My favorite part of working with good managers is their seeming superpower to make their difficult jobs guiding and engaging with team members and stakeholders look easy. Here are 8 key behaviors I’ve observed in these managers:
While we spend most of our time commiserating over bad managers and thinking and writing about seemingly super-human leaders, it’s most often the quiet, hard-working managers operating below the top-levels who make our organizations go and grow.
It turns out that successful, effective leadership is much more than a focus on results. Here are some valuable leadership lessons learned the hard way.
Great leaders understand a key indicator of their effectiveness is found in the answer to the question: How did I affect you?
We all know these challenging characters. They’re present in every workplace. The question is, how do you deal with them and get your job done? In my free mini-course, I share 5 videos with ideas and approaches you can put to work immediately with your versions of these challenging characters.
As leaders, we often fall victim to the belief that our teams need us to survive and thrive. In reality, if we’ve done our jobs right in selecting, developing, and placing people in the right positions, and worked hard to create a healthy environment, what they need is less of us.
The conversations I genuinely worry about are the ones that aren’t taking place. As a leader, just thinking about what’s not getting talked about should scare the daylights out of you.
The struggle over the big decisions is the inherent ambiguity. The unknowns are overwhelming. Fear of getting it wrong floods our minds and our brains struggle for traction in the muck. Nonetheless, these are the times when you have to stand up and cut through the fog of ambiguity.
The term, attitude gets a bad rap most of the time. We associate attitude with words such as bad, uncooperative, truculent, antagonistic. When was the last time you heard someone say, “That person has an attitude,” and you interpreted it as a compliment? Attitude needs a p.r. campaign.
There are no courses, books, or even alchemical formulas that replace the hard work essential for learning to lead. Here are 10 hard-won lessons for anyone in search of success as a leader:
