The book, “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win,” is one of the latest additions to the growing number of books from the ranks of the warrior heroes known as Navy SEALs. This one is a keeper, with powerful lessons drawn from life or death experiences. While our workplace challenges are mild by comparison, the leadership lessons are a perfect fit for anyone accountable for the results of others.
A brief look at the week just past and a recap of my leadership and management writings from around the web.
It’s impossible to lead effectively if you don’t have an open line of communication with your team members. Here are six ideas to help your team members open up to you:
A bit of commentary on the month that was January, 2016 and a recap of my leadership and management writing around the web. Enjoy and have a great weekend!
We tend to reserve our thinking, writing and talking about leadership for the hierarchical relationships. However, peer groups represent great, untapped sources of problem-solving and improvement. There’s ample opportunity for you to assert as a leader of this group, if you take the right approach. Here are 7 steps to asserting as a leader of your peers without being perceived as a jerk…
From about the six-month mark out of college and for all but eighteen months of the next twenty-two years, I supervised, managed and cultivated my leadership skills in a variety of different technology and software firms. While I loved and still do love the challenge and responsibility for guiding and developing others, the work (including the actual running of the business) was and is demanding and draining. I learned over time that I could only be at my best for others if I took care of my own refueling needs first. Here are 9 ideas to help re-energize your leadership spirit:
Most senior leaders lack any form of an honest, effective and timely feedback loop, and when they succumb to the pressures of the role and begin to flail, things can go bad in a hurry. You should be on the lookout for these five warning signs suggesting that it’s time to hit the pause button before you suffer a leadership meltdown.
Too many firms act as their own worst enemies by sustaining rules and processes that no longer apply and that block the freedom and flexibility of employees and teams to experiment and innovate. Effective leaders and managers work daily to change or eliminate these blockers. Here’s a dose of encouragement and some ideas for you to spark a healthy revolution of change in support of your team:
If you’ve ever worked incredibly hard only to have something run off the rails or just not generate the results you were after, you understand what an imbalance in the Efforts-to-Results ratio feels like. Here are some thoughts on aligning this equation in your favor:
There’s a lot of happy talk in books, on blogs and in articles about leaders and leading. Much of the writing and commentary on leadership and leading reads like a Made-for-TV script with much of the gory and dirty content left out and the outcome predictable—the good guys always win. It’s disconnected from reality. What’s needed is a revolution in how we as consumers of leadership evaluate and select our leaders.
