A Leadership Power-Up is a positive action you take to strengthen your energy, enthusiasm, and resolve for the hard work of guiding and developing others while driving results. This new series share simple, powerful approaches for powering up your performance as a manager and leader.
In workshops and live settings, I’ve been asked numerous times about my biggest mistakes as a manager. I’ve made a fair number of them over three decades of leading and managing (and I regularly share these via my cases and articles), however, my Achilles Heel earlier...
Being the hero of your own leadership and management journey isn’t about focusing on yourself. To the contrary, it’s about focusing on those around you and striving to leave every encounter, situation, and person a bit better than how you found it. Here are 4 questions to use daily to strengthen results on your own heroic journey:
If you’re growing frustrated and fatigued with your life as a manager, you might want to take a step-back and review and strengthen the foundation for your role. Three items provide structural integrity for your managerial foundation: role clarity, values, and connectedness
All three components inter-operate to support your effectiveness and to eliminate many challenges in this difficult role. Alternatively, the absence of the three is potentially disastrous.
How confident are you that your message is getting through to others? Too often we perceive we are communicating clearly and effectively, when all anyone hears is something resembling the adults on a Charlie Brown feature. You know the noise they make: “Wah wa wa wa wah wa.” Don’t let this be you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald offered, “There are no second acts,” and mostly, this holds true for our organizations. What’s good or great one day often succumbs to market forces and disruptions. Organizational transformation on a large scale is a difficult act, yet some do succeed. In this first in a series of articles, I offer my perspective on at least 4 of the big obstacles that get in the way of success.
There are many reasons our seemingly failure-proof plans go horribly wrong. One critical step you can take to move the odds of success in the right direction is to borrow a step from Red Teaming and learn to unpack and stress test key assumptions. This article shares some ideas to help you get started with this critical step for strengthening decision-making and planning activities.
Cross-functional teams are a fact of life in our organizations. As a team or initiative leader, you are competing with a host of other priorities and initiatives for the hearts and minds of your team members. Your group’s performance depends upon you taking steps early in the team formation to ensure a healthy, effective working environment. Here are five ideas to help you jump-start your cross-functional team’s health:
In most workplaces, we operate with loosely coordinated groups and not teams in the true sense. These groups lack purpose, coaching, structure, support, and leadership, and as a result, sub-optimize. Fortunately, the ingredients and recipe for effective team development are not locked away somewhere in a vault. Mostly, they are basic blocking and tackling.
Communication challenges are a fact of workplace life, however, establishing clear communication values can simplify and improve a team’s effectiveness and efficiency with this mission critical behavior.
