Just for a minute, pretend you’re five years old, your mom is sharing a very charming, perhaps often repeated piece of motherly advice:

“Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words will never hurt you.”

OK, OK. You can come back now. The truth is, that after age five, this charming advice becomes a lie and remains a lie for the rest of your life. Some words and behaviors can actually terrorize.

I grew up in a household where we had an extraordinary interest in words. As a way of introducing that interest to you, here are are a few Lukaszewski-isms; words I’ve invented where there seem to be an inadequate supply of existing words to suffice. Here is this month’s batch.

Attorneys, often by the score, will be involved in this crisis situation. What I’ll describe and suggest in this note is sensible, constructive, actually quite helpful, and will lead to far more prompt and appropriate resolution of the controversies, confrontations, contention and the victimization crisis situations will likely generate.

If you have been following the Norwood Teague story, you have surely read the 8/11/15 piece by the Star Tribune reporter who covers University of Minnesota athletics that revealed that she had been an ongoing Teague target dating back to December 13, 2013.

My perspective is that job one has to be the restoration of the relationship between police leadership and the community. Restoration of these more important relationships will only occur when public confidence in police leadership is rebuilt and restored.

Sometimes the only way to help organizations avoid embarrassment, humiliating visibility, enormous litigation, and just plain stupidity is to illustrate dramatically the pattern of behaviors and attitudes that lead to catastrophic reputational trouble.

Leaders must implicitly and explicitly recognize the ethical expectations by everyone inside their organization. Focus groups, polls and interviews reveal a general list of ethical expectations similar to the one listed here.

You are looking at the real environment of internal communication. The percentages indicate the influence of a given executive level or source of information on individuals at their desk or workstation.

To keep your organization moving forward, there are seven key leadership communication function ratios.

One of the more frequent questions I get as a crisis manager is, “What are the best practices for laying people off, executing cutbacks or rightsizing?” (No, Target did not call me.) Management expert Tom Peters calls these management maneuvers “corporate capsizing.” The answer is pretty simple: There really aren’t any.