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Dr. Vincent Kituku Articles

Written by: Dr. Vincent Kituku

What Successful People Avoid in Their Communication - Click To Read Article
There are key, unbelievably overused sentences you must make efforts to consciously avoid in your communication, especially in these uncertain economic times. Check those who use these sentences frequently and chances are they are not on your list of the people you consider successful in any endeavor of life. I call them de-motivators and dream busters or responsibility deflectors. The moment you utter any of them, you surrender your desire for immediate action and “borrow” time to wallow in self pity-which is a dangerous move that will never bring either tangible or intangible results.

Make Your Story Add Value to Your Clients Bottom Line - Click To Read Article
The purpose of your story for a workplace audience is to improve the bottom line. Even in those employee appreciation programs where entertainment may seem the focus, there is an undeniable expectation of increased productivity after your story is heard. The question to ask yourself when using your story is: What is the point of the story and how does the story improve a client's bottom line?

From Here, Now Where? What’s Not Working and What Will - Click To Read Article
You know how things are in your business, professional or personal endeavors. You have first hand knowledge of how our economy, that for the most part is still ailing, has affected everything you expect from whatever you do. Your passion, creativity and hope are on hold until “things change.” The reality is, until you ask yourself, “What’s not working for you, what will?” and then implement what will work, nothing will change. Your business, professional or personal pursuits will remain on hold and risk being forced to obsolescence until “things change.”

Will Your Talented Employees Stay - Click To Read Article
We are at the end of three years of an employers’ market. Lack of job opportunities has kept employees who might want to leave for greener pastures and those who are dissatisfied with jobs, bosses, or their work environment put. Even in industries that traditionally experience high employee turnover, there has been little movement. Because people have had nowhere to go even when they have wanted to, leaders have not had to “Love them or lose them.” It has been easy to, “Use them and they will stay anyway.”

9 Top Inspirational Attributes Great Leaders Use to Motivate Employees - Click To Read Article
Are you one of the leaders who think that some employees only work for money? Do you spend sleepless nights worried that your good and talented employees might be looking for "greener pastures?" Do you wonder why there are employees with negative attitudes about your organization, its goals and expectations? Are you concerned that there are bright and talented employees who are less likely to share new ideas and/or are afraid of change? In my more than ten years of conducting hundreds of surveys on what employee consider their leaders' strengths (or wish their leaders had), and makes them want to work under that leader, the findings are consist across industries and across public and private organizations.

Inspiring People for Maximum Productivity - Click To Read Article
It is amazing to learn and witness an ordinary teacher inspire average students for outstanding performance. There are numerous outstanding coaches who were never star players in their day. And there are the average employees who became leaders and turned organizations around-on the positive side. What one sees among these leaders, regardless of their background, is individuals with a vision, burning desire to turn that vision into reality, ability to communicate that vision to others in a way that inspires positive attitude, determination and action from the listeners.

Dealing with the Failure Within an Organization - Click To Read Article
The best advertisement for any organization is the genuine enthusiasm portrayed by employees. That enthusiasm is a byproduct of how employees feel valued, how they perceive their input is appreciated and how much fun they have doing what they do.

6 Proven Ways to Conquer Your Fear of Public Speaking - Click To Read Article
Cicero, renown world speaker and philosopher said, "I turn pale at the outset of a speech, and quake in every limb and in all my soul." Read Exodus to learn about Moses' fear of public speaking. John Dryden described his fear of public speaking this way, "Whenever I speak a cold sweat trickles down all over my limbs as if I were dissolving in water." I know how it feels to have running stomach, sleepless nights and disappointed audience.

Top Must Have Assets to be a Sought-After Leadership Speaker - Click To Read Article
What can you do to be a sought-after leadership speaker? Work hard on it! Are there some professional and personal attributes that you can develop to set yourself apart in a crowded field of speakers? Here are the major ones that can't be faked.

Top Tips on How to Jump into Personal & Professional Success - Click To Read Article
Jumping high and forward is an inborn talent for survival of the African impala. The impala is known to jump about ten feet high. This high jump propels the impala to land about thirty feet from the spot where it starts. With this ability of vertical and horizontal jumping, the impala survives and thrives in the carnivore-infested savannas of Africa.

The Enduring Presence of Third Stringers - Click To Read Article
They are not on front pages. You may never read about them or hear their names in their playing days. But you will know their attachment to the sport they love long after those who had names on the front pages are long forgotten. Their spectacular performance in something they believe in and are passionate about is evident in their contribution to it long after the days of their obscurity are gone.

Sailing With the Tides of Change for Workplace Survivors - Click To Read Article
Leaders/managers and supervisors can learn a 3, 000 year old lesson from the Egyptians. When they mummified their Pharaohs, Egyptians removed the dead leader's brain but left the heart intact. They believed that for a leader to be great, a compassionate heart was necessary during and after life.

Protect Your Success: Have Unfinished Business - Click To Read Article
The fastest way for an achiever to revert to mediocrity in any endeavor of their calling or profession, is to have no unfinished business. Competitive edge, continuous growth and success, are loosely tied to achieving established goals. The key is to turn yesterday's goals into today's routine, it is also the platform you need to set goals that are more challenging, the one that you never thought of yesterday. You must see and set yourself up for a life beyond today's goals.

Moving Forward After Organizational Restructuring - Click To Read Article
Since the early 1980s, a wave of reorganization has emerged. The plight of displaced employees has received great attention, as evidenced by the many programs for helping them retrain, relocate, increase their employability and regain their emotional stability. Relief comes to an organization after restructuring when everyone assumes that the worst has passed. However, the readjustment process for the remaining employees may become a shocking experience for the organization.

First, Know Your Buffalo-Then Get the Right Spears! - Click To Read Article
You can never overcome a challenge, in your organization or in your personal endeavor that you have not identified. Using the wrong resources and/or strategies will not help overcome challenges, it could even make them worse.

Dealing With Negative Criticism - Click To Read Article
No one likes to be criticized, and more so negatively. Negative criticism from members of your family, coaches, media or fans hurts and may discourage creativity and channel one's efforts in the wrong direction. Negative criticism can destroy your potential if you let yourself to dwell on what your critics say instead of focusing on your future.

Whose Feather Are You Flying With? - Click To Read Article
As a leader, there is one fact you can't deny: you are in your position partly because other people helped you, with their talents, skills or resources, to achieve your vision. Emmett Smith, the Dallas Cowboys' running back who broke records and will one day join the elite NFL Hall of Fame Club, took the time when he retired to recognize 187 people who provided him with the "feathers" to be a star in football.

Un-used Potential - Click To Read Article
Millions of talents and gifts come and go from this world packaged within people who never used them. Yet, when you discover and use a hidden talent and/or gift, you significantly enrich your life and the lives of others.

Top 7 Leadership Lessons Learned From Gardening - Click To Read Article
Gardening has tips that can be applied in Gardening has tips that can be applied in leadership strategies, parenting and spiritual issues. My mother gave me a small plot to garden when I was ten-long before she bought me my first underwear and shoes. It was mine to cultivate, plant and care for my crops before harvesting them. Sugarcane was my crop of choice. I could harvest one at a time without asking for my parent's permission. At that tender age, I discovered a source of tranquility and moments for creative thinking that are rarely experienced in our fast paced world. Up to 1985, I gardened whenever schools were closed. What many consider manual labor was an interconnection of mental, physical, and spiritual aspects that always left a sense of significance words cannot describe.

Top 7 Tips for Overcoming Buffaloes With Others - Click To Read Article
When you or your organization is face-to-face with a fierce buffalo, there is no short cut-just as villagers could not run away or climb trees, neither can you escape from the buffalo trumpeting you your organization. You have a strategy and a team to help overcome the beast.

My Father's Leadership - Click To Read Article
Today's decline of the social structures in America that hold families, corporations and other institutes together is largely attributed to ineffective leaders. As I reflect on the importance of quality leadership, I think of my father, Johnson Kituku Musoo. My father is a living testimony that what you don't have should not stop you from achieving what you want. His mother died before he turned ten, leaving him with a younger brother and sister to care for. I learned about his struggles from other people. I never heard him complain--although I once saw him cry, wishing that his mother was still alive.

Managing Perpetual Workplace Changes - Click To Read Article
It doesn't matter whether you are an old timer or an amateur in what you do. All that matters in our jungle is to apply the lion-gazelle concept of survival. "Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will die. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

Leading Amateurs to Success: What Leaders Can Learn from Mt. Borah - Click To Read Article
If, as a leader, you have said, "I wish I heard more talented people our production would increase" or "The reason we fail is because we don't have experienced people" think twice.

Job and Success Re-defined - Click To Read Article
I have been astonished, since 1997 when I started interviewing people before my presentations, by how some professionals, leaders and business owners have redefined what we call jobs and work-related success. These people have factored a critical element in their jobs or success in what they do-they understand how, at the end of the day, another individual's life is made better by their involvement.

Father Hiran: Thankful for a Priest Who Changed Our Lives - Click To Read Article
It's thirty years since this Irish priest stood in front of 120 freshmen and spoke to us mixing English and Kikamba, our native language. He encouraged us to have vision, dress like gentlemen and participate in extra curriculum activities.

Don't Let Your Group Drink Dirty Water-Be a Leader - Click To Read Article
There is an Akamba, Kenya, proverb that says, "Syaasya ndongoi, inyusaa muuluu." This wise saying means when a herd of cattle lacks a leader, it ends up drinking dirty water. This saying is based on an observation in which the last herd to get to the water source finds the water has been made dirty by the ones that arrived before it.

Discover and Use Your Personal Strengths - Click To Read Article
Once you become consciously aware of your key personal strengths and make it a lifetime goal to use them all the time, you will increase your productivity, be more pleasant to work with and save yourself the pain of trying to improve non strengths. We don't succeed by using our weaknesses. We thrive by using the full potential of our strengths.

Discover the Benefits from the Most Ignored Resource - Click To Read Article
My observations, for the last ten years, on what resources are available for personal and professional growth, and how people use them have led to one key conclusion. To a great extend, people don't succeed because they ignore the most available and accessible resource-other people's experience.

Beyond the Lion's Claws and Teeth of Your Future - Click To Read Article
Vision overshadows inadequacies related to skills, resources and abilities. It has been said, and proven to be true, that what your mind can conceive, and you believe in your heart, you can achieve. "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science" (Albert Einstein). Dreams are the seeds of success.

Are You Sabotaging Your Success? - Click To Read Article
Many people know what they want to achieve in life but they feel there are more stumbling blocks than steppingstones on their way. They find themselves not doing the things that must be done to get them ahead. Many people, in most cases, sabotage their own dreams with what they are doing or not doing-they can be self-made victims.

Be a Positive Outlier and Change Your World - Click To Read Article
When you think of it, George Washington was an outlier and so were characters such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Galileo, Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc and Nelson Mandela. Are you a positive outlier? When an outlier is removed from a set of data, its influence is gone. In your sphere of life or work, can your absence be noticeable? Would people wish you were still available to affect their work or life in a positive way? You don't need talent to be an outlier. You need vision of the future you want, decisions to get you started on a path toward your vision and actions that bring you results.

Balancing Work and Life - Click To Read Article
A major explanation for stress has been uncertainty in the workplace as a result of increased competition, changing local and international trade regulations, merging of corporations and technological advances. These changes have been experienced nationally and locally, Idaho included. For example, Micron's production and profits are directly affected by business practices and turmoil in East Asia. Zilog, Hewlett-Packard, Ore-Ida Inc. and other corporations constantly make major business adjustments to be profitable in an emerging and unpredictable environment.

7 Must Know Motivators Employees Appreciate at All Times - Click To Read Article
So often when I am contacted to work with a group of leaders I am asked, "What can we do to keep our employees motivated, focused and increasing productivity?" Then that question is followed by the comment, "We have goals that we want to achieve."

13 Known Strategies that Stop Employees From Screaming - Click To Read Article
Have you ever wondered why people thrive in activities not related to their work but fail to have the same enthusiasm and/or output in what they are paid to do? Their morale is low, no personal accountability and their creativity in minimal from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday-Friday...Because the workplace has changed, employees need a new leadership approach to overcome their challenges. Unlike the Kamba women who expected their men to rid the community of the attacking forces, today's employees need the tools themselves. The workplace has become an unpredictable jungle and leadership needs to know why people with talents and experiences are dissatisfied and not using their potential-thus damaging the bottom line.

5 Proven Strategies to Grow Your Association's Membership - Click To Read Article
In many cases, education can be provided without a community setting. You have no control where members get their education, but you can control the dynamics of the community they belong to.





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