Next Level Blog

APRIL 4, 2023

Here are five must-do’s: Create Strategic Plans – As an ambassadorial leader, you need to lay out a strategic plan for your remit that supports and aligns with the strategic goals of your company. Incorporate that dynamic as part of your strategic plan and leverage your visibility as an enabling factor in the success of your plan.

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Strategic Planning Storytelling Planning Marketing 176

Next Level Blog

MARCH 1, 2012

I’m about halfway through “How” by Dov Seidman, and I find his overarching point compelling — that in a world of radical transparency, how we do things matters as much as or more than what we do.

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Planning Development Organization Team Building 191

Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

Let’s hear it for Doug Elmendorf! It’s possible that, as was the case with me until yesterday afternoon, you don’t know who Doug Elmendorf is. He runs the Congressional Budget Office and was the star. Please click the headline to read the whole story.

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Planning Power Budgeting Leadership 183

Next Level Blog

APRIL 28, 2020

And that means we’re going to have to adjust if we plan to finish the race on our feet. Stop Holding on to Your Original Plan – Going back to work won’t mean going back to normal. I get that at some level – there’s comfort in the familiar and in the belief that by following a plan we’re in control of our outcomes.

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Strategic Planning Planning Fashion Follow-up 242

Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 22, 2022

That starts with a plan that has a simple easy-to-communicate outline of, “This is what we’re going to do, by when and why it matters.”. Keep refreshing your plan – Remember, the way you avoid being asked, “What have you done for me lately?” That means that you’ll want to spend regular time refreshing your going forward game plan.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 23, 2024

What are the intentions and what’s in the plan for articulating, exhibiting, and refining those characteristics? If you project yourself out to New Year’s Eve of this year and you’re feeling great about the way 2024 has gone, what are the professional and personal headlines that make you feel that way?

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Retail Audience Learning-by-Doing Follow-up 278

Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

They’re almost always fun conversations because the vast majority of my clients show measurable improvement in the leadership behaviors they’ve focused on in their development plans. He’s had solid line direct reports who took their cues from him and were evaluated on well they executed against Joe’s overall plan.

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Power Influence Executive Coaching Report 167

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 17, 2023

Advance agendas and materials not only give you time to prepare, but they also force the organizer to think through their game plan for the meeting. Get an Advance Agenda : Likewise, if the organizer can’t produce a coherent and focused agenda and related materials to review before the meeting, don’t go.

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Execution How To Objective Executive Coaching 317

Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

Let’s hear it for Doug Elmendorf!   It’s possible that, as was the case with me until yesterday afternoon, you don’t know who Doug Elmendorf is. He runs the Congressional Budget Office and was. Please click the headline to read the whole story.

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Planning Power Budgeting Leadership 100

Next Level Blog

JANUARY 18, 2022

Engaging them in that conversation enables them to both contribute to the planning process and understand where they fit in. Undoubtedly, you’ll need to adjust the plan along the way, but co-creating a roadmap for how you’re going to get where you’re going can go a long way to keeping people on point and engaged.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 25, 2022

The third P is for Plan – what’s the plan that will create the picture that fulfills our purpose? And, the fourth P is for Part to Play – what’s your part in the plan that creates the picture that fulfills our purpose? The second P is for Picture – what does it look like when we’re fulfilling our purpose?

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Team Delegation Learning-by-Doing Career 245

Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2021

As some brilliant military strategist said at some point (the origin is disputed), “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” And every time someone chooses it, I learn more about how leaders can make smart choices around what needs to be perfect and what can be good enough.

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360-Degree Feedback Tactics Project Team 246

Next Level Blog

APRIL 26, 2021

Like a lot of organizations, this company has a senior leadership team conference at the beginning of the year – either fiscal or calendar – to lay out their themes, goals and plans for the next 12 months. Part one is that the best organizations have an annual management calendar that drives planning, assessment and accountability.

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Leadership How To Performance Review Learning-by-Doing 139

Next Level Blog

JULY 26, 2022

I’ve been sharing this balcony to dance floor planning template with other leaders and leadership teams lately and am getting good reports back. Click here to get a free copy of the template that you can use with your team. I’d love for you to try it in an upcoming meeting and let me know how it works for you.

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Team How To Long-term Mentor 277

Next Level Blog

JUNE 24, 2020

It’s more so during a pandemic when work routines and business plans are completely disrupted. Plan – A lot of the folks I’m talking with are struggling with their diets because they’re in so many online meetings and end up snacking instead of stopping for a real meal. Prep – While you’re planning, do some prepping.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Keep talking about the vision, the plan, the progress, and what you need to change. So, if the need for buy-in never ends, how do you keep your colleagues bought in? Here are three steps that work for my executive coaching clients: Communicate frequently. Keep talking about it until you hear it repeated it back to you.

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Fashion Executive Coaching Team Planning 256

Next Level Blog

AUGUST 17, 2021

Making plans to go back to the office in the Fall? And then the fun and optimism came to a screeching halt as vaccination rates plateaued, the Delta variant arrived, the masks went back on and plans for the Fall began to be cancelled. COVID case rates were falling. Vaccination rates were rising.

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Content Comparison Conference Stress 238

Next Level Blog

JUNE 7, 2022

My suggestion is to come up with a plan and approach for yourself that is based on three time frames: before, during and after. Once you’ve identified where the vulnerabilities in your itinerary might be you can make some plans to mitigate them. Your time for exercise might be less.

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Travel How To Hotels Sports 176

Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 29, 2014

As you think through and plan for what you want from 2015, you can use these three simple questions in this post to create a Life GPS® to help you get where you want to go. Life GPS Mindful Mondays 2015 new year planning' What difference would it make if you had a GPS for your life?

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Planning 186

Next Level Blog

MARCH 30, 2021

Start the Week with Planning Time : A chief operating officer I’m working with has staked out Monday morning as personal planning time for herself. It’s the same with the clients who are taking the Monday morning planning time or the Friday lookback time. A proactive way to start the day!

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Management Chief Operating Officer Short-term Report 166

Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

So, one of the behaviors he decided to focus on in the development plan based on his Next Level 360 results was “Focuses less on day-to-day operations and more on taking advantage of strategic opportunities.” He’s felt like he hasn’t just been pulled into the weeds; he’s had to set up a house in them.

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How To Operations Team Resources 316

Next Level Blog

JUNE 29, 2021

If you can share what particular audiences need to know about plans and outcomes before they need to know it and give them plenty of time to think things through before they respond, even better. What I’ve said for years about custom-fit communications is that it’s outcome oriented and audience specific.

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Audience Learning-by-Doing Executive Coaching Execution 246

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 11, 2022

How do the current and upcoming individual initiatives hang together in a coherent plan? What’s the longer game? What are the competitive and other influential forces you see in the market? If you start the sentence, “We’re doing this, so that…”, what comes after the “so that”? What do you know that your team probably doesn’t know?

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Team How To Trends Definition 309

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 31, 2023

Periodically, as I just did on an annual personal and business planning retreat, I pull them out and review them and look for the patterns. Keep the Receipts : One practice that I’ve found very valuable over the years is to take notes, create worksheets, and journal observations and then keep them.

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How To Analysis Trends Reference 254

Next Level Blog

JUNE 18, 2018

Communicate the plan: When you sequence the work, you end up with a plan to do the work. When you have the plan, communicate it. Communicate it to your team so they understand what everyone is trying to do, by when and how they all contribute to the plan. Reduce ambiguity by communicating and confirming the plan.

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Middle Management Audience Micromanagement Planning 161

Next Level Blog

AUGUST 25, 2020

They wake up every day with a plan. They adapt their plan to a virtual world. What problems are they trying to solve and how can I help them solve their problems? These are the kinds of questions the best virtual sales leaders ask themselves. The virtually excellent ones view that found time as a gift.

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Early Adopters Competitive Advantage Hotels Learning-by-Doing 243

Next Level Blog

JANUARY 11, 2022

In the words of the great philosopher, Mike Tyson, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit in the jaw.” Let Go to Pick Up : Those great mojo plans you have for 2020 likely include picking up some healthy and productive new routines or reinstituting old ones that have helped in years past. Here’s what I’m doing to maintain my mojo.

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How To Follow-up Goal Stress 245

Next Level Blog

JANUARY 3, 2019

And, by writing this, I am following through on one of the habits I set out for myself in my annual planning period between Thanksgiving and the end of the year. So, to make sure I read more books this year, I’ve set up a reading list ( you can see it here ) and a plan. The problem is I haven’t had a plan to really learn how to play.

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Class Follow-up Learning-by-Doing Metrics 118

Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 22, 2014

As the year winds down and the holiday season is upon us, it’s a great time to reflect on 2014 and plan for 2015. (I Tune in next Monday for the planning part.) I wrote a post last week on the reflecting part.

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Planning Books 181

Next Level Blog

JANUARY 3, 2023

Morning review – If you use a Life GPS® or some other personal planning framework to organize your life, review it a few mornings each week and just ask yourself, “How am I doing?” Some nights I choose the meal and the wine, but more and more I choose the moderation that enables a better tomorrow.

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Review Follow-up Definition Energy 348

Next Level Blog

MARCH 9, 2021

But before we all go completely bananas and rush back to our former lives, this feels like a good moment to do a little self-assessment and forward planning as we approach reentry. You may not have thought about it this way, but for the last year many of us have been on a version of what nutritionists call an elimination diet.

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Travel Energy Workshop Sports 246

Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 4, 2019

First, start your workday with 15 to 30 minutes of planning time to flag the two or three things that you absolutely need to get done that day based on your bigger picture priorities. That gives you time to plan, catch-up, think, read and reflect. As a result, productivity, quality of outcomes and health and well-being all suffer.

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Management How To Crisis Engineering 143

Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 18, 2013

The good news is that you may be planning on taking some extended time off during the holiday season. The bad news is you may also be planning to spend some of those precious hours writing up annual performance reviews for the people that report to you.

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Performance Review Review Tips Report 208

Next Level Blog

APRIL 7, 2020

Facilitation can look like something as urgent as bringing the right people together to develop a unified plan to allocate, distribute and share scarce resources during the crisis.

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Crisis Bottom-up Short-term Benchmarking 139

Next Level Blog

MAY 11, 2021

After that, you get more tactical by walking through the Plan that will create the picture that fulfills the purpose. And, finally, and most importantly for the purpose of helping people feel connected and essential, is their Part to Play in the plan that creates the picture that fulfills the purpose. I’d start with Why?

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How To Participative Content Creativity 130

Next Level Blog

JULY 13, 2021

I’ve also heard about a lot of plans to require everyone to be in the office on certain days of the week or for a minimum number of days a month regardless of what their role is or what the role requires.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

And, now, this week, after 18 months of intensive development, I’m realizing a long-held dream of casting the net of coaching leaders to their next level even wider with the release of our online self-directed coaching course, Next Level Leader: A Proven Plan to Increase Your Influence and Impact.

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