From In-Person Rooms to Screens and Zoom

Through our first several years of attending the semi-annual International Maxwell Conference, where we completed our initial licensing with Maxwell Leadership then pursued all the continuing education and mentorship we could absorb, Cindy and I were very intentional to get involved behind the scene...

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Mining Institutional Battles for Justice Seeds

Think back to each piece of what I’ve shared here: the strain when reading the non-compete language buried in a lengthy contract, the institutional conflict that followed and our refusal to compromise our values, leading to the courage, cooperation, influence, and systems we’ve built from the seeds ...

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Influence Beyond the Institution

Time provides us with distance from adversities, adversities that often seem monumental in the moment. Those same adversities, when viewed through a lens of time, end up being relatively insignificant in our bigger picture. That’s absolutely the case when I look back on that 2017 event. Our entire c...

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Building on Adverse Experiences

The “demotion promotion” stung for sure, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the challenges we dealt with over the four or five years leading up to that. We had nurtured the seeds from each and were on much more stable ground, financially and emotionally. Truth be told, fending off foreclosure, reeling ...

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The Sting of a Pay Cut

In late July 2014, I received the best performance review in my career. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I deserved it. I had hired nearly 200 external candidates and filled at least a third as many internal positions, secured over $150 thousand dollars in grants to offset some of the training cost...

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Mining Professional Setbacks for Justice & Responsibility Seeds

Here’s a quick reminder: I’m not sharing any of this for sympathy. Hell, I don’t want it! I’m also not reliving any of this to shine a negative light on anyone. If that were the case, I’d be listing their names and tagging them on social media - and some of them absolutely deserve that and far more....

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Negotiating Value Turns Setbacks into Strategic Growth

Living through such an extended period of scarcity and digging our way out of that near-foreclosure experience certainly strengthened our resolve, but it also provided us with seeds we could nurture toward significantly greater opportunities later on. Those seeds served as a foundation for the confi...

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Influence Earned in Silence

Because we chose to take a moral stand and just were not willing to compromise our values, our financial opportunities tied to that multi-level marketing venture never really recovered. But digging in on what I knew was right provided more value than we would have ever gotten there; the seeds that v...

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Isolation Tests Purpose

The cost of ostracism was real, financially and emotionally. In addition to all the private conversations painting us as the bad guys for taking a moral stand, the individual who actually told those ladies that he wouldn’t help them unless they slept with him got down right nasty about us in front o...

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When Opportunity Turns Toxic

Just so it’s fresh in our minds, let’s revisit how Hill defined his third leadership attribute, a keen sense of justice. He shared that “Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of followers.” I’ve emphasized this in each of my books and with every group,...

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Justice and Responsibility Take Root

My direct responsibility with anything truly related to human resources came slowly, very slowly. Since the behavior-based safety role I had held for so long was being filled internally, the process took a few months. Most of my time during that ordeal was dedicated to keeping those plates spinning ...

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Negotiating From Principle Instead of Desperation

About a year after declining the global behavior-based safety position, the guy who accepted it visited our facility. I still don’t know if he had any idea that I was offered the role first but I distinctly remember him providing “constructive criticism” around several things we had been doing succe...

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