Followers need to see how things will get better and what that future might look like. Leaders need to build that foundation of stability, and hope sits on top of that.
— Tom Rath
I think trust is primarily built through relationships, and it's important because it's the foundational currency that a leader has with his team or his followers.
Clearly, there aren't enough positive moments or interactions happening in the workplace. As a result, our economy suffers, companies suffer, and individual relationships suffer.
Friendships are among the most fundamental of human needs.
I first found out I had cancer on my eye and lost an eye to this disease when I was 16, and I've since had cancer in my kidneys and pancreas and a host of other areas.
When you ask people about what they enjoy doing, time spent with the boss is even worse than time spent cleaning the house. So this suggests that there are a lot of leaders out there who are not doing an adequate job.
When I was in kindergarten, I entered a competition and read 52 books in a week.
Leaders need to be thinking constantly about what they're doing to create a basic sense of security and stability throughout an organization.
Ignoring negative things that need to be changed is destructive and does nothing to alleviate negativity. Instead, we should focus on the way we're treating other people in our brief interactions with them.
When we asked people if they would rather have a best friend at work or a 10% pay raise, having a friend clearly won.
I always thought there were some people who were just destined to be disengaged in their jobs because that was their personality, and no matter how hard managers tried, there wasn't much they could do with some of those people.
There's a conventional wisdom that says that strategic thinking is much more important than relationship building, which doesn't seem to be nearly as highly valued as it should be, based on what some of the leaders that I've spoken with have said to me.
On average, spending time with your boss is consistently rated as the least pleasurable activity in a given day.
I'm a researcher, so I'm realistic that there's nothing I'm doing that's going to prevent me from getting cancer in the future. But I can slow it down.
At a very basic level, people need to know that there is constancy in their jobs and, more broadly, in where the organization is headed.
Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They're just more engaged at work.
The real energy occurs in each connection between two people, which can bring about exponential returns.
'StrengthsFinder 2.0' is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers - it was oriented more toward managers - or that the energy and excitement would continue to grow.
You need a lot of effort and talent to produce greatness.
The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician.
Washington is not a city that takes great pride in being a healthy place, necessarily. Now, I have no data. That's just my own observation.
