If you want to support someone…you need to ASK them what actions they would actually find supportive. Well, duh, you might say. Isn’t this obvious? Perhaps not. I’ve seen a lot of faux support circulating on social media recently, starting with the whole “wear a safety pin to show you’re an ally” meme on Twitter […]
Tag Archives: Relationship-building
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One of the things I love to do as I run my local rural roads is to observe the animals I pass by. I am especially interested in the variety of their responses to me. Cows strike me as curious critters. They turn and watch my progress. If I stop to tie my shoe or […]
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During one of my weekend runs, I passed under a bridge where a homeless man was sleeping. I’d been out for an hour or so, and the tea I’d drunk earlier was calling for an exit. As I scouted for a suitable location, it occurred to me that I had a few things in common […]
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How you phrase the question influences the answer(s) you receive. We all know this intuitively. Our senses go on alert when we hear that question that seems to contain within it a judgement about what the right answer might be. Then there are the poll-takers, with questions and multiple choice answers that point to a […]
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How Not to Say the Wrong Thing by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman is easily the most brilliant thing I’ve read all year. I will summarize it briefly but you owe it to yourself to go read the whole thing. Basically, when someone is in a sucky situation – their dog died, they have cancer, […]
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My CalSAE colleague Shelly Alcorn writes a great blog called Association Subculture. She recently posted a great “back of the napkin” story sketch about association membership. So I decided I needed to draw mine! (Click on the thumbnail to see a bigger image.) When I went to library school in the 90s I joined a […]
Human beings are hard-wired to read faces – our babies figure it out way before they can talk or walk. While there are facilitators out there who help groups in virtual meetings, I am not one of them. I find it hard to connect with people when our interaction is mediated by a screen – […]
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As a facilitator, I am always pushing my clients to put announcements and reports into a memo and reserve their F2F meeting time for the things that people in groups do best: generate ideas, make decisions, solve problems, plan strategy. So I am always interested in new methods for ideation and problem-solving. Daniel Pink’s blog […]
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>If you follow all the network marketing gurus, you have joined several different kinds of business, service, and networking organizations in order to develop relationships that will lead to more clients. As I finished 2010 and planned for 2011, I made a Network Map to evaluate how effectively my groups have generated new clients over […]
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