Closing the Know-Do Gap
Margie Blanchard says, “The gap between knowing and doing is bigger than the gap between knowledge and ignorance!” Read that sentence one more time: if you’re anything like me, it takes an extra second and maybe also a small shake of the head to get the whole of her point locked in. We already understand a part of her claim,…
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- posted at 12:31 PM
- May 15, 2013
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Not Rocket Surgery
Try this out: the next time you’ve got twenty people in a room (or 2 or 2,000), ask this question: “Recalling the leader in your life (parent, teacher, coach, boss, pastor, mentor) who had the biggest and most positive impact on you, what did they “do” the made such a difference?” I have asked this question of groups many dozens of times,…
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- posted at 10:26 AM
- May 6, 2013
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People Are Soft
“Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” Henry Ford wrote those words, and they add up to just about the biggest little sentence I’ve read in a year. When I ask for a hammer, I more or less get the tool I had in mind. Same with a lot…
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- posted at 2:06 PM
- April 29, 2013
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Why Bring Your A-Game?
The fervor of our daily work bears an out-sized impact on our productivity. At first blush, this statement seems too obvious for comment. But what is not obvious is where “fervor” comes from, or how to get some. We all know what it’s like to spend a day hitting on all cylinders, the time flying by, as we move several small to…
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- posted at 11:08 AM
- April 22, 2013
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Are Some Jobs Just Too Menial?
A key responsibility of great leadership is to lift up the purposefulness that the company serves so that everybody who works there understands why their work matters. We call this responsibility, “Raise High the Vision!” While teaching a graduate leadership course in “leadership and motivation,” a student raised her hand and protested a point I had just made. “I manage…
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- posted at 9:21 AM
- April 15, 2013
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Failure and Success
Success in not the most highly advisable goal. You know the old saying, “nothing breeds failure quite like success!” And what is the reason for this? The reason that a fixation on success is inadvisable is that: Fixating on success makes you fearful. Fixating on success makes you measure something that you cannot control. The reason people grow, and the…
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- posted at 2:05 PM
- April 2, 2013
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Faster, Faster, Faster
Early in my career, I worked for an organization that had a very limited vocabulary. Certain words and sentences were either unknown to them, or they were prohibited in a secret policy manual that they forgot to give me when I got hired. Here are some examples: “Let me show you how we do that job here!” Orientation was non-existent,…
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- posted at 9:53 AM
- March 25, 2013
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Behavior 15: Promote Continuous Growth and Development
In Gallup’s important Q12 work, which examines levels of employee engagement within organizations, several of the Q12 (Twelve Questions) related powerfully to Build on Strength. Question 3: At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best? Question 6: Is there someone at work who encourages your development? Question 11: In the last six months, has someone…
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- posted at 10:39 AM
- March 18, 2013
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Behavior 14: Align Strengths With Team Responsibilities
“Back in the small company days of 15-20 employees, Bob was responsible for the software developers, and on a daily and weekly basis, they would need to check in their code, get feedback on what they were developing, how it worked with the system, and so on.” The President and CEO of a leading provider of clinical information systems in…
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- posted at 12:52 PM
- March 11, 2013
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Behavior 13: Explore Each Person’s Strengths
At the heart of serving leadership is a point of view about the human person, namely, that people are your organization’s greatest treasure. This point of view requires an about-face inside the minds and hearts of many leaders who are accustomed to thinking of their people as tools; even our accounting system assigns people to the “liability” side of the…
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- posted at 1:42 PM
- February 27, 2013
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