Great Leadership By Dan

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Guest post from Rob Hartnett: “What is a high-performance leader?” a leader asked me in a Facebook Live session. One of the many I have done since Covid-19 as we pivot to new ways of working. A high-performance leader is one who is intentional about their leadership. They are not a leader because their position entitles them to be; they see leadership as a verb, a skill to continue to develop and hone.

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Great Leadership By Dan

AUGUST 6, 2020

Guest post from Ron Garonzik and Rick Lash: In 1938 archeologists in Israel made a remarkable discovery – a cache of 2,500-year-old letters between officers and their commanders. They provide a unique window on the impact overly controlling, self-centered leadership styles can have on others: “Regarding the letter you sent, the heart of your servant is ill, when my lord said: Don’t you know how to read a letter?

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JUNE 4, 2020

Guest post from Beth Armknecht Miller: Recently, I was working with an executive who shared a job description for a new IT position. He leads a rapidly growing company so there were going to be multiple hires for the same position in a short period of time. As he spoke about the position and the next steps in his hiring process, I became uneasy. Why was I concerned?

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Great Leadership By Dan

APRIL 2, 2020

Guest post by Stan Silverman : During a recent event to launch my book, Be Different! The Key to Business and Career Success , I spoke about the importance of hiring people with common sense and good critical judgment because at some point, you want them to violate policy when it is in the company’s best interest to do so. I described an experience early in my career while serving as national sales manager for one of my company’s operating divisions.

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Great Leadership By Dan

FEBRUARY 2, 2009

updated 3/23/2020 Here are the 10 tips for leading in challenging times. They may not be any no better or worse than the rest, but they resonate for me, and I sincerely hope they will for you too. 1. Work hard and perform. Wow, isn’t that profound? I’m serious, though. As leaders, these are times that require sacrifice, hard work, and perseverance. This is how battles are won and great companies get turned around.

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Great Leadership By Dan

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Guest post from Stephen Klemich : It is often asked, what is the difference between Leadership and Management? For over 30 years we have always referred to Leadership as being able to rise above the situation, be objective, strategic and find time to contemplate the culture, people and one’s leadership impact. Management is on-the-ground, day-to-day task orientated, checking quality and delivery of the product and service, and looking after the people.

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JANUARY 23, 2020

Guest post from Maria Ross: Let me ask you a question: What does a successful leader look like? Effective leaders are masters of business strategy. They are visionaries who know how to clearly communicate their vision to others. To climb the corporate ladder, you’ve got to make fast, difficult decisions at critical times. Successful leaders have persistence, tenacity, confidence, enthusiasm.

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Great Leadership By Dan

JANUARY 9, 2020

Guest post by Colin D Ellis : People who are true leaders stand out. Others want to be around them because they know they’re worth following. But what qualities do these leaders have that make them exude such strength of character, while other supposed leaders fall short? According a leadership survey conducted by McKinsey , U.S. companies spend around $14 billion on leadership development.

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DECEMBER 5, 2019

Guest post from Phil Renshaw and Jenny Robinson: For many years now there has been increasing recognition of the value professional coaches bring to managers and leaders in business. Given the power of coaching, it can benefit everyone. Both the supply and the demand for such coaches continues to increase. However, it is our belief that we are all missing a vital fact.

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Great Leadership By Dan

NOVEMBER 19, 2019

Guest post from Paul Smith : Every great leader tells stories. But which stories are the most important ones to tell? That’s a question I’ve thought a lot about. And after interviewing over 300 CEOs, leaders, and executives in 25 countries around the world about their use of storytelling in business, I finally have an answer. I discuss all of my conclusions in the new book The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell.

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Great Leadership By Dan

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

Guest post from S. Chris Edmonds : Being around values mis-aligned people lowers trust, discretionary energy, and performance. Our research suggests three key steps you can take to ensure values-aligned experiences: 1) Be clear on your own values. Define the behaviors you will demonstrate when you are living your values, and take time regularly to reflect on how you’re doing with modeling those valued behaviors. 2) Observe the decisions and behaviors of others.

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Great Leadership By Dan

AUGUST 8, 2019

Guest post from S. Chris Edmonds : When leading a culture change initiative, scrutiny of senior leaders’ plans, decisions, and actions increases heavily. I tell senior leaders that they’ll never be able to run a yellow light at a traffic signal in their town again! Yes, even senior leader behavior away from the workplace is scrutinized. Consequently, it is extremely important for senior leaders to model their declared values – every day, with every interaction.

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AUGUST 1, 2019

Guest post by Bill Treasurer : Leadership is typically associated with action—with trying, doing, and achieving. However, there’s another side to leadership that focuses on the followers: trust. As leaders, we need to actively trust our followers, teams, and employees. While this sounds simple, it’s often a hard task for those of us who are goal-oriented.

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JULY 16, 2019

Guest post from Tabitha Laser: What is leadership? Since joining the workforce more than 25 years ago, and serving as a leader for numerous organizations, it’s apparent that leadership means very different things to different people. Simply put, leadership is the art of inspiring, motivating, empowering, supporting, and assuring a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal.

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JUNE 25, 2019

Guest post from Alf Rehn: Some say we live in the golden age of innovation, an age ruled by transformation and revolution. They point to shiny startups and the seemingly unstoppable progress of technology, and proclaim that our age is on track to solve all problems and cure all ills. I say they are sorely mistaken. Instead, I would argue that we live in the age of innovation crisis.

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MAY 30, 2019

Guest post from Stephen Frost and Raafi-Karim Alidina: To build an inclusive organisation, there are two main things you need to do. You need to de-bias the systems that run the organisation, such as recruitment, pay, procurement, talent management and marketing. And you need to lead inclusively. Whilst both are important, leadership is the cornerstone, without which all the diversity initiatives in the world will be in vain.

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MAY 28, 2019

Guest post from Sara Canaday: As leaders, we are, by definition, doers. We finish. We deliver. We get results. And we love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with crossing things off our “to-do” lists. The tougher the task, the better we like it. We revel in being that person people bring the undoable to and then conquer. That’s how we got here, right?

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Great Leadership By Dan

MAY 21, 2019

Guest post from Greg Bustin : Leaders are in the decision-making business. Some of your decisions are bigger than others, and so to be considered successful on your terms as well as the terms of others means you must make more good decisions than bad decisions when the stakes are highest. What’s your decision-making process? There are 10 questions leaders must answer—either intentionally or intuitively, either alone or collaboratively—when making big decisions.

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MAY 9, 2019

Guest post from S. Chris Edmonds : Cornell University professor Dr. Tony Simons’ powerful article, “ The High Cost of Lost Trust ,” appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 2002. In that piece, he described his team’s efforts to examine a specific hypothesis (“Employee commitment drives customer service”) in the US operations of a major hotel chain.

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MAY 7, 2019

Guest post by David Komlos and David Benjamin : You arrive at work one morning, take the elevator up to your appointed floor, amble down the carpeted hallway staring at your shoes and wondering what the day has in store for you, open your door…and there sits a ferocious lion. As startled as you are, the lion roars a mighty roar. If you are like most people, in the blink of an eye you slam the door, turn tail and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

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APRIL 18, 2019

Guest post from Charles D. Morgan : A few decades ago, when time was still a gentle concept, companies just rocked along in their comfortable hierarchies, everything centralized, proposals moving up the chain of command and decisions moving down at approximately the speed of glue. Then in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, we had the tech bubble, and the old business model began to come apart.

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Great Leadership By Dan

MARCH 12, 2019

Guest post from Fiona Murden : In 1998 I graduated from business school feeling I knew all there was to know about leadership. I began work as a management consultant and much of what I’d learnt was very quickly thrown out of the window. The basics of behaviour tell us far more than the latest fad. I became obsessed with observing like a detective, working out what, why and how.

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Great Leadership By Dan

DECEMBER 10, 2007

I often hear that managers just don’t have time for leadership development. They are too busy learning a new part of the business, dealing with an employee performance issue, getting ready for a new project, negotiating a new deal with a supplier, onboarding a new supervisor, crunching a new budget, and getting ready for a visit from headquarters. Once they get all of that taken care of, and things settle down, only then they’ll have time to focus on their own development or the development of t

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Great Leadership By Dan

DECEMBER 17, 2007

It seems like every time I administer an off-the-shelf leadership team assessment, the results are horrendous! I’ve been through a gauntlet of team assessments as a leader, team member, and facilitator, with a variety of companies and teams, and the results always seem to be the same. At best, average, but still room for improvement, and at worst, I see descriptors like “dysfunctional”, “toxic”, “serious problem”, “needs immediate attention”, etc… In fact, one of the most popular team models out

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Great Leadership By Dan

DECEMBER 29, 2007

Why’s boss a four letter word? It’s a double SOB spelled backwards). Companies spend an awful lot of time and money training managers how to be great leaders. Maybe we should also tell them how not to be bad bosses? It might be harder to stop doing annoying things than to learn brand new skills. Here are five ways to get started on your journey to “great leadership”, and to look for things to stop doing: 1.

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Great Leadership By Dan

JANUARY 13, 2008

DO: 1. Seek feedback on a regular basis, especially after you have identified development goals. Exchanging information and perceptions is a process, not a single event. 2. Receive feedback as a gift that provides you with honest information about your perceived behavior/performance. Be open to what you will hear. 3. Let the person finish what he or she is saying. 4.

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Great Leadership By Dan

JANUARY 24, 2008

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss", The Who Using a structured “New Leader Integration Process” can: - Reduce the time that it takes a new leader and his or her new work team to begin to communicate more openly and freely, and build trust, inclusion, and collaboration - Offer the new team the opportunity to surface, explore and discuss their perceptions with the new leader, focusing on needs and expectations, concerns and issues, team direction, goals, and current or anticipated projects.

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JANUARY 29, 2008

Developing your stars is critical to an organization’s success. Your best employees, or A players, boost company performance, both directly—by working harder at their jobs—and indirectly, by their ability to inspire and motivate others. Therefore it’s critical to invest the time and energy to keep them satisfied and engaged. Understand what drives A players Finding out what motivates your top employees on an individual level is critical.

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Great Leadership By Dan

FEBRUARY 3, 2008

Developing employees can be time-intensive. Matching direct reports’ interests, values, and skills to growth opportunities requires energy and careful consideration. How can you optimize the time spent on this activity? By understanding who on your team should be developed—and who requires performance improvement. To understand how successful leaders allocate their employee development time, it’s helpful to consider the return on management, or ROM, of developing your direct reports.

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Great Leadership By Dan

FEBRUARY 19, 2008

In honor of President's Day (not sure where it came from.): “In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself. He sought to mend America's wounded spirit, to restore the strength of the free world and to free the slaves of Communism.” That's how Lady Thatcher started her great eulogy of Ronald Reagan, summarizing in one sentence his personal qualities and his great achievements.

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MARCH 2, 2008

Teams and organizations can often get too insular and unable to think outside of their own boxes. Leaders need to encourage team members to look outside for new ideas. Here's 12 ways to ensure your team members are getting their daily dose of external perspective: 1. Send team members to external training, networking events, or conferences 2. Forward newsletters, articles, research, and best practice reports to your team 3.

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APRIL 6, 2008

Guest post by the remarkable Keven Eikenberry : There are many reasons why trust is important to us as leaders. With higher levels of trust we are able to influence change more easily and quickly. With more trust we are able to create higher levels of productivity and team cohesiveness. I could go on, but in short, being trustworthy and trusted are two of the most valuable attributes remarkable leaders possess.

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Great Leadership By Dan

APRIL 21, 2008

Pepsi has always been known as a great company for leader's. USA Today recently did an interview with Their CEO, Eric Foss. Here's the link: Retain talent, but develop it, Pepsi Bottling chief says. I like what he has to say. Here's a summary: 1. Most people quit because they feel underappreciated. Give talented executives stretch assignments. 2. It's a myth that all fresh ideas come from new hires and that long tenure creates stale thinking.

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Great Leadership By Dan

MAY 1, 2008

There was a question over on the ASTD discussion board that inspired me to write this post. Pam asked: “ I am looking for ideas to provide training with limited resources (space, money and staff)”. It’s a great question. I’ll bet there’s a lot of small, one-person training departments and even big, global companies that need to run a lean organization that are looking for ways to train or develop leaders on the cheap.

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Great Leadership By Dan

AUGUST 5, 2008

Companies will often use external, university-based programs as a way to develop their high potential senior leaders. These programs typically are 1-2 weeks in duration and offer an intense (and expensive) learning experience. According to Iris Marchaj, Director of Smith Executive Education, “99% of leadership development programs offered by elite business schools are male-oriented.which is precisely why they fail when it comes to leadership learning for women!

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Great Leadership By Dan

AUGUST 28, 2008

The questions below relate to the skills and qualities needed for effective coaching. Use this assessment to evaluate your own effectiveness as a coach. 1. Do you seize development opportunities and focus on immediate performance problems for your employees? 2. Do you try to develop a supportive, emotional bond with your employees? 3. Do you observe your employee's behavior?

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Great Leadership By Dan

OCTOBER 29, 2008

I’ve always been a strong proponent of the importance of having a written individual development plan (IDP) for leadership development. That is, identifying: - What you want to get better at - How you’re going to do it - When you’re going to do it I have one. I make sure my employees have one. And I try to encourage all employees to have one, not just managers.

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