The view of the leader as symphony conductor is appealing on multiple levels. One helps create beautiful music and the other enables high performance. However, there is one big difference between the leader and conductor—the leader must compose and conduct at the same time.
The road to career success runs through a nearly endless string of challenging conversations. Learn to survive and thrive in the most difficult of communication circumstances and watch your career grow. This article offers three big ideas to help you navigate challenging conversations and come out a winner.
Organizational life is wearing on us, and for those charged with leading and guiding others, it's natural for fatigue to set in on occasion. However, if the fatigue lingers, you might find yourself facing a leadership slump. Here are four big ideas to help you navigate a leadership slump.
There's the practical dimension of leading where we focus on the grind-it-out, get-things-done-through-others heavy lifting. However, there's a higher-order opportunity with this work. The leadership opportunity is truly about the potential to create by working with the ultimate medium: the ideas and efforts of others.
Vague feedback is incredibly destructive to morale and performance. This article includes guidance to strengthen your delivery of quality feedback as well as suggestions if you are on the receiving end of vague feedback.
Difficult decisions and challenging conversations are inextricably linked. You don't get to the big decisions on strategy, structure, or talent without some tough discussions. Yet often, we as leaders fail to model the right behaviors. Here are eight ideas to help you and your team strengthen discussion and decision-making processes.
One of the root causes of communication failure in the workplace is our inability to listen effectively. We're typically distracted by our own thoughts, striving to multi-task, or, we annoyingly step all over the messages of others. However, we can improve our listening skills, and in the process, solve more problems and build performance. This article offers nine ideas to help strengthen your listening muscle.
There are few activities in our organizations more important than developing emerging leaders. A healthy, full pipeline of leadership talent is essential to sustain success and navigate a complex world. The Foundation + 4 Pillars framework helps guide managers in pursuit of this critical work.
No job is perfect, however, when you manage to align your sense of purpose with a cause that brings this purpose to life, the work can be exhilarating at times and enjoyable all of the time. If time is running at a snail's pace and there's no joy in the work, it's time to pursue a reset.
In reality, the work of strategy is some of the most challenging thinking work a firm’s members will do. And truth be told, it’s never really finished. Strategy is a process, not an event, and the work of evaluating, diagnosing, and choosing are never-ending activities.
