Next Level Blog

JANUARY 23, 2024

This is the time of the year when I spend a day with my C-suite clients to give them some space to get up on the balcony to consider what success will look like 12 months from now and what they and their teams need to focus on to make those outcomes more likely. How do you want to leverage and enable your leadership team this year?

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Retail Audience Learning-by-Doing Follow-up 278

Next Level Blog

MARCH 22, 2023

This question is about identifying the important facts about the team member’s performance and organizing the facts in a way that provides insight into what they accomplished or didn’t and how they did what they did or didn’t do. At its simplest, this question is about what you want your team member to keep, start or stop doing.

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Management How To Performance Review Stress 294

Next Level Blog

APRIL 12, 2022

It could be about getting a team back on track, putting a key initiative back on the rails or reviving a business or line of business that has lost its momentum. Fourteen months later, he and his leadership team have done just that. Seth brought all of himself to his team and to the work.

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How To Participative Team Travel 257

Next Level Blog

JULY 11, 2023

In the short run, you scale yourself by developing a team of traffic controllers who keep things moving in their own intersections. And, then, to scale the approach even further, you work with your team of traffic controllers so they, too, become traffic enablers. Your job becomes monitoring the overall flow of traffic.

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Executive Coaching Metrics Learning-by-Doing Team 142

Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

More often than not, my most successful clients have tapped into the transformative power of systematizing simple things. In his closing 360-degree survey at the end of the six-month program, Joe showed a 73 percent rate of improvement on giving his team space and a 90 percent rate of improvement on communicating his team’s results.

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Power Influence Executive Coaching Report 167

Next Level Blog

JUNE 28, 2022

High achieving, ambitious leaders want to blow right past the strengths that have enabled their success and dive right into what they need to “fix.”. He was able to take the strengths of collaboration and creating an open environment that he exhibited with his customer and deploy them with his team. Big mistake.

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Next Level Blog

JANUARY 18, 2022

What I mean by that is pulling the thread of the story about why you and your team are doing what you’re doing through everything you do. So, how do you pull the thread through to keep your team energized and engaged? The same idea applies to leading the work of your team. You have to pull the thread through.

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Engineering Participative Team Goal 237

Next Level Blog

JULY 12, 2022

Back in January, I wrote a post about how leaders need to pull the thread through so their teams can see how their work fits into the longer arc of the work. One of the leadership communications distinctions I’ve been thinking about a lot this year is the difference between communications that are episodic and those that are longitudinal.

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How To Execution Tactics Resources 346

Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

Showing up with confidence is so important to success and effectiveness that I wrote a whole chapter on the topic in The Next Level (Chapter 2: Pick up confidence in your presence; let go of doubt in how you contribute). It may be for you or someone on your team as well. There’s so much you don’t know that it can mess with your mojo.

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Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

Your organization’s culture is the leading indicator of whether or not your strategy is going to be successful. In this post, I want to share a short checklist of things senior leaders need to think about and do to shape and drive cultures that make strategies successful. Culture needs constant attention.

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Next Level Blog

AUGUST 25, 2020

Many of the sales leaders I’m talking with this summer are working on how to help their teams raise their games in the virtual world we’re living in. I’ve been collecting some best practice ideas that can help you and your team reclaim competitive advantage in a virtual world. Back in June (remember that distant time two months ago?),

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Early Adopters Competitive Advantage Hotels Learning-by-Doing 243

Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Some companies have been successful in pivoting quickly, while others have found it more challenging. The successful pivoters are either reinforcing existing cultural norms or are creating new ones that make it feel safe for their leaders and people to do things differently. What’s the difference between the two groups?

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Innovation Agility How To Business Model 216

Next Level Blog

JULY 11, 2018

This post is adapted from the forthcoming third edition of my book, The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success. These sets of behaviors break down into three primary components of executive presence: personal presence, team presence and organizational presence. Leveraging your team is the next layer of the pyramid.

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Leadership Execution Operations Learning-by-Doing 181

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 26, 2021

You owe it to your team member, your organization and yourself to deliver straight-up meaty feedback that can be understood and acted upon. This is what success looks like. Here’s some of my best advice on how to avoid delivering the dreaded feedback sandwich. These are the strengths you have that you can leverage to be better.

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How To Executive Coaching Construction Resistance 246

Next Level Blog

JUNE 29, 2021

By putting themselves in their colleagues’ shoes and then shaping their communications around those insights, my ahead of the communications curve clients set themselves apart as people who reduce the collective stress level by eliminating surprises and setting others up for success.

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Audience Learning-by-Doing Executive Coaching Execution 246

Next Level Blog

JANUARY 11, 2019

If you’ve ever had to make a trip to the emergency room (hopefully not) or watched a medical drama on TV (probably so), you’ve seen a team of doctors, nurses and other team members doing triage. You and your team end up spending most of your time and attention on the urgent stuff that’s right in front of you.

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Engineering Executive Coaching Team Goal 146

Next Level Blog

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

Doing that work led, in 2006, to my book, The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success. I fondly remember Dave, who, when he realized his negative outlook was bringing his team down with him, used my process to enlist them to point out in real time to him when he needed to change his approach. Those were my people.

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 12, 2021

Sometimes it comes up with a manager who wants advice on how to answer that question from an ambitious team member. If you and your team are not delivering on your current responsibilities, you’re not going to generate the trust needed to promote you into bigger responsibilities.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 19, 2020

edition of The Next Level in 2018, I summarized a lot of what I’d learned in the 6 years since writing the 2 nd edition with three leadership imperatives: Manage Yourself Leverage Your Team Engage Your Colleagues. Your Team is where your leverage is. However you show up is completely predictive of how your team shows up.

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Next Level Blog

MARCH 6, 2019

I didn’t last long there and a year later was back in my home state of West Virginia leading a small team of researchers in the Governor’s economic development office. Doesn’t have my back : Once you’ve lost a team on this one, it’s really hard to recover the trust. She was kind, smart and made sure stuff got done.

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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. What are your best practices for sustaining your team or organization’s momentum throughout the year? What say you?

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Leadership How To Performance Review Learning-by-Doing 139

Next Level Blog

MARCH 30, 2021

Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to coach the members of a couple of different corporate senior leadership teams. The coaching approach I use for leadership teams is a lot like the one I use for individual leaders. Both she and her colleagues report that this proactive start to her week is making a positive difference.

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Management Chief Operating Officer Short-term Report 166

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 23, 2019

This is the time of year when a lot of the leaders I work with are buckling down to write up annual performance reviews for the people on their team. It’s not true, however, in terms of how you can use the annual review process to set you and your team up for success. How do you want your team member to feel at the end of it?

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Performance Review Review Process How To 149

Next Level Blog

MAY 15, 2019

Who are the different players inside and outside your organization who have a stake in the success of what you and your team are working on? Share the headlines on the progress you and your team have made since the last time you reported in. This is where you can establish some context and show off the chops of your team.

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How To Learning-by-Doing Goal Team 187

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 4, 2013

If you''re a leader in a large organization, this is especially important because your team''s success depends on how good a job you do as their Chief Marketing Officer. That''s what leadership and career expert Dan Schwabel teaches you how to do in his new book, Promote Yourself: The New Rules for Career Success.

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How To Brand Career Advice 185

Next Level Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2021

They were out visiting their teams and were absolutely thrilled to be doing so. We’ve been able to get a lot done on Zoom, Teams and WebEx the past couple of years, but there is no substitute for the connection that comes from being in the room with people. That’s going to continue to be especially true for leaders going forward.

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Travel Bottom-up Productivity Products 196

Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

Building on the new reality of distributed work, I think we’ll see an acceleration in the move towards agile, flexible work teams that cut across functions. Listen : One of the best ways to learn what others care most about is to ask them open ended questions like “What would make this year a huge success for you?”

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Influence How To Trends Learning-by-Doing 246

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 30, 2019

Some of the more common answers include things like goal setting, developing the team, coaching, performance management and setting the organizational climate. My contribution to the list is “If you’re the leader, you’re the chief marketing officer for your team.” What is your team doing that tracks with what they care about?

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Marketing How To Team Goal 146

Next Level Blog

APRIL 11, 2013

We were talking recently about what he’s learned in a long and successful career that has spanned some of the top organizations in the private and public sectors. That’s a big factor in his success. In his current company, he’s noticed that career success is all about how quickly you put points you on the board.

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Career Execution Development Company 190

Next Level Blog

JUNE 15, 2021

For instance, lately I’ve had a number of conversations with clients and colleagues about talented team members who have gotten themselves stuck in the role of superstar individual contributors when they have the desire and capacity to be enterprise-wide leaders. They own the results, but they’re not personally doing the results.

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Long-term How To Short-term Tactics 131

Next Level Blog

DECEMBER 15, 2020

For those fortunate enough to be well-led, including team members in many of my client organizations, this year has happily shown the benefits of leaders who consistently do the work of non-heroic leadership. Early on in the pandemic, Arden defined the work for her “team of 5 million” as coming together to keep each other safe.

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Long-term Collins Health Care Executive Coaching 211

Next Level Blog

SEPTEMBER 21, 2021

I know they were motivated because they showed up at 8:30 am on a Saturday morning for the Durham Success Summit’s (DSS) annual flagship event. The one we used on Saturday was to have the guys team up in groups of three and do three 10 minute rounds of coaching in 30 minutes.

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Goal How To Follow-up Learning-by-Doing 243

Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 2, 2018

He’s the leader of a team that’s running some very challenging and game changing technology initiatives for the company. He spoke rapidly and clearly about how his team approached the project, what they had overcome along the way and the impact that their work was having on the company. He was public and open in asking for help.

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Financial Leverage Learning-by-Doing Executive Coaching Conference 178

Next Level Blog

MAY 11, 2021

By connection equity, I mean that everyone on a team or an organization has equal opportunities to feel connected to and included in the work no matter what they do or where they do it. This week I want to build on that post by offering three strategies that foster what I could see us calling “connection equity.” I’d start with Why?

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How To Participative Content Creativity 130

Next Level Blog

APRIL 6, 2012

This week, I’m highlighting posts on what it takes to build strong teams, the war for talent, the myth of overnight success, how Buddhist mindfulness can make you a better business leader and one company’s approach to fighting burnout.

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Teamwork Skills Team Succession 164

Next Level Blog

JANUARY 24, 2023

How do you want them to feel while they’re there? What kinds of connections do you want to foster? What do you need to provide in terms of space, guidance, equipment, support, and your own involvement to successfully execute on your plan?

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Next Level Blog

OCTOBER 11, 2016

The way to avoid that situation is to take some time up front to develop some consistent talking points for your leadership team to use in conversations with their teams. That’s a good definition to keep in mind as you and your team develop your talking points. What will success look like after you make changes?

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Brainstorming Definition Politics Team 100