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The World Café is a technique for really engaging people in questions and issues that matter to them. It combines doodling or drawing on the table followed by discussion and the opportunity to move to a different table with a different question and another round of writing, drawing and discussion.

Readers share their approaches for saying thank you to colleagues, co-workers, and clients. These suggestions followed the post “The Imperative to Say Thank You.”

If we really believed that our success at work depends on other people being successful in their jobs, what would we do differently?

I ask this in the context of exploring our interdependence as people working within the same organization. We Americans have a dim sense of our interdependence with each other and with the rest of the world.

Yet, no matter what our role is, we are supported by many other people of whose work we may know nothing. How many times do we think about the people who are on the roof fixing the leaks or the people who deliver the products or the people whose job it is to find resources for the organization or those who ensure that everyone gets a paycheck?

It grates on me when I hear people talk about “soft skills.” Although definitions vary, soft skills generally refer to the ability to communicate effectively, knit a group of people together toward achieving a goal, and create a sense of shared community and purpose. CareerBuilder.com’s Kate Lorenz describes these as “interpersonal skills and leadership qualities to guide teams of diverse professionals.”

 “…Firms today are having a very difficult time finding managers who have superior ‘soft skills’,” says John P. Kreiss, president of SullivanKreiss, a recruitment and placement firm for design and construction professionals.  Based on my own consulting practice, I would have to agree that most workplaces could do with more soft skills.

Our language is part of the problem. By calling them “soft,” we are demoting this constellation of abilities and skills to something frilly, mushy and largely unimportant. Let’s find a more fitting term for them.

This amazing “word cloud” was created by Wordle at http://wordle.net. The site creates customized word clouds from any text that you provide. Words that appear more frequently in the source text show up relatively larger. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The resulting images can be printed, shared on a BLOG. Heck, you can even put the images on T-shirts. You can put your Wordles in the on-line gallery which is open for the universe to see which is why so many of them are anonymous.

My book Staying Healthy in Sick Organizations: The Clover Practice™ launched on Labor Day, 2008.  The aim of The Clover Practice™ is greater peace of mind and reduced stress.

The Clover Practice™ comes from my 20-plus years as a management consultant and, like a clover, consists of three principles:

• Tell the Truth, Always
• Speak for Yourself
• Declare Your Interdependence

All three of these principles are simple, but not easy to live. If peace of mind is the aim, we need to be truthful even when it’s not convenient and even when we don’t look too good. White lies even compromise our integrity and the degree to which others trust us. This doesn’t mean we say everything that comes to mind. We don’t have to share our opinions on everything. They are just our opinions, after all, and not eternal truths.

A friend invited me to her new home today to see the place and to enjoy lunch outside on the patio. The conversation turned to her experience working as holiday help for a department store. She described a communication encounter with a supervisor that still stings even though it took place several years back. She was helping a customer with a large order and was not in the location her supervisor expected to find her.