Leading Blog

DECEMBER 20, 2011

Great leaders know they cannot let others determine their moods and behaviors. The decision is ours. David Pollay wrote The Law of the Garbage Truck to remind us that “it is not our duty to absorb the frustrations, anxieties, and disappointments of other people. We were not put on earth to carry other people’s negative energy, nor were we created to burden others with ours.

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Leading Blog

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

This is a guest post by Joel Garfinkle, author of Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level. Garfinkle asks, “What makes one person more successful than another?” Getting Ahead is a straightforward guide to help you eliminate your blind spots to improve how you are perceived, increase your visibility and exert your influence. Great material.

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Leading Blog

AUGUST 3, 2011

This is a guest post by Marlene Chism, author of Stop Workplace Drama. Uncertain times always invite a little more drama, particularly in the workplace. One reason is because the brain craves certainty. When you feel uncertain, the amygdala, an almond shaped structure in the brain shoots out chemicals through your blood stream that make you experience feelings of fear, doubt and anxiety.

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Leading Blog

MARCH 28, 2011

In times of change there is the tendency to either stick doggedly to what has always worked in the past or to throw it all out and start new. Neither extreme is the answer. Heritage and innovation is a tension that needs to be managed— thoughtfully. Our default thinking is to view the world in terms of what has worked before so we often fail to address the changes going on around us.

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Leading Blog

JANUARY 28, 2011

Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT says, “ Success has a much greater influence on the brain than failure.” Ned Hallowell comments in Shine : While of course mistakes need to be acknowledged and, one hopes, learned from, it may be more likely, from a purely neurological point of view, that a person will learn more from a success than a failure.” Hallowell points out that acknowledgment or recognition serves two important functions.

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Leading Blog

MAY 6, 2011

Justin Menkes says that there are no longer periods of calm seas for leaders in any industry. So it’s not a matter of gritting your teeth and riding out the crisis. Leaders must get comfortable in an environment of ongoing stress. They must be Better Under Pressure. To do this a leader must possess a “highly unusual set of attributes that often run counter to natural human behavior.

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Leading Blog

JULY 6, 2011

An easy trap for any leader to fall into is the “Look what I did!” trap. Success easily erodes humility. Humility isn’t about the lack of ambition, but acknowledging the luck, the good fortune, and the contributions of others to your success. It is the humility that comes with a habit of respect for others. Stephen Hall calls it the “gift of perspective.

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Leading Blog

FEBRUARY 14, 2011

B ooker T. Washington (1856–1915), the first African-American to receive an honorary degree from Harvard, was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. Washington was born into slavery to a slave mother and a white plantation owner in Franklin County, Virginia. He became a national figure with his Atlanta Address of 1895, in which he advocated vocational education for blacks as a way to improve race relations, making him a popular spokesperson for African-American citizens.

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Leading Blog

NOVEMBER 22, 2011

Demand is created in the gaps between what we really want and the goods and services we settle for. “Demand creators figure out how to solve the big and little hassles we all face—and they make our days easier, more convenient, more productive, and simply more fun,” writes Adrian Slywotzky in Demand. Slywotzky has identified six insights and behaviors of demand creators: Make it Magnetic.

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Leading Blog

OCTOBER 26, 2011

It’s Not About You by Bob Burg and John David Mann, is the story of a leader’s journey. A journey any good leader has to take. Ben begins with an agenda. His job is to convince or if necessary, to steamroll a manufacturer of high-quality chairs to accepting a merger. Ben’s company believes it to be a good thing, but the target company is not so sure.

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Leading Blog

APRIL 7, 2011

Poet and Fortune 500 consultant David Whyte said that “The core act of leadership must be the act of making conversations real.” Conversations—sometimes difficult conversations—are what build relationships. Conversations that provide the opportunity for possibility. Conversations about choice. Leaders create the opportunity for conversation. By bringing people together for conversation they increase engagement, commitment and accountability.

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Leading Blog

DECEMBER 7, 2011

You can’t do it alone. We often try to, imagining that we can see and know the things we need to know without the discerning eye of a outside point of view. Bill George and Doug Baker remind us in True North Groups that, “We need people around us to whom we can look for support and advice, who can help us develop as human beings. We need them to help us become better leaders in our work, our communities, and our families.

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Leading Blog

SEPTEMBER 23, 2011

Max DePree popularized the idea that leadership is an art. So much of what a leader does cannot be objectively measured. To reduce leadership to a set of algorithms is to remove it from its context; to ignore the complexities, the contradictions, and the possibilities. Artists must deal with uncertainty, contradictions and diversity almost by definition.

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Leading Blog

JUNE 13, 2011

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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Leading Blog

OCTOBER 7, 2011

The term work-life balance is fatally flawed says Matthew Kelly in Off Balance. Meant to deal with the pressures surrounding both personal and professional life, the term has unwittingly created a false dichotomy. You can’t separate the two. In fact, says Kelly, “the term itself diminishes our ability to make the case that work can be a richly rewarding part of a person’s life and should in many ways be personal.

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Leading Blog

AUGUST 16, 2011

While creativity is associated with artists, creativity is really part of life. It is how we shape our work into something meaningful. Benjamin Franklin put it this way: “To cease to think creatively is but little different from ceasing to live.” You might not think of yourself as being creative, but if you are expected to solve problems, strategize and come up with new ideas, then you are required to be creative.

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Leading Blog

JANUARY 19, 2011

What leader wouldn’t want to lead a “great workplace?” I’ve never run across anyone that wouldn’t. So why aren’t we able to point to more of them? I suspect that, in the main, it’s because many of those leaders that don’t lead great workplaces, don’t know they aren’t. They have never taken the time to ask. From their point of view it’s hard to imagine what they could be doing differently.

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Leading Blog

JUNE 27, 2011

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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Leading Blog

OCTOBER 14, 2011

Dave Ramsey defines EntreLeadership as “the process of leading to cause a venture to grow and prosper.” Entreleaders know how to blend their entrepreneurial passion with servant-like leadership that motivates employees through persuasion instead of intimidation. EntreLeadership is a book about how business works from a practitioner. His advice, on nearly every facet of running a business, is based on solid principles.

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Leading Blog

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

Without delegation no organization can function effectively. Yet, lack of courage to delegate properly, and the knowledge of how to do it, is one of the most general causes of failure in organizations. —Lester Urwick, Elements of Administration. Every time you delegate work to a teammate, three inescapable core elements of delegation are in play. Authority , responsibility , and accountability form an integrated process and must be applied by you as a unified whole.

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Leading Blog

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

Rajeev Peshawaria says ironically, even though leadership hasn’t changed, we have Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders. The difference between mere bosses and leaders is that “leaders find the energy to stay on and fight, and energize others around them, while nonleaders give up.” “Superior leadership requires incredible amounts of emotional energy —the power to stay the course despite the most formidable of obstacles.

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Leading Blog

MAY 26, 2011

John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design. In Redesigning Leadership , he—with co-author Becky Bermont—pulls the leadership lessons from the ups and downs of his time there. In his transition from MIT to RISD he found that the two words “free pizza” were a powerful motivator to convene large numbers of students. “Making people work together can be fairly challenging, but getting them to eat together is somehow vastly easier.

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Leading Blog

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

If we truly want to deal with a difficult or unmanageable person, we have to get at the thinking behind the behavior. Why do they do that? Why are they that way? Instead of going deeper, it’s easier to just label them and avoid the issue. He’s rude. She’s unreliable. He’s an egomaniac. She’s self-absorbed. Anne Loehr and Jezra Kaye, authors of Managing the Unmanageable , say that these “unmanageable” people are costing companies a fortune.

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Leading Blog

APRIL 20, 2011

Unless they can highlight a problem, many book reviewers don’t feel like they have done their job. They operate under the assumption that being a critic means being critical. Many bosses operate the same way. They feel feedback is good only if it is critical or negative. Adam Bryant suggests in The Corner Office , that we be a coach, not a critic. He writes, “Employees know if their boss is rooting for them to succeed, and they’re much more open to feedback if they sense the manager’s goal is to

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Leading Blog

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Richard Rumelt has written an insightful book on developing the ability to identify and develop good strategy. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is obviously the result of decades of practice developing strategy and the many case studies and classroom interactions made it personal and very readable. We’ve all been there. The big conference room as the lights dim and the Power Point slides begin.

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Leading Blog

MARCH 25, 2011

Apple is on a roll and we want to know how Steve Jobs does it. The Steve Jobs way is, in a word, passion. Passion drives his perseverance and momentum through setbacks. Passion obliges his attention to detail. Passion necessitates his intense focus. Passion fuels his outbursts. Passion compels him to encourage those around him. Passion urges him to compete with himself.

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Leading Blog

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

For those looking to do more with Twitter than just using it to exchange information, Claire Diaz Ortiz, who leads social innovation, philanthropy, and causes at Twitter, has written Twitter for Good : Change the World, One Tweet at a Time to do just that. Claire says that Twitter is effective as a tool to coalesce your message, make a difference and create a movement.

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Leading Blog

JULY 13, 2011

This is a guest post by Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran, authors of Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders? How often have you wondered who the real leader is in your office? Maybe you need to delegate a critical project, and you can’t afford to put your faith in someone who is not up to the job. Or maybe you work under several managers, and you want to make sure that you are building rapport with the one who counts.

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Leading Blog

AUGUST 19, 2011

While we might like to think otherwise, here is a fact about successful leaders: Successful leaders go through significant periods of time in which they feel confused, discouraged, and unsure of themselves and their decisions. They feel as if they should be somewhere else, doing something else. And un successful leaders go through the same thing. The difference, says Harvard professor Robert Kaplan, is “how they deal with these periods of confusion and uncertainty.

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Leading Blog

AUGUST 8, 2011

In Common Purpose , consultant Joel Kurtzman makes the case that excellent leaders build a sense of inclusiveness—a sense of we—within the organization by creating a common purpose. A place where people know what to do and why, and understand what the organization stands for. Based on interviews and first-hand experience, Common Purpose lays out how to achieve and then sustain a culture based on a common purpose.

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Leading Blog

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Mostly people say they want big, new, creative ideas. But when you come up with one, they seem to go out of their way to kill it. They act like creative people must be stopped. Wouldn’t it be nice to know where the opposition is going to come from before you ever present it? In Creative People Must Be Stopped , David Owens suggests that it will come from at least one of six different areas: Individual —your idea may not be that good Group —your group criticizes it out of existence Organizational

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Leading Blog

JULY 12, 2011

It is natural to want to be like the people we look up to. We want to recreate the success they have enjoyed in our own lives. So we try to imitate them. It seems like the shortest distance between two points. Of course, we are trying to copy a result. What we often fail to see is the work it took to get them to the place where they could do what they do.

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Leading Blog

MAY 17, 2011

It’s not unusual to find in a group, a person that just doesn’t seem to fit in; someone we would rather do without. Often we find them irritating simply because they are coming from a different perspective—a different agenda—than the rest of the group. While this can be annoying, these people provide a very important service to the group. Consider the experience Rhode Island School of Design president John Maeda relates in Redesigning Leadership : Working in a group where there are considerable

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Leading Blog

APRIL 12, 2011

Former chairman and chief executive officer of Baxter International, Harry Kraemer, has written a genuine, back-to-basics book on value-based leadership: From Values to Action. He presents four interconnected principles that build on and contribute to each other: Self-Reflection is the most important and is central to your leadership. “If you are not self-reflective, how can you truly know yourself?

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Leading Blog

OCTOBER 24, 2011

It is a defeatist attitude to think that luck or circumstances primarily make you what you are. Luck, both good and bad happen to us all. We cannot control much of what happens around us, but the choices we make, as Jim Collins and Morten Hansen’s research confirms, determine our success. In Great by Choice , the authors rightfully assert that we have entered an extended period of uncertainty and turbulent disruption that might well characterize the rest of our lives.

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Leading Blog

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

In an environment of uncertainty and disruption, a successful leader must become what Mike Thompson calls an Anywhere Leader. The anywhere leader is the kind of leader who can land on their feet no matter what the setting or situation presents. Mike Thompson, author of The Anywhere Leader , says that “managers who have advanced their careers through tumultuous times are the ones who find a way to fit in, build trust, and contribute in any setting in which they are placed.

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Leading Blog

JUNE 20, 2011

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.

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