Learning Center

The Courage to Risk (and Fail) in Leadership and Teams

In high-performing teams, the courage to risk and fail isn’t a threat.  It’s a signal. A signal that the team is growing, experimenting, and engaged in solving real problems. But in many organizations, the opposite is true. Risk is met with hesitation, blame, or bureaucracy. People hold back their ideas. Frontline employees don’t speak up. […]

What Team Risk Resolution Looks Like in Practice

Risk resolution is the missing skill hiding in plain sight.  If you’re leading a team, you’ve probably already felt the tension it’s meant to solve. You’ve seen the eye-rolls in meetings. The idea that never made it past the whiteboard. The team member who used to speak up, but doesn’t anymore. You suspect something’s off—and […]

Entrepreneurial Success? Reduce Risk

Small businesses are vital for a successful economy. They also carry the most risk. So what can you do to reduce risk? According to Gallup, small businesses create 65 percent of desirable new jobs. In the United States, 50 percent of all jobs are found in small businesses.  New small businesses are important for communities […]

Cutting the Work Culture Clutter

Workplace culture  is a hot topic among business leaders. Work environments that resonate with trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success are resilient work cultures that spark cooperation among employees and collaboration between departments for improved revenue, purpose and impact. These work communities tend to be team based and leaders are skilled at facilitating employee […]

Risk and Creating a Culture of Innovation

Risk is the fifth TIGERS® principle required for high performance team work and for building a cooperative and collaborative work culture capable of innovation.  The other five principles are trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy and success. They form the acronym, TIGERS®. Risk, by definition, is taking an action that can result in a mistake that leads […]

TIGERS Success Series 2013 Employee Engagement Blog Recap

Here is the 3rd part of a 5 part series recapping the blogs and articles posted in 2013. The Employee Engagement blog recap is loaded with great information on both employee engagement and disengagement in the workplace.  But just what is employee engagement? By most definitions it is an employee’s level of involvement, emotional commitment, […]

Encourage Risk-Taking to Bolster Team Building Success

Risk is defined as a ‘situation involving exposure to danger or failure.’  So when you mention the word, risk, several emotions come to mind such as: Fear Failure Stress Anxiety But without the element of risk, there would be no new discoveries, innovation, or progress – especially in the world of business. Without risk, organizations […]

Study Shows Cyber Attacks Target Small Businesses

I was lucky this year.  A link I opened from what appeared to be a real person on Twitter didn’t wipe out my computer systems altogether. But the cyber attack known as the FBI virus did considerable damage. Almost one-third of U.S. small businesses surveyed by the Ponemon Institute had a cyber attack in the […]