In Monday’s Leadership Caffeine post, I strongly encouraged senior managers to accelerate the pace of their leadership development activities for their high potentials. Today, it’s your turn. Quit waiting for the boss to bestow the mantle of leadership responsibility on you. Here are 5 ideas to help you gain leadership experience before the title:
In my experience, many senior managers move too slowly to expose their developing leaders to new and more challenging situations. This is a mistake that artificially inhibits professional growth and potentially risks losing the interest of your best and brightest emerging leaders. Here are 5 ideas to help you move opportunities along at a faster pace, and a polite reminder that nothing is free. You’re on the hook for coaching every step of the way.
The team or project leader’s responsibility is not to find a way to squash the variance in personalities, but rather to foster the right environment for people who are different to come together and perform. Here are four key mistakes to avoid as you seek to align your collection of challenging personalities around your project and pursue great performance.
Leading is lonely work. The higher you climb on the ladder, the tougher and lonelier the decisions become. Get used to it. No one ever signed on as a senior leader because of the potential for camaraderie.
Ideas in the workplace that are voiced but never vetted or pursued are the corporate equivalent of those brilliant insights we have in the middle of the night that we don’t bother to write down. “I’ll remember it in the morning,” we think at the time. We rarely do. Here are 7 ideas to help you jumpstart your firm’s “ideas to Actions” machine:
The essence of good leadership includes not only bringing great talent to the party, but also creating an environment that encourages people to come together around a clear and compelling purpose. How hard are you working at moving beyond the targets and numbers to help your team discover and focus on its’ unifying purpose?
One of the oddities of organizational life is the fairly frequent and sudden promotion of individuals from competent individual contributor to someone responsible for the work of others…supervisor or manager, without any visible sign of mentoring or support for the newly in-charge individual. “Congratulations…go get ‘em Tiger.” Here are 6 ideas to help you survive this challenging new assignment:
In preparation for an upcoming presentation, I’ve become a bit obsessed with studying the 1910 expeditions and race between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott to 90-degrees South (the South Pole). The lessons for leaders and managers practically leap off the pages of this classic example of coping with risk, uncertainty and volatility. Here are 5 lessons from these remarkable expeditions that you can apply in your work-life today:
Intuitively, one would expect most senior managers to recognize both the delicate state of people’s emotions in this uncertain era and to take some steps to both confront and mitigate this destructive force in the workplace. Based on the survey results, perhaps more than a few managers missed the memo. Here’s your reminder.
I doubt that anyone reading this would disagree with the theme of, it’s important to be a good listener to be a good leader. However, in working with leaders at all levels striving to strengthen their performance, listening skills aren’t an issue some of the time, they are an issue nearly 100% of the time. Here are 3 ideas to help you exercise your leadership listening skills today:
