Success with the work of strategy demands hard work and the irreplaceable ingredient of leadership courage. It is this courage that allows management teams and organizations to ask and answer the hard questions critical for survival and renewal.
One of the most effective leaders I've worked for used his natural curiosity to infect us all with a sense of wonder, exploration and experimentation. Yet our practices in organizations today often stifle or manage curiosity out of the equation. Ironically, curiosity might just be that key ingredient required for survival and success in our era of change.
For any leader or management team struggling to navigate strategy, there are two tools I find incredibly useful in helping groups navigate complexity. They share a common trait in challenging strategy groups to focus their energy on cultivating a clear picture of a firm's reality and then defining a way forward, before defining actions. Too many teams jump to the actions and skip the heavy lifting and deep thinking. These tools keep you honest when it comes to strategy.
“Research suggests that the human mind has a propensity to pay greater attention to and process the bad compared to the good, a phenomenon often called the negativity bias. Bad feedback has greater impact; bad impressions are quicker to form; bad information is processed more thoroughly...and negative stereotypes are easier to form.” From Dr. Amit [...]
Your promotion to front-line manager places some distance between you and your team members, however, it also offers you an entirely new peer group: other front-line managers. This article offers six ideas for you to jump-start your networking activities with your new peers.
Building high performance teams is a critical part of a leader's job. However, when you build the team without clarity and commitment for the mission, watch out for these 5 painful leadership lessons:
Why is it some people fail to talk about anything but themselves? Resist the temptation to regale others with your "I" monolog, and instead, focus on creating healthy dialog. If it doesn't work, move on before your ears metaphorically melt.
My recent interview with a CIO from a major publicly traded firm reminds us all that some of our biggest adversaries in our push to survive in this tumultuous world are the caretaker managers inside our organizations.
Look around you, and you’ll see that your front-line managers are accountable for the lion’s share of people managing in your organization. Whether you call them supervisor or manager, these individuals are responsible for the teams delivering customer support, technical services, operations, sales, and many other functions across the enterprise. These roles are also training [...]
Observing someone who is highly competent at their work is inspiring. As leaders, we must invest more to find, support, and develop these high performers.
