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Effectively Influencing Decision Makers: Ensuring That Your Knowledge Makes a Difference

Marshall Goldsmith

In many ways, influencing ultimate decision makers is similar to selling products or services to external customers. No one is impressed with salespeople who blame their customers for not buying their products. Former Harvard Professor Chris Argyris pointed out how “upward feedback” often turns into “upward buck-passing”.

Influence 139
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How Criticizing in Private Undermines Your Team

Harvard Business Review

Is your leadership team a real team — one in which members are interdependent with each other for meeting team goals? If so, they should also be accountable to each other for working together to achieve those goals, including how they rely on, work with, and make decisions together.

Team 18
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How to Give Feedback to Someone Who Gets Crazy Defensive

Harvard Business Review

Make delivery–and implementation–more productive. Melissa foresees that scenario, but her temperament makes her vulnerable to what business theorist Chris Argyris calls “defensive strategies” — ambiguous, counterproductive behavior chosen to avoid interpersonal discomfort. He wants her to back off.

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Management’s Three Eras: A Brief History

Harvard Business Review

Only glimmers of what was to come showed up in the work of thinkers such as Adam Smith, with his insight that the division of labor would increase productivity. Along with the new means of production, organizations gained scale. The goal was to optimize the outputs that could be generated from a specific set of inputs.

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How Criticizing in Private Undermines Your Team

Harvard Business Review

Is your leadership team a real team — one in which members are interdependent with each other for meeting team goals? If so, they should also be accountable to each other for working together to achieve those goals, including how they rely on, work with, and make decisions together.

Team 8
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What I Learned About Coaching After Losing the Ability to Speak

Harvard Business Review

Finally, there’s the impact on accountability: Research shows that we’re more likely to achieve our goals when we write them down. Clients tell me they actually welcome these conversations that feel more on the record, because they want to make progress on their goals, and the “record” can help measure that.

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What I Learned from My TED Talk

Harvard Business Review

Our goal today is to learn our way into the future. We can also see a counterexample in the less productive response of RIM. And to a degree, I believe that a lot of what many of us are taught is tied to this notion of perfection, and that it can warp our ability to keep sight of our goals.