. I got to experience this dynamic when I started my latest contract. I was put on a team with half of the people being veterans – they had been there for over five years --...

The greatest problems people experience at work are not problems within their role, their department, their function, or their organization. It’s solving problems between their role and other team member's roles, between departments, between functions, and between organizations. I call these "Problems Between." The biggest problems--and thus the greatest opportunities to add value--are not in your job role, your department,...

The Joy of Giving There is a cycle at play this time of year. Around November and December marketing departments turn up the volume on the act of giving. Expensive gifts, affordable gifts, sparkly gifts, you name it and there's a commercial for it. I joined a new team last week, and being so close to the holidays much of...

All it takes is one person to invite a group to be a team. One person can ask for shared clarity about the collective task before members assume individual assignments. One person can ask others "What's in it for you to be on this team this time?" One person can request personal promises that support performing as a team. Are...