What better way to spend the weekend before the official publication date of the book, than conducting a leadership workshop for some very bright young managers in the Raycom Media group. Raycom believes in growing leaders from within the organization, and each year selects up-and-coming mid-level managers for specialized training. I've played a role in that program for several years running. Being a manager is serious business, of course, but if you read my book, you'll see that I believe levity is a key value of leadership. As a surprise to the class, Raycom's news VP, Susana Schuler purchased early copies of the book from Amazon.com, and presented each one with a copy, which I then signed. This photo was taken after they learned about the importance of feedback -- and my concept of "feedback glasses" (also in the book.) We took a few class pictures together, and needless to say, this one is my hands-down favorite.

{"id":900,"date":"2012-06-04T11:09:19","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T18:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/?p=900"},"modified":"2012-06-04T11:10:14","modified_gmt":"2012-06-04T18:10:14","slug":"leading-and-laughing-my-favorite-combination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/?p=900","title":{"rendered":"Leading and Laughing: My Favorite Combination"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,20,19,34,10,9,13,33,30],"class_list":["post-900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-jill-geisler","tag-what-great-bosses-know","tag-work-happy","tag-laughter","tag-leadership","tag-management","tag-poynter","tag-raycom","tag-teams"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/RaycomClassFun.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=900"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":905,"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900\/revisions\/905"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whatgreatbossesknow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}