June, 2011

Leading Blog

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7 Guiding Principles for Developing Leadership Talent

Leading Blog

People deliver numbers. If you want the numbers, you need the people. As a leader you need to know how to judge raw human talent. In The Talent Masters , Bill Conaty and Ram Charan explain how to do it. To develop talent, you need to become intimate with your people; to know the essence of each individual. Talent masters can identify a person’s talent more precisely than most people simply because they excel at observing and listening.

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The Big Vision is Important but People Live in the Details

Leading Blog

Most leaders don’t want to be called a tyrant, a control freak, or even a micromanager. To avoid that, it’s easy to jump into the other ditch and be laissez-faire. Leaders have a duty to navigate between these two extremes as the situation dictates. Typically, we like to present the vision—the values—and leave the details to be sorted out. We like to give the big overarching principle without explaining exactly how it plays out in everyday life.

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You Can Be Legal and Still Be Wrong

Leading Blog

It’s not uncommon to find a big difference between what’s legal and what’s right. Our preoccupation with “what’s legal” insures more legal problems. If we paid more attention to what’s right, we would take our relationships to a new level. And it’s all about relationships. Legal is about what I can get away with. Ethics is about what is right. Legal requires less thought than ethics.

Ethics 280
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4 Lessons from the Toyota Crisis

Leading Blog

“Crisis response must start by building a strong culture long before the crisis hits,” say Jeffrey Liker and Tim Ogden, authors of Toyota Under Fire. Turning crisis into opportunity is all about culture. It’s not about PR strategies, or charismatic leadership, or vision, or any specific action by any individual. It’s not about policies or procedures or risk mitigation processes.

Crisis 280
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To Focus on the Work, You Must Focus on People Doing the Work

Leading Blog

Many managers think they manage the work. They don’t. They’re responsible for the work, but they get work done by influencing the people who do the work. What makes this complicated is what Peter Drucker pointed out: when you hire a hand, it comes with a head and heart attached. So you must pay attention, lots of attention, to the whole person—head and heart—because you need more than your people’s time and attention.

Drucker 280
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Leading Views: Four Ways to Change

Leading Blog

We know what to do to make people happy at work says Brian Tracy. The problem is that we either forget to do those things that make people happy, neglect to do them because we are distracted by other things, refuse to do them because we don’t understand their importance, or, worst of all, do things that actually make people unhappy and then justify our behavior with self-righteous excuses and rationalizations.

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The Essential Ingredient for Executing Your Vision

Leading Blog

If you don’t build a framework of values around your vision, it will fall short of the goal. And those values must be clearly understood by everyone on the team if the initiative is to succeed, for a couple of basic reasons. A vision is what could be , but it is grounded and guided by—or even sent off-course by—your most deeply held values— what is.

Execution 277