At the beginning of my leadership workshops, one of the ice-breaking activities is to have the participants think about and jot down the characteristics and behaviors of great and lousy leaders that they’ve experienced in their careers. It’s always fun to watch the small groups attack this task with relish.
The passion that a leader brings to his or her work is the secret sauce in a winning recipe for creating an effective working environment and developing a high performance team.
Good leaders understand their role, work hard on developing credibility, listen and ask questions and provide coaching and mentoring. Great leaders do all of that and they infuse everyone around them with a sense of excitement for the adventure.
There is a fascinating article on Change Management in a recent issue (Issue 2/2009) of the McKinsey Quarterly (subscription required) by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, entitled: “The Irrational Side of Change Management.”
And while much has been written over the years on this important and vexing topic, the authors offer some insights and ideas that they describe as counter-intuitive, but potentially helpful in improving your odds of success with these initiatives. This article alone was for me worth the hefty annual subscription price.
This week’s topic focuses on the plight of the first time leader and a call to action for experienced leaders everywhere to step up and do a better job mentoring and coaching.
Whether you are a first-time leader, an experienced manager taking over a new team or an informal leader such as a project or product manager, you will be as successful as you are credible. Your credibility is your professional bedrock. Build on it carefully and constantly.
For this second installment of the business rules that my friend Paul Byrne and I derived from watching the movie the Memphis Belle (see my first installment: Management Lessons from the Memphis Belle-Rule #1), I am departing from the order in which we originally wrote the rules.
Instead, because it is a concept so fundamental to our success in anything we do, I am jumping to Rules 11, 16 and 19, all of which underscore the importance of being totally “mission aware”. Without a sense of our mission, the rest of the rules are meaningless.
This week’s boost of leadership energy comes straight from one of my early career mentors. This truly exceptional individual practiced leadership according to 5 simple handwritten rules that he kept posted on the wall in his office for everyone to see.
These rules pointed to his True North as a leader, and were the first words that he would read every morning, right after securing his first of many cups of coffee for the day. They read…
While there is no doubt that strategic planning done right is a valuable management process and tool, in my opinion, we need to change both the vernacular and the approaches to move from strategic planning to conducting strategic conversations. Frankly, I want everyone in my firm thinking, talking and relating their work activities to the firm’s strategies for creating customer value and thumping competitors.
Thanks to the great team at the Maximize Possibility blog, the April 15th Carnival includes a fantastic collection of posts from some of the leading minds in talent. Oh, and it even includes one of mine!
Every once in awhile, my second favorite publication, Harvard Business Review, serves up some fascinating content that leaves me scratching my head and wondering. In addition to some excellent content, the April, 2009 issue summarizes a couple of potentially pointless studies in the Forethought section.
One asks: “Are Great Companies Just Lucky?” and the other serves up, “Employee Happiness Isn’t Enough to Satisfy Customers.”
Both articles offer up some interesting premises and are backed by well-pedigreed professionals that seem to have conducted a fair amount of research to conclude that luck is important and employee happiness is not the silver bullet of customer satisfaction.
My reactions range from, “OK, and the point is…?” to “Huh?”
