As you approach the annual resetting of the calendar and contemplate how you will make this year different, better, and complete, here are some thoughts on how you can rethink your approach to your goals and turn them into growth and gold.
In the best of times, leading and managing is hard work. In this era, the demands are unceasing, and it's easy for fatigue to set in and dull a leader's thinking. Here are seven ideas to help combat this sense of creeping fatigue:
Creativity—the ability to look at complicated situations and identify novel solutions that solve problems, advance initiatives, or rewrite old rules—may be the most critical skill of all in our workplaces. As leaders, we need to foster it, stimulate it, and do everything we can to ensure we're not the ones suppressing it. Sadly, creativity is something that many leaders trample all over in their daily activities.
Any event that brings people together and doesn't tap into the knowledge and ideas of the participants is an event that misses the mark. It's time for something different! Introducing the Leadership Caffeine Jam Sessions!
While many individuals deliberately keep their work personas and their personal personas separate, I checked, and each of us is one person. Yet, the faster you grow comfortable letting them see you as that whole person, the faster they’ll trust you. And yes, trust is the critical foundation for high performance.
What we want as leaders is deep immersion from our team members. Yet, our systems, numbers, and approaches mainly generate transactional involvement. They lack unity of purpose.
Developing as a leader doesn’t follow a straight line. It’s different for every individual. Focus on getting better at this job daily. Here are five ideas to help you jump-start this good work.
I'm consistently surprised by how few managers and executives have a game plan for their one-on-one sessions with team members. Just ask those team members, as too many describe these sessions with the boss as infrequent or inconsistent, ineffective, and in some cases, intolerable. Here are 7 ideas to help you increase the effectiveness of your one-on-one sessions for all parties:
OK, the topic of feedback isn't stand-up comedy funny. It's funny as in odd because there are so many contradictions surrounding it. Here are five practices to help managers bring feedback to life as the performance-enhancing tool it is capable of being:
What if we led as if lives and livelihoods depended on the outcome? There are some great lessons from the vaccine moon-shot described by Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review. It's time to put these lessons to work in all of our organizations.
