Your presence as a coach and a stakeholder in the development of the new leader will have a significant impact on the outcome for this emerging leader. And your positive example will be visible to all to learn from and emulate.
I had just been hired on in a senior strategic marketing role in an industry new to me, and job one was acclimating to the market and industry dynamics and trying to understand what a customer looked like in this world. After the obligatory round of meetings with company executives, division heads and as many of their team members as I could convince to allocate some time, I recognized that the context, while appreciated, lacked the depth you can only gain from connecting with customers and industry players on their home turf. No rocket science here, just good common sense. Here are 5 valuable lessons I learned through the eyes and windshields of some top sales representatives.
One mis-hire can poison the workplace pond, tarnish your reputation and impact your team’s/firm’s ability to execute. Do this a few times and your mistakes will likely knock you out of the hiring game and potentially into the cozy confines of today’s crowded unemployment lines. Unfortunately, the average manager isn’t very good at assessing talent and making the right call. Here are three great hiring habits I learned from a remarkable sales manager:
From the symbolism of the annual off-site strategy event to the cost to the fact that strategic thinking time is reduced to a once or twice a year event, this approach is anachronistic in a world with markets and conditions changing daily. In twenty years of these things with some great people and great businesses, I’ve yet to see anything come out of these meetings that changed our businesses. I will offer that they did allow for another layer of vetting and idea absorption. Nonetheless, the heavy lifting took place with others outside of the cozy confines of a resort or hotel meeting room. It's time to ditch the annual strategy off-site.
All over the U.S., there’s a fresh new crop of MBA graduates leaving behind their books and case studies, and in some cases, preparing to rediscover their families after several years of their noses buried in books and their fingers glued to their keyboards. A key question on their minds is, "What's next?" Here are seven ideas for freshly minted MBA as they navigate the end of one career journey and the beginning of the next.
A good friend brought me up to speed on her career challenges recently, and after listening and empathizing with the unfortunate events that led to the recent job loss, I asked her what she had learned in the process. Her response included some good nuggets of hard-earned wisdom that we can all benefit from. Here are 5 points to consider before jumping In to that cool new job:
There’s no doubt one of the most significant challenges any service organization faces is how to sustain excellence in service delivery over long periods of time. After all, service organizations live or die based on the passion and commitment of the people providing the service. Once the passion goes, the service trends to the ordinary. Or worse.
If you have the privilege of leading others, consider what Dr. Mayo’s 3rd condition for sustaining success means to you, your team and your organization.
Getting to a good decision on big issues is challenging. Navigating the discussions leading up to a decision however, often resembles something on the difficulty of slogging through the Amazonian jungles in search of a mythical lost city made of gold. If you survive the process, you are bound to come out a very different person. It doesn’t have to be so hard.
If you’ve ever been part of a truly effective team…a high performance team, you know the experience is memorable. For those who’ve lived and thrived on a high-performance team, the memory of what it was like to work with a motivated, caring, challenging (but respectful), accomplishment-focused group of individuals provides sustenance for the lonely, near-death experiences that characterize so many other team and project experiences in the workplace.
