Interpersonal Relationships Archives

The Good Life: More Ways Your Work Adds Value

April 17, 2023Dana AckleyRelationships & Relationship SkillsApril 2023, Interpersonal Relationship Skills, Interpersonal Relationships, Organization Welfare, The Good Life, Welfare of People in an Organization

A former coaching client and I reconnected on a catch-up call. It was great to hear how well his career and his life had progressed. During the call, he mentioned that his good friend, Marc Schulz, Ph.D., was the co-author (with Robert Waldinger, MD) of a new book, The Good Life and How to Live It. It describes the most recent findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, work that has been going on for eighty-four years. I ordered the book immediately. The authors present their findings in an incredibly readable way. They also share results from several other longitudinal studies that are consistent with the Harvard results. These are truly powerful findings, as well as replicable – the gold standard of science. The bottom line: “Positive relationships are essential to human well-being.” (p. 29). I will leave it to you to review the book in order to see…

Leaders Have More Choices

January 3, 2022Dana AckleyLeadershipAssertiveness, Coaching and Affiliative, Coaching Leadership Style, Coercive or Directive, Emotional Self-Awareness, Empathy, Interpersonal Relationships, January 2022, Leadership, Primal Leadership, Social Responsibility, Visionary, Workshops

Want to help your clients make their organizations more profitable? This is the third in a series of four blog posts that provide a model for you to do just that. Thus far, we’ve examined how an organization’s climate, profitability, and leadership styles relate, as reported by Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, in Primal Leadership: Companies with positive climates are much more profitable than those with negative climates. Leadership style directly controls 50 – 70% of climate There are a number of learnable leadership styles To maximize leader effectiveness, match leadership style to situational needs. In our previous post, we described two of the six leadership styles discussed in Primal Leadership: Coercive (or Directive), and Visionary. We looked at: times when each of those styles can work well times when they shouldn’t be used which EQ skills support their success, and the five steps which you, as a coach, can take…

Is EQ a Constraining Resource?

September 7, 2021Dana AckleyAnxiety, EQ Limitations, Impulse Control, LeadershipAnxiety, Constraining Resources, Impulse Control, Interpersonal Relationships, Limitations, Self-Regard, September 2021, Working Together

All organizations have one or more constrained, or more accurately, constraining resources, resources that limit what can be accomplished. To illustrate, imagine that in a moment of poor impulse control, you agree to bake fourteen cherry pies for a company event. You have lots of cherries, lots of flour, mixing bowls, spoons, an oven that holds seven pies, and one, only ONE, pie pan. That pan is your constrained resource. We often think of constrained resources as tangible. For example, the auto industry is currently in a jam. It can’t get enough computer chips to make cars. Show rooms are nearly empty. Want a car? Expect to wait several months. As Rudyard Kipling said, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost . . .” But some resources that organizations need are intangible. You can’t see them, but they can…