LET’S THINK back to our childhoods for a moment.

20If you’re a person of a certain age, say over 40, you grew up in what many might call a simpler time. After school, we’d rush home to do our homework so we could play outside with our friends. We might ride our bikes around the neighborhoods, or play kickball, or blind man’s bluff.

IN business schools, many professors put students in teams. The teams do a variety of things. Sometimes they do classroom activities. At the other extreme, they create a project that counts for a boatload of points in the course. No matter what the team’s purpose, most students hate teamwork.

HAVE YOU looked around your organization to see who’s doing what?

As technological changes have impacted so much in the last couple of decades, are the people in your organization “fully employed?” Here are a few things to think about. Read more. 

I HAVE spent a lifetime in higher education, first as a student, then as a professor and administrator. We are not known in higher education for our ability to make changes quickly. Most of the time, it doesn’t have negative consequences, but sometimes it can.

IT HAS taken me six decades, but I have accepted something recently that perhaps you also might need to accept.

When people show you who they are by their actions and words, believe them.

How often do you consider the personal side of your life when you consider job opportunities?

I have lived and worked in a variety of locales: a mid-sized city, two smaller cities, and one fairly rural college town. As a person who blooms where she’s planted, I have no issues assimilating into any of the communities. But that’s not true for everyone. Read more. 

CHANGE is inevitable. We know it, but we don’t have to like it.

I had a conversation with a person who has been in his position for less than a year. His manufacturing organization was not up to date on best practices in the industry. As we discussed the many changes that he and his supervisor had brought to the organization, I asked what I thought of as the key question: “How receptive were the employees to these new ideas?”

Read more. 

SUPPOSE a manager comes up to you and says “I know Lynne is bad at her job, but she’s a lovely person, so I’m transferring her to your team.”

How would you react?

College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson

College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson’s weekly column in The Free Lance-Star discusses change and taking risks. Read BEING UNCOMFORTABLE:

YOU’VE probably heard “do one thing every day that scares you” at some point in your life. I think about this phrase a lot. It’s really hard to do something that creates discomfort every single day, but you can certainly occasionally get out of your comfort zone.

Like many, I’m not a huge fan of heights. As a kid, we would visit Vulcan, a statue in Birmingham, Ala., near my hometown. After climbing what seemed like thousands of steps, you ended up on a circular landing where you could walk around the statue. There was only a 3-foot-high fence around the landing. I would press my back against Vulcan and inch my way around the statue. I did not want to get close to the edge and look down.

Read more.