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What Gets in the Way of Listening

Harvard Business Review

Take, for example, our client, Janet, a successful principal in a management consulting firm. She recently received 360-degree feedback from colleagues that she needed to improve her listening skills. As a management consultant, she described her role as, “providing efficient solutions to clients.”

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Three Myths About Your Strengths

Harvard Business Review

As far back as 1967, in his classic book, The Effective Executive, management guru Peter Drucker wrote: "The effective executive makes strengths productive. As the father of much of modern management theory and practice, he was simply describing the best management practices versus those he thought made no sense.

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How Women Can Show Passion at Work Without Seeming “Emotional”

Harvard Business Review

That’s what we’ve found in our review of more than 1,000 360-degree feedback reports on female executives. If some colleagues, male or female, don’t respond to passionate appeals, they may respond more favorably to a different tactic. That’s not to say that women are in the wrong.

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How to Boost Your (and Others’) Emotional Intelligence

Harvard Business Review

Among the various core ingredients of talent and career success, few personal qualities have received more attention in the past decade than emotional intelligence (EQ), the ability to identify and manage your own and others’ emotions. Sometimes it can feel like you’re working on an island managed by six-year-olds.

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How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders

Harvard Business Review

Using 360-degree feedback data over a 12- to 18-month period, we were able to track what, exactly, the leaders who'd made the most significant progress were doing. Getting leaders to stop and look at the bigger picture can help them see potential problems sooner and focus more on strategic and less on tactical issues.

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The 2010 Execution Round-Up: Six Companies That Couldn't 'Get It.

Strategy Driven

It appears Nokia was not able to coordinate decisions and activities across departments or levels of management. Many innovative ideas became the victims of in-fighting among managers who had competing objectives. The BRIDGE that held for Gap Closers #1 and 2 : The Ability to Manage Change. When one million bottles of St.

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How to Stop People Who Bog Things Down with Bureaucracy

Harvard Business Review

Energy vampires are often smart, well-intentioned managers who inadvertently slow the company down with too many questions, too much analysis, too much process—and not enough action. One tactic: Make sure the next 10 hero stories you tell are about doers, about the front line, about those who execute.