Surveys. They're supposed to take the pulse of a company's performance through the eyes of their customers. However, they frequently deliver the opposite -- a veiled and biased pile of data that is used only for your monthly performance reports. This happens because many organizations are prone to customer deafness. Surveys are constructed based on what companies want to hear, rather than on what customers need to say.

I recently had the opportunity to be on the Lead on Purpose podcast with founder and host, James Laughlin. We geeked out on rugby, drumming, sports, and leadership. James is a world-renowned high-performance leadership expert and has won seven world championship titles. He now has the opportunity to interview former world leaders, pro athletes, Navy SEALs, and CEO's. I am not a world leader nor pro athlete, but I do fall into a couple of those categories and run a management consulting firm focused on building high-performance teams and leaders in organizations across the globe.

What makes for a happy life? Philosophers have pondered this question for millennia, coming up with different theories and recommendations for people to follow, but not necessarily having any hard evidence to prove their ideas. That’s what inspired the long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development. Starting in the 1930s, researchers tracked men from different neighborhoods in the Boston area over several decades, asking them to provide regular updates on their lives, including their current health, income, employment, and marital status.

In many instances, your first impression is formed online. When people are researching you in a professional capacity, their go-to resource is LinkedIn. If you want to impress people with your authentic first impression, you need to make your LinkedIn profile congruent with who you are in the real world. That means aligning the bits-and-bytes you with the flesh-and-bones you.

It’s gotten to a point where I’m not even shocked anymore. An organization with a charismatic leader experiences enormous growth. Rumors and rumblings of leadership trouble behind the scenes start to come out, followed by actual allegations of bullying, sexual harassment, dominating personalities, or abuse. The leader goes down in scandal, sometimes taking the organization with him or her.