Thank God It's Monday®! Blog

How to Fix the Pervasive Issue Of Poor Communication

When your people say, “We have a communication problem,” they’ve actually told you nothing—and that’s exactly the problem. “Communication” has become a junk-drawer word that hides real issues, keeps teams in ambiguity, and quietly kills execution.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich exposes why top five-percent organizations refuse to tolerate vague complaints about communication—and what they do instead. They build explicit communication skill sets, set crystal-clear expectations, and hold people accountable for how they pass critical information.

You’ll discover:

Why the word “communication” is meaningless until you name the specific breakdowns slowing your team down.

How lazy communication shows up in missing handoffs, unresolved conflict, and fuzzy project status updates.

What top-tier teams do differently to create authentic, credible communication that drives problem solving and results.

This isn’t about sending more emails or adding another meeting. It’s about engineering how information moves—up, down, and across your organization—so people know exactly what’s happening, what’s needed, and what “done” looks like.

Watch now.

Over twenty years of having a university-validated culture survey that we do within organizations, just guess what’s always number one in terms of the problems that people perceive to have within the organization. You guessed it: communication.

What do you mean, communication? Well, there’s the problem. The word communication doesn’t mean anything. Does it mean that information doesn’t come up through the organization?

It doesn’t go down through the organization? That people don’t work through conflicts together? That people don’t know how to pass the baton in projects? That, well, you get it.

Communication, the very word, the essence of it, lacks communication. It doesn’t say anything. When people stay in ambiguity, nothing gets done. And yet, there needs to be an answer because top five-percent organizations have one thing in common.

They have cleaned up their communication patterns. They’re no longer lazy communicators. And everyone is very, very clear about how to pass batons, how to ask for what they need, how to communicate the stage that something is at. But that doesn’t just happen with good intention.

That’s a series of skill sets that people must learn in order to make that happen.

But if somebody can do it, you can do it. And if you want to be a top five-percenter and keep that status, you’re going to need to help your team figure out how to elevate their communication skills such that they are no longer lazy communicators, but they are authentic, credible communicators that allow for a complete and clear understanding of what’s going on and bring problem-solving skills as a result of the communication. Because at the end of the day, we still got to get the results, even though there will be breakdowns, and clear communication takes away many of the breakdowns.


Gratitude Groove: Celebrate Thanksgiving with Heart

Gratitude isn’t a holiday sentiment — it’s a performance advantage.

In this Thanksgiving video, Roxanne Emmerich reminds us that the real power of the season has nothing to do with turkey and everything to do with the people who make our work lives possible. In a world that feels increasingly chaotic, this is the moment to pause, reconnect, and return to what matters most: appreciation, contribution, and meaningful relationships at work.

When leaders and teams anchor themselves in gratitude, performance shifts. Engagement rises. Stress decreases. Collaboration strengthens. And organizations experience the cultural lift that only authentic appreciation creates.

In this video you’ll discover:

The workplace realities we forget to celebrate — teammates, contribution, connection, and leaders who truly care.

Why gratitude is the cultural lever that transforms morale and increases team alignment faster than any “program” ever could.

Simple daily actions that build loyalty, trust, and an atmosphere where people actually want to perform at their best.

This Thanksgiving, choose to create a ripple of appreciation that lasts far beyond the holiday. Your people matter — and they need to hear it from you.

Happy Thanksgiving — make it extraordinary.

Watch now.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. Yeah, the food is great, but it’s not even about the food. It’s about the connection and the remembrance to stop and pause and appreciate the people in our lives — the things that we have.

In a world that’s on its ear, where it seems that almost everything is a little bit crazy out there, it’s time to remember all the great things that are going on and all the great people that are there — and the fact that we have a job, that we get to contribute, that we have teammates that we get to connect with, that we have a boss that cares for us and wants us to have better things, that we get to play on this earth together.

Please take a moment to appreciate the people that you work with. Give them a high five. If appropriate, give them a hug. Decide to let them know they matter to you.

Let this season be the time of remembrance for the things that I want you to feel all year long, which is a connection to the very people that you work with — because it’s all about the people, silly. Yes, that’s all that really matters.

So Happy Thanksgiving. Make it an extraordinary one by living in a state of gratitude and appreciation.


Stop Leaking Your Culture

This week’s video uncovers a silent saboteur of workplace performance: venting.

What appears to be harmless complaining among teammates is actually a corrosive force that leaks trust, drains morale, and weakens the culture you’ve worked hard to build.

Discover why venting is just gossip in disguise—and why professionals committed to excellence must address issues directly, not indirectly.

It’s a wake-up call to lead with integrity and stop the slow leak that’s eroding your culture from the inside out.

Watch now.

Complaining to friends or coworkers about teammates might seem harmless, but it erodes trust, unity, and morale faster than you can realize.

Venting is not harmless. It’s toxic.

Venting is by definition gossip.

Every complaint leaks energy and weakens the culture you’ve worked hard to build.

Real professionals don’t gossip. They address issues directly and constructively at the source with the person with whom they have an issue.

Imagine a culture where trust is strong because teammates communicate openly, honestly, and respectfully. That’s the culture of high performance to fiercely protect.

So next time you’re tempted to vent, choose ethics and courage instead. Address it directly.

Protect your team’s trust because a healthy culture starts with you.


The Brain Chemistry of Accomplishment

Feeling buried? Good. That means you’re in the arena where results are made.

Today’s world demands more with less—faster and better. The question isn’t, “Will I ever get caught up?” It’s, “How do I wire my day so progress is inevitable and energizing?”

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich reframes overwhelm as a leadership advantage and shows how to trigger the brain chemistry of accomplishment on command.

You’ll discover how to:

Convert overwhelm into momentum by redefining success as a string of completions that physiologically reinforce confidence and capacity.

Engineer daily wins with simple systems—write it, do it, check it—to create the “Good job” dopamine hit that fuels sustained performance.

Prioritize what actually moves the needle so you knock down the vital few, not the trivial many, even when the inbox never ends.

If you’re waiting to “catch up,” you’re surrendering your edge. Instead, build a cadence of completions that compounds into culture-level performance. Your team doesn’t need more hours; it needs a scoreboard of meaningful wins.

Ready to flip the switch from overloaded to unstoppable?

Watch now.

Do you have more work to do than the time you have to do it in? Well, welcome to planet Earth. That is the world we all live in now. Listen, here’s the thing: people sometimes run from a job like that, going, “Ugh, I am overwhelmed,” and yet they go someplace else where everybody has too much to do, and now they’re in a brand-new job with less experience, and it takes them even more time to get less done, and it just got a whole lot worse. Here’s the thing: we have to accept the fact that we live in a sped-up world. There is a requirement to do more with less, faster with fewer, and do it all better than ever.

And what an opportunity.

If we let that crush us, if we define ourselves as being inadequate because we’re always feeling behind it, as opposed to going, “I knocked that one down; I was super powerful today; I moved something else through,” and we don’t focus on the completions, we will stay in the world of overwhelm. So knock off those completions, have it be a blast every time you move through it, give yourself a high five, check it off the list. I don’t know about you, but I add things to my list just so I can check it off because it feels good, and there’s a brain chemistry shift that says, “Good job, you knocked something down.” Create systems to make sure that you are knocking things down and feeling good about the fact that, even though you’ll never, ever, ever get caught up again—because that may be the case—you’re knocking down the important things and focusing in on what matters the most.

Be the Miracle

Mediocrity is crowded. Miracles are available.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich challenges leaders to reject the illusion of “safe” and operate from possibility. From moon landings to global video calls, every breakthrough was once declared impossible—until someone chose it anyway. The same is true inside your organization.

In this video you’ll discover how to:

Adopt a miracle mindset. Decide that extraordinary outcomes are your responsibility—then align behavior, cadence, and standards to match.

Destroy the myth of safety. Recognize that “playing it safe” is the riskiest strategy; everything can change in an instant, so choose bold action.

Replace “middle” with mastery. Build a culture where people stretch, execute, and never shrink back to yesterday’s limits.

Executives don’t need more platitudes; they need a repeatable way to create outcomes others call improbable. This episode invites you to treat stretch goals as the default, silence the “can’t be done” chorus, and organize your team to deliver the improbable on schedule.

Discover how to be the miracle—starting this week.

Watch now.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” —Albert Einstein.

The invention of the television? A miracle. A man walking on the moon? A miracle. Instantaneous access to the world via video communication? A miracle. As every one of these ideas was pondered, there were many who said, “That can’t be done.” And yet each one happened.

And remember that each day thousands of other miracles happen—wonderful stuff, amazing stuff, stuff that often doesn’t make the daily news.

But they are miracles nonetheless. Whether it’s putting a man on the moon, meeting an impossible deadline, or exceeding a stretched sales goal against all odds—we thrive when we commit to create our own miracles. Working toward our own miracles stretches us in every way to be more than we have been in the past. And when we pull it off, we can never shrink back to our limited thinking and execution again.

We now own a higher level of power. What if you lived as if it was your responsibility to create miracles?

Besides, who wants to go to work and shoot wildly for mediocrity? “I’ll meet you in the middle.” “Let’s reach for the middle.” “It’s lonely at the middle.”

None of these even sound good. There is a gnawing in our souls to be a part of something great. Great philosophers write about the desire to be great. We are all called to make an impact, to shake things up, to make the world a better place because we live.

And then the rational mind interferes. You can find one hundred people who will tell you something is impossible for every one who thinks it can be done. And those one hundred are absolutely right as far as their own horizons are concerned—because at their level of understanding of how life works, it is impossible.

Possibility thinking is available to all of us, but it’s only used by a few. The ego preserves a feeling of safety by refusing to stretch our understanding of what is possible.

But safety is an illusion.

From our health to our money to our relationships—everything can change in an instant, no matter how safe it feels right now. History books are filled with examples. So let’s get over the illusion of safety. It’s not real.

If you think it is, you’re diagonally parked in a parallel universe. The only thing that is real is that you are here in this time and place, and you have this moment to dream big and live life to the max. So why not dream about miracles? Decide to create them.

Plan on making them happen. Don’t contaminate your energy or your dream by listening to those who will tell you it can’t be done. They haven’t yet learned the secret that miracles are given to those who choose them.