As stated in this New York Times article, Canada’s Catholic bishops said Pope Francis would not apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in an educational system that tried to eliminate Indigenous culture.
Pope Frances would have more credibility if he outright rejected the churches role in this. Frances gave us hope that the church would regain its moral authority. As I have pointed out in my previous blogs, he is failing miserably.
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This story by Roxane Gay is an objective perspective on the ‘Roseanne’ reboot. Gay came to the conclusion that while she found the first two episodes funny and very well done, watching further episodes would compromise her principles because the series “normalizes Trump”. The network realized it was leaving some viewers behind — and put into effect a plan that brought back a working-class sitcom.
Fox News and the National Enquirer have consistently been trying to ‘normalizing Trump’ since he entered the National stage. Given Fox’s ratings and Trump’s improved poll numbers, the normalization of Trump is working.
My bet is that other forms of media, entertainment and art will attempt to do the same. The Nazi propaganda machine in the early thirties used the same methods to ‘normalize he Hitler’.
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Mickey Callaway, the Mets new manager, is among the youngest of a new crop of baseball managers steeped in analytics but known for soothing egos and coaxing high performances.
This story is an example of what both employers and employees are looking for in leadership. The ‘Emotion Revolution in the Workplace’, an initiative of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence and the Faas Foundation, promotes the development of emotional intelligence skills because it is in most cases the missing ingredient in leadership; and something employees at all levels hunger for. Baseball managers and managers in other sectors should all be “steeped in analytics but known for soothing egos and coaxing high performances.”
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The peculiar painful limbo of David Shulkin shows how the president often handles personnel matters - publicly, hoping the employee will leave instead of forcing an ouster. Here, as described in this New York Times article, Trump follows a common tactic used by bullies - forcing employees to quit rather than firing them. Many interpret this as cowardly; it’s not. Bullies usually take perverse pleasure in making people’s lives miserable to the point where they break.
Most fall into what I refer to in ‘Vera’s Story’ on page 9 in the introduction of my book as ‘The Bully’s Trap’, where the target becomes what the bully wants them to become - a poor performer with a bad attitude - in essence the villain rather than the victim. Some choose to leave. Others, like Rex Tillerson, force the bully’s hand. Yet, other’s commit suicide. Precious few are not forced out.
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As I’ve indicated in my book, “From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Our of the Line of Fire”, bullies are masters of deflection, denial, deceit and manipulation; and Trump is playing this to the hilt. Once again, as exposed in this editorial by Charles M. Blow, we see that Trump’s penchant for disruption to the exclusion of reason or possible consequences has reached fever pitch.
As Richard Haass so succinctly tweeted, “@realDonaldTrump is now set for war on 3 fronts: political vs Bob Mueller, economic vs China/others on trade, and actual vs. Iran and/or North Korea. This is the most perilous moment in modern American history — and it has been largely brought about by ourselves, not by events.”
I have been predicting Trump’s systematic unraveling of our democracy prior to his election, and subsequently, to underscore the dire predicament his actions are placing upon the entire world stage.
This is the big leagues, and this little man is feeling the stress and strain of it. The real danger here is his doing something
Given the positions Trump has chosen to put hardliners like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton into, the biggest deflection could be unwarranted military action. That’s the real danger here.
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The ‘Emotion Revolution in the Workplace’ is an initiative in which the Faas Foundation has partnered with the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence. Our research has revealed that one of the biggest reasons emotional intelligence has generally not been embraced as a leadership capability is that it is viewed as soft, with the purpose of “being nice”. The perspective in this Washington Post article nicely challenges that view.
We assert, based on evidence, that emotionally intelligent managers are better able to give tough messages to their subordinates. Developing emotional intelligence skills in people allows them to have open, honest and direct conversations; something we have found is not the norm in most organizations. We are also finding employees want this feedback.
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This article in the New York Times advances a question that has been out there from the get go of the bizarre relationship that the most powerful man in the (for now) free world has with the most powerful man of the (current and future) unfree world.
Former CIA Director John Brennan is not a man who uses words lightly. In this Huffington Post article, Brennan is quoted, “Trump would take his “rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history” once “the full extent” of his “venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known,” Brennan wrote. “You may scapegoat Andy McCabe,” he added. “But you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”
These powerful words, coming from someone who, more than anyone, had access to information on the Putin/Trump saga, should not be taken lightly. As the NYT Editorial Board challenges, it’s high time for Trump to prove Brennan's words wrong!
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The following is a guest blog by Jay Remer
I could not help but notice the recent headline in this paper stating that New Brunswick is Canada’s most polite province. Diving right into the article, I quickly realized that this grand pronouncement was based on the percentage of businesses that say please and thank you in email communication. As wonderful as the headline sounds, 15 percent of the 250,000 examined emails that include please and thank you is hardly a ringing endorsement for politeness.
Saying please and thank you is what we are supposed to be taught as soon as we learn to speak. The fact that so few of us use these phrases in business communication explains at least in part why the general culture in the North American workplace is not polite but is fear-based.
A work environment must go far beyond simple platitudes to qualify as truly polite. An organization that provides a safe work space for all of its employees, one in which encouragement and appropriate support are a part of the culture, qualifies. An organization where high employee retention is reflective of a high morale qualifies. An organization where employees speak highly of their job and of their boss qualifies. An organization where civil debate and respectful communication occurs qualifies. An organization where an employee has someone to turn to if unnecessary stress, harassment, or abuse rears its ugly head qualifies. And, an organization where every point of human interaction is a positive one qualifies.
If you look at these qualifiers within your own organization or place of work, what answers do you discover? Dismally low ratings are revealed on an almost daily basis, with survey after survey uncovering the ugly truth. Mental Health America and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence have both conducted such surveys in partnership with Canada’s Faas Foundation that indicate that less than 25 percent of employees are fully engaged in their work or speak highly of their boss or the organization for which they work. And the remaining 75 percent are actively looking for other work.
These are facts that cannot be refuted. They are however clear indicators for where we need to look to begin to fix this colossal problem. It’s not much of a stretch to see what a long road we have to travel to have businesses that qualify as being truly polite. Although please and thank you are a start, companies need to understand the interconnectedness between our life at work and our life outside of work. Given that most of us spend more of our waking hours at work than we do at home with our families and friends, I suggest that significantly more attention needs to be focused on our workplace culture.
Most human resource trainings, though regularly offered, seldom have any lasting impact. The reason for this is a lack of desire at the top to welcome any real change. If this desire to maintain the status quo is the experience you are coping with, you have little choice but to change jobs. Given that 75 percent of the workforce is in this situation, it’s a scary jungle out there.
As scary as the landscape may be, it is up to you/us to make choices for ourselves that help steer us to a more fulfilled life. Employers need to refocus their thinking from simply being a place that is offering work to anyone qualified, to a place of excellence, where there is little turnover and a line-up of potential employees seeking work because of the way everyone is treated. That would qualify as polite.
There is an effort afoot within the province to become the innovative province. I have my doubts that leadership found within the government has the ability to accomplish this without a tremendous amount of input from the public at large that they will listen to and implement when appropriate. My doubt comes from the number of fundamental challenges facing the province that have gone unresolved for generations.
If one looks at poverty, education, and access to quality healthcare, the steep hill to climb ahead of us is daunting. These challenges will not go away without significant effort. This requires realigning priorities from community to community. Without changing the water on the beans, you can expect the status quo to continue. The weakest links in our society will continue to be marginalized and not given the assistance needed to achieve a real change. Not until this real change occurs do we deserve to be dubbed as polite.
Please and thank you is a start. What will you do to carry the conversation further?
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This story in the New York Times suggests that both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were at odds with those who pressed for full disclosure on Facebook’s role in spreading disinformation. The story also indicates how obsessed Zuckerberg and Sandberg are about their public image; and Sandberg has become an impressive role model for women.
Unless they come clean with what they knew, when they found out, and what they did about it, their reputations and that of Facebook will be in tatters. For Sandberg, it is even more significant because a failure to “Lean In” on this will make a mockery of what she has espoused.
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Brenda Lucki, a member of the national police force for 31 years, will take over as RCMP Commissioner in April as appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Having used the RCMP as an example of a Dictatorial Culture in my books, written a number of blogs on them, and interviewed a number of former and current employees, both prior to and subsequently after this appointment. Lucki’s predecessor, Bob Paulson, had made similar promises to overhaul the department, especially in terms of how harassment and mental health issues are handled, at the time of his appointment in 2011.
I am not at all optimistic Lucki will have any more success than her other many predecessors. For her to be successful, two things have to happen. First of all, a new model of governance must be instituted; and secondly, a culling of ‘the old boy’s’ club is long overdue.
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