Teaching others to employ effective decision-making processes is one of the most important and often ignored responsibilities of those in leadership roles. Unfortunately, training your team to look to you for the calls on how to fix problems and move forward is much easier than teaching your team members to stand on their own for most issues.
Every high performance team I’ve experienced as a participant, a sponsor or an outside advisor, was governed by an overarching set of principles or values that formed and framed the culture. And while good words alone don’t create success, the combination of the leaders and participants living and acting according to those words everyday made things work.
Just say “No” to the post-work invite from the team for the beer. While you’ll feel torn because you enjoy social time as much as the next person, pay attention to that little voice in your mind trying to get your attention with, “You shouldn’t, you’re the boss.” No moralizing here. I’ve simply known too many who shut this voice out and paid with their credibility and on a few occasions, their jobs. Not convinced? Here are 6 reasons why I believe you should pass on the post-work happy hour invite:
As a lifelong team participant and now devotee of leveraging the power of teams, I was fascinated and excited to see the article, “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” in the April, 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review. I suspect we are all for adding some science to the stick, squishy and often problematic issue of how to get people to not only play nice together in the sandbox, but how to do so at a sustained high-level of performance. Here are a few thoughts and “blink reactions” to this interesting article and study:
A few years ago, I wrote a post entitled, “At Least 20 Things to Stop Doing as a Leader” Reader comments quickly quadrupled that number. It seems there’s no shortage of Bad Boss habits. Here’s a few more “fresh” suggestions provided by clients for publication purposes since I wrote the original post. (Note to readers, this and the predecessor post with comments are ideal for printing and quietly leaving behind on the boss’s chair.)
Few events do more to suck the life and energy out of a team than the boss’s weekly status meeting. If you are the boss, it’s time to exorcise these from your operating routine.
It’s easy for those of us who count our career in decades to discount how well attuned our youngest workers are to what defines good leadership and good business practices. To do so, is a mistake. Here are 7 reasons why you should work harder to leverage the potential of your youngest workers:
Newsflash: all good leaders make mistakes. A great number of them. Everyday. After all, there are people involved, and this would be really easy without the people. Fortunately, people are all that we have. The true test of your leadership character isn’t measured by the number of mistakes you make, but rather, by what you do moving forward once a mistake is recognized. Here are 8 ideas for effectively learning from and navigating your leadership mistakes:
Sometimes the best leadership guidance comes in short, strong bursts flavored with a few blunt reminders. Warning: consume too many of these at one time and your team members will thank you, productivity will go up and work might become a lot more enjoyable. Here are 12 shots of Leadership Espresso to help you get it right:
I’ve been mildly surprised that the book, Beyond Performance-How Great Organizations Build Competitive Advantage by Scott Keller and Colin Price, hasn’t commanded more attention in mainstream business circles. Perhaps we’ve grown numb to the almost endless number of books purporting to show us the way to sustained success. However, don’t let the existence of 25,000 or so books published on managing change during the past two decades, blind you to some of the important and data-backed conclusions of Beyond Performance. Here are some reasons why this may be one of the more important books you will read this decade:
