Q. Tell me about your most important leadership lessons.

A. I studied a lot of philosophy at Jesuit High School in Dallas. One of the things that really struck me was that most people seem to think that there’s a separate code of conduct in business from your personal life. And I always believed they should be the same.

So we have what we call foundation principles. They are talked about and emphasized around here constantly. They’re all almost corny, a little bit Golden Rule-ish, but it causes two things. It causes everybody to act as a unit. Even though we’re sort of liberating everybody to choose the means to the ends, we all agree on the ends, and the foundation principles are what cause us to agree on the ends.

...

Q. Talk more about those principles.

A. We preach a lot here that team is one of the most beautiful of all human experiences. You do great things together, and you go home at night feeling wonderful about what great things you accomplished that day. That’s what people want, and that’s what wise and sophisticated leaders help cultivate and know that people want. Every bad boss you or I have ever had thinks that what people want is the exact opposite of that. The way we create a place where people do want to come to work is primarily through two key points. One of our foundation principles is that leadership and communication are the same thing. Communication is leadership.

Anymore, Corner Office is the article I turn to first in the Sunday Times. This week the interview is with Kip Tindell, CEO at Container Store. The excerpt above contains a challenging thought, an important thought, about integrity. Though the lesson has to be carried farther, Toastmasters need to remember that you can't talk one way and act another. It just won't wash.

Tindell returns to the idea of integrity at the end of the interview

Q. Is there an expression you often use that is, in effect, No. 8, the one that is not on that list of the company’s seven foundation principles?

A. Yes, and it sums up a lot of things. We talk a lot about a person’s wake, like a boat’s wake.

Q. Explain that.

A. Most people’s wake is much, much, much larger than they can ever imagine. We all can’t imagine that we have as much impact on the people and the world around us as we really do. That’s just a way of getting people to see that everything you do, and everything you don’t do, impacts your business, the people around you, and the world around you, far, far, far more than you can imagine. 

When it comes to learning and genuinely retaining something, nothing beats experiences. Formal educational or speaking settings don't always allow for actual hands-on experience with the content, but almost every learning situation — including presentation in various forms — does permit the use of stories. Stories, that is, that illustrate the content and bring people in, enabling them to "experience" the material in an engaging, visual, and imaginative way. A way that will be remembered. One can use analogy, or metaphor, or the depiction or verbal reenactment of actual, relevant events that illuminate and make the material more real and more memorable. Stories have an emotional component and when you engage people's emotions, even just a little bit, you stand a better chance of them paying attention and remembering your point (whether or not they agree with you is another matter entirely).

Good advice from one of the best speaking blogs. Click through for more detail and for a link to a podcast with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who "touches on the issue of experience and emotion and the importance of enthusiasm."

Marshall, in a recent blog post consisting of interviewing tips, explains that while ultimately, you need to ask insightful questions and lead the interview in interesting directions, you're far more likely to have a good interview if you drop the stiffness and have a real, honest conversation with the person you're interviewing. This may seem obvious, but he lays it out in a way that makes it really clear and easily to implement:

I, as did every super-novice interviewer except maybe Michael Silverblatt, started out by scripting elaborate sheets of questions ahead of time. This is death. Work from a question sheet, and you kill any chance of organic exchange, of real, vital intellectual back-and-forth. You just tick off the boxes and grind awkwardly forth.

As Jack Paar told Dick Cavett, "Kid, don't do interviews. That's clipboards, and David Frost, and what's your pet peeve and favorite movie. Make it a conversation." I once thought of this as a dichotomy between two equal and opposite hosting strategies. In the "facilitated speech," the host's goal is simply to elicit maximally interesting and detailed responses from the guest, minimizing their own presence. In the "conversation," the host both contributes and seeks contribution, potentially even mirroring the guest's role.

Maybe you're doing an interview or an interpersonal communication project from one of the advanced manuals. Maybe you've been stuck in an interview you wish hadn't happened. Here's good advice on how to do it right. More at the source.

And from Verlyn Klinkenborg's editorial in today's Times

Recently, I have been considering the four-way stop. It is, I think, the most successful unit of government in the State of California. It may be the perfect model of participatory democracy, the ideal fusion of “first come, first served” and the golden rule. There are four-way stops elsewhere in the country. But they are ubiquitous in California, and they bring out a civility — let me call it a surprising civility — in drivers here in a state where so much has recently gone so wrong.

What a four-way stop expresses is the equality of the drivers who meet there. It doesn’t matter what you drive. For it to work, no deference is required, no self-denial. Precedence is all that matters, like a water right in Wyoming. Except that at a four-way stop on the streets of Rancho Cucamonga everyone gets to take a turn being first.

I don't suppose that there's really that much distance between these two approaches, but I find the mood and the civility of Klinkenborg's much more appealing.