Quick tips to energize your daily leadership activities.
It takes courage, self-confidence, and a high degree of risk tolerance to challenge conventional wisdom in environments fueled by the relentless pursuit of perfecting the status quo. Here are three behaviors of individuals who think and act differently and succeed:
Here’s a simple checklist process I use (and recommend to my clients) to help ensure they avoid the all activity/no vector trap.
If you're an executive or top manager staring at a new group you've been assigned to lead and concluding you've got a lineup that looks destined for last place, it's time to take action. Of course, most of those actions involve the person staring back at you in the mirror. Here's a process that will help:
Unless you're in a start-up or small business, it's impossible to have everyone in the firm physically "in-the-room" for strategy sessions. However, using a strategy-as-a-continuous-process approach, it is possible and desirable to involve everyone in the work of strategy from ideation to execution. But first, you've got to re-plumb the trickle-down strategy process approach to something significantly more inclusive.
While there’s no one-formula-fits-all recipe for career success, there are common ingredients in the form of behaviors and skills. Here are the six base ingredients I see most often, albeit in different proportions
I’ve long believed learning to lead in the gray-zone inside organizations is a great approach for creating value, standing out, and getting ahead in your career. Here are 10 tips to help you tackle those vexing issues no one owns, by cultivating support and helping others succeed.
Develop a reputation as someone everyone can count on to tackle the big, ugly issues, and watch the doors open. Of course, it pays to have a strategy to avoid the traps while stepping up to solving or fixing the problems others actively avoid. Here are 4 approaches to help:
The work of new manager development in our organizations is mostly messy. If you're the new manager, that's a problem. Ditto for the promoting manager. Here are three questions to help new managers gain critical context for their challenging new roles:
People do their best work when they have context for their labors. Here are three discussions managers should be having with their team members to promote performance and stimulate career growth.
History is filled with examples where a decision at a moment-in-time changed the outcome. As we commemorate the courage of those who participated in the D-Day Invasion in World War II, I look at Eisenhower's decision that day and another fateful decision 80-years earlier that changed the course of a nation. Our workplace decisions aren't on the same scale, yet, the big decisions at a moment in time do change the fate of organizations. What can we learn from history here?
