Not every day in your life as a leader is a party complete with cake and ice cream. When you encounter one of those days where everything seems to be working against you, it's time to force a smile and keep marching.
Preoccupying on the past in feedback conversations generates stress. Instead, focus on leveraging experiences and outcomes to design for improved effectiveness in the future.
Our mistakes in pursuit of learning are the burpees, extra gym time, and leg days of our mental fitness for most of us. For those where mistakes are measured in cost or time (not life impact or safety), your mistakes measure how hard you are pushing yourself to grow. Here are ideas to turn your misfires into gold.
While an incredible number of people move every year, and everyone knows what a miserable project it is, there are a surprising number of leadership lessons in these situations. Here are a few I gleaned from our recent move efforts.
The best managers are devoted students of the art of character study—not out of some desire to play armchair psychologist, but rather out of the desire to help.
There's a simple, powerful exercise you can run with your group that will transform the working environment for the better and provide you with the critical framework for coaching you've been lacking. You need to Write the Rules for Success with your group.
While many individuals deliberately keep their work personas and their personal personas separate, I checked, and each of us is one person. Yet, the faster you grow comfortable letting them see you as that whole person, the faster they’ll trust you. And yes, trust is the critical foundation for high performance.
It's always bothered me that building a healthy working environment isn't described in most managerial job descriptions. This is the most important work a manager can engage in to strengthen engagement and performance, yet working on the working environment is ignored in the daily rush for results. In this article, I offer ideas and approaches to help managers jump-start this critical work.
While I’ve not attended your business review session, I can tell you with confidence born of experience that most of these events are painful time, productivity, and morale killers. And, in this world where COVID has taught us that quarters are like centuries and the world shifts in hours and days, I increasingly find the ubiquitous quarterly business reviews anachronistic. It's time to change your team's operating approach.
What we want as leaders is deep immersion from our team members. Yet, our systems, numbers, and approaches mainly generate transactional involvement. They lack unity of purpose.
