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Think Differently About Engaging with Your Organization’s Top Leaders

Think Differently About Engaging with Your Organization’s Top Leaders

Your assumption that they’re busy doing top-leader things and don’t want to hear from you is partially flawed. Most senior leaders I’ve worked with and around love to hear from individuals at all levels. Here are five ideas to help you think differently about engaging with your organization’s top leaders:

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Winning the Inner Game of Leading With Positive Self-Talk

Winning the Inner Game of Leading With Positive Self-Talk

Fear, self-doubt, and the tendency to catastrophize situations are your adversaries as a leader. The essence of life is overcoming challenges. Instead of allowing your negative emotions to rule you, engage in a little self-trickery and reset and reframe the negatives to positives.

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Help Aspiring Managers Explore and Experiment Before Leaping into the Role

Help Aspiring Managers Explore and Experiment Before Leaping into the Role

Moving from contributor to manager is one of the most awkward transitions a person will undertake in their working life. It’s an unnatural act, where you take almost everything you know about success in your day job and push it over into the “Never Mind” column.Instead of perpetuating the “hope” approach to identifying and developing new managers, try my favorite question, “Why manage?” three times, backed by some exploration and experimentation.

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Ignore these Five Facts of Organizational Life at Your Peril

Ignore these Five Facts of Organizational Life at Your Peril

The “I” topic for influence comes up regularly in my emerging leader coaching calls. Individuals frustrated with their assignments or feeling as if they’re being bypassed for the best opportunities mostly share one common thread: they are under-invested in striving to grow their workplace influence. Here are five unavoidable facts of life that suggest influence development must be part of your work.

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Leadership Caffeine™—Here’s Where You Should Slow Down to Move Faster

Leadership Caffeine™—Here’s Where You Should Slow Down to Move Faster

It’s easy to swallow the dogma that has emerged around the “Cult of Speed” in our management thinking and teaching. Yet, the pursuit of speed in poorly designed systems exposes weaknesses and often precipitates project, strategy, and even organizational failure. Said simply, raw speed kills. Sometimes you have to tap the brakes and slow down to ultimately move faster.

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Love the Role of Manager: Six Big Reasons

Love the Role of Manager: Six Big Reasons

There’s a reason I devote on average one-day per working week to supporting the development of new managers in my practice. It’s important. And while I spend a good deal of time highlighting the challenges of the role, there are at least six big reasons why you might love this role.

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