Start a Government Employee Volunteer Program!
Do you have multiple employees within your municipal organization who give back to your community through volunteering with nonprofits? If so, April is their month, and if you don’t have an employee volunteer program (EVP), it’s the perfect time to do it. National...
Core Democratic Values
Core Democratic Values (CDVs) are the only topic I remember learning in first and second grade. However, beginning in third grade and beyond, I don’t remember CDVs being as integral to the social studies curriculum. At the risk of generalizing, the shift of my...
Ingredients for a Successful Career Path: N-C-E
Ingredients for a successful career path: networking, communications, and developing subject matter expertise In reflecting over the span of my career in government (and in the private sector) I have come to a recognition that are several valuable elements for...
A Serving Leader’s Ego
The following is excerpted from their book, The Serving Leader. In this excerpt, Mike, who has been called to help his dying father’s leadership project, goes to visit a company whose leadership style has been an influential part of his father’s project. His guide,...
Downsizing Government: 2016 Realities
Government employees often cite job security, together with generous retirement and fringe benefit packages, as factors which initially attracted them to their jobs and serve as a powerful retention force. However, after the recession, Government employees now...
Information Governance Insights: Trust But Verify
Well, time marches on and your Information Governance program is humming along like the well-oiled machine that it is! You know this because things are getting filed, requests come in, orders go out and everyone's questions have slowed to a bare trickle. A testament...
Communication in Our Changing Political Landscape
If you have not paid attention recently, there have been presidential primary elections and caucuses held across the country with more to come. About half of the states have voted for one or both major parties at the time of this writing. This election cycle,...
No Man Rides Alone
As a U.S. Army veteran and retired Captain from the Roseville, California Police Department I have seen and experienced the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS). I spent 30 years in my law enforcement career, and during that time saw many officers suffer from the...
Put Your Priorities in the Right Order
People often ask me how my attitude to life has changed on both sides of my cancer ordeal. Sometimes, rather than embark on a detailed explanation, I just tell the following story. U2 embarked on a World tour in 2005 with 3 big dates in their home city, Dublin. I had...
Push Beyond the Comfort Zone
Part of leading yourself is learning when to challenge yourself at strategic moments in your professional life. When I look back at my career, several big professional growth spurts were directly attributable to when I pushed my comfort zone. These were times in which...
The Adaptation of Metrics: From Baseball to the Badge
In the Fall of 2003, I happened upon a book about one of my favorite subjects—baseball—and by the time I had completed reading Moneyball, I had found a way to pierce through some of the most daunting challenges facing leaders of organizations: How to find talented...
Government Security & Information Assurance Training
Advanced technology has brought incredible progress to society, but it’s not without its faults. Chief among them is faulty information security, which breeds identity theft, viruses, malware and hacking, to name a few. The biggest defense against these threats is...
KPIs for Life: Understanding Organizational Management
I am working on a new but familiar project focusing on performance management and key performance indicators (KPIs). The framework and presentation of a performance management system does not matter I am realizing. Specifically, the way performance measurement...
George Washington’s Vision For National Banking
It’s February and time to celebrate George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1732. Washington, the 1st President of the United States, greatly contributed to foundation of the banking and finance industry. Washington said, “A people…who are possessed of the spirit...
Information Governance Insights: The Magic Black Box
We’ve talked a lot about Information Governance and the goal of increasing the productivity of employees, lower costs, increase operational opportunities, and cover downside risk by providing consistency, integrity, security and availability of information throughout...
How Government Can Utilize Niche Social Media
If you have been reading GovTalk the last few months, you should have some direction on how to use the three largest social media platforms to your entity’s advantage. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the top tools to coordinate a social media campaign for any...
A Journey to End the Journey
In my previous article I described how I often use the analogy of a mountain to help me tackle the challenges of life. But in 2007 I actually moved the mountain from analogy to reality. By then any remaining doubts that my recovery was not both incredible and...
Of Leaders and Teams
In the first of this two-part series, we used illustrations of bridges as we looked at the power of external forces and the active perspective leaders employ to swiftly assess, understand and respond to challenges facing their organizations. We’ve already seen that...