Spreading praise
True praise roots and spreads.George Herbert, "Proverbs" in The Complete English Works, 276. The first word is critical: True The difference between affirmation and flattery…
Home
His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant…
Affirmation
Sam Crabtree's Practicing Affirmation is excellent. He argues that the normal drift of our lives pushes us toward correction and criticism and away from encouragement…
Your one up
Good organizations want to retain their best employees if at all possible. As a budding supervisor I was taught that the number one influencer for…
Always recruiting
If you're a leader, you're always recruiting. Perhaps not in the formal sense where you're literally trying to recruit folks to fill positions, but you're…
Humor
I've been tremendously blessed to grow up and through institutions that knew how to laugh. Though, I can't pretend that the humor was always appropriate--it…
Rivalry
"Last one into the house is a rotten egg!" Making ordinary tasks into competitions can be a powerful way to motivate behavior. But it also…