Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance and other books on leadership and change, developed the Energy Bar™ as a free tool to help people in organizations get their ideas across in ways that get people committed and engaged. 
Rick has advised leaders from many countries on ways to apply this new tool successfully.
As I write this, I am attending a webinar on how to conduct effective webinars! (Really, I am not making this up!). You can see that I am multi-tasking, which means that I am barely paying attention to the speaker. Hmmm.
Someone wrote to me last week and asked, “How can I track energy during webinars that I conduct?” (In The Energy Bar video, I say that you must be able to read how well your meeting is going – is energy increasing or decreasing?)
With all the books, consultants, and decades of experience leading major organizational changes, I keep expecting the success rate of these major projects to rise, but the failure rate still remains high.
Back in 1995, when I first started writing about change in organizations, the failure rate was about 70 percent. In 2008, IBM conducted a major international study of C-level executives and found that only about 40 percent of those changes succeeded. In 2013, a Towers Watson study found a long-term success rate of 25 percent.
You may know this story: researchers asked groups to count how often a team passed the ball to other members of their own basketball team.
Pretty simple.
There is a good reason why people don't tell you the truth. (Wait for it.) They aren't idiots.
A senior manager in a small privately-owned company told me they would warn new hires to never criticize the owner’s ideas in a meeting. But, some enthusiastic newbies didn’t listen. They wanted to make their mark, show their worth, and that was pretty much the last anyone ever saw of them.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a 2-hour webinar. It was rich with content. The speaker often asked for our input in the chat room and then used that information to amend his presentation. Near the end, he went into his sales pitch (which he said he was going to do, so no surprises there). And then he finished with a lengthy Q&A session. It was a great use of my time.
Using The Energy Bar as my gauge (www.energybartools.com), I was already ‘Interested’ when I joined the call, especially since it had been recommended by someone I trust. The webinar was so good, I purchased the product.
