Quint Studer Provides Insights to Management Style

Journalists are notorious for being bad bosses. Motivation in a newsroom is generally doled out in heaping mounds of humiliation and the occasional flying object. News directors tend to feel it is their solemn duty to personally make sure the skin of a young reporter isn't just thick, but impermeable. My first boss once sat behind the anchor desk and announced to the entire newsroom that I needed lessons on how to apply my makeup. Weeks later he threw a pen at me for rolling the TelePrompter too slowly. Our station was No. 1 in the market, but he eventually found himself in the unemployment line.

If only Quint Studer taught Newsroom Management 101. Studer is the author of Hardwiring Excellence and provides keen insight on how to manage greatness. I had the opportunity to attend his conference in Dallas last week. I learned more from him on how to manage employees in two days than in my entire career. By the end of the first day I was already calling back to the office, making arrangements for ideas that I had seen demonstrated.

Studer's background is in health care. He managed two hospitals and brought their rock-bottom employee satisfaction scores from nil into the 90s. The salient details of how he managed to do this are as follows:

• create standards of behavior,
• keep everyone accountable,
• reward and recognize often.

It all seems simple enough, which it is, but it seems nobody really teaches these tenants in school. Generally, those who are good at their jobs are promoted into management. The company relies on that person's good judgement, and usually provides little to no training on how to motivate. Nurses went to school to be nurses, accountants to be number crunchers - not motivators and leaders. There's a difference.

Studer comes from a health care background, but his thought process can be easily adapted to other disciplines. Pick up a copy, apply a couple of strategies and you'll reap the rewards of happier employees which include better efficiency, quality and most importantly contented clients.

Author of Eat, Pray, Love Visits Dallas

There are only a few books that have truly changed my life. The Bible, let me know that I will always have questions and that I must look within for the answers. Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird made me want to be a writer, and a little girl again. Eat, Pray, Love rounds out the trifecta with its cleverly written words that helped me better understand my own spirituality, and gave me the courage to quit my day job to take charge of what is most important - family.

I saw the fair skinned blonde locked author, Elizabeth Gilbert, beaming on Oprah more than a year ago, just a few weeks after I had given birth to my son. I caught the end of the show and was drawn to the thirty-something writer talking about her travels to Italy, India and Indonesia (the basis of her recent book). I ordered it online partly out of envy. My son was eating every three hours so I barely had time to go to the grocery store in between breast feedings, much less take a sojourn to another country. An entire year passed before I had the opportunity to open the book.

Gilbert is brutally honest about how her divorce nearly led her to commit suicide, and the path she took to transform herself. Her wisdom on life is indispensable, encouraging and inspiring. When asked how she finds the courage to write about the extremely personal details of her life, she stated she didn't feel it was courageous, but more pathological. "I showed the book to a few friends and they said, 'Wow, there's some really personal stuff in here,' and I thought, really?" she laughed. "It's just who I am."

Other tidbits of wisdom from her discussion included:

• To thine own self be kind (rather than true - how can one be true to when they aren't sure of their own truth?)
• Silence is a precious commodity - even rich people don't have it.
• This thing (referring to her body) is better equipped for life than this thing (pointing to her head). If you fall down and break your femur, the biggest bone in your body, you can have a doctor put a cast on it and be good as new in six weeks. However, if someone calls you stupid or ugly, 30 years later it still hurts.

Creative Cleansing Provided by Columnist

Star-Telegram columnist Dave Lieber visited the Fort Worth IABC group this week. Not only does he write two weekly columns for the Star-T, he has self-published a couple of books. The Dog of My Nightmares and Watchdog Nation, the latter of which he has just begun promoting.

For those of us in need of cleansing our creative palette, he recommends these clever exercises to get the juices flowing:

• Try channeling other writers you admire. Write out a few paragraphs from one of their stories in longhand and then try to begin your next piece with their style in mind.
• While editing, try changing the font and increasing it's size in order to help get a different perspective.
• Movie scores help tell the story, try listening to one for inspiration when creating your next piece.

"I came to this earth to be creative and help people" - Dave Lieber