You heard it here first. It’s OK to Have Some Fun as a Leader. Most of the popular press on leading and leadership focuses on the challenges, strain and pains of leading, leaving one to assume that signing on for the role is akin to a vow of chastity or at least a vow of silence. Here are 5 ideas for safely infusing more fun into your workplace. The increase in performance might just surprise you.
This has been a productive period for my development of new programs and information offerings. While we all write and talk about the impact of great people on our organizations, it is truly palpable when you are on the receiving end of that help. Thanks to two outstanding young professionals, Eric and Amber, that are busy helping and holding me accountable to getting my work done, we’re adding new programs, tuning up prior offerings and extending our line-up of information products.
’s easy to get caught up in departmental or team squabbles inside of organizations. My advice: stay clear, stay out of it and learn to think and act for yourself.
Jeffrey Pfeffer’s article, Power Play, in the July-August Harvard Business Review (fee) is interesting and relevant for everyone working inside organizations as well as for those individuals actively engaged in the development of leadership literature and course-work. Pfeffer tackles the important topic of power. How to gain it, how to wield it, and in his opinion, why those that actively cultivate power are more effective at driving change and implementing a new strategy. He also suggests that the leadership literature is soft-selling or ignoring this very real and important part of organizational life.
A great friend and talented product manager once offered in a moment of frustration that he viewed his principal job as one of “managing reduced expectations.” This brilliant, but depressing turn of words reflected bigger business problems, including a logjam in development that effectively precluded us from doing anything to enhance the competitiveness of our products in a timeframe shorter than something that you might find on a geologic time-scale. The “managing reduced expectations” seems to be a theme inherent in our society right now, and it is a dangerous mind-set.
Chances are, we've all read about and heard from mid-career managers complaining about the younger generation entering the workforce. The “don’t want to pay their dues,” and “you can’t pry them away from their PDAs,” and “poor work ethic” laments are in my opinion, lame copouts by managers stuck in their own inflexible ways. There’s good and bad in every generation, it’s just that this one feels different, because it is.
There are a million opportunities for us to shortchange conversations in pursuit of the urgent important. It takes discipline and the recognition that your attention as a leader is one of the best ways that you have for conveying your respect for individuals and teams.
Critical and challenging communication situations demand crystal clarity. The discipline of message mapping is a powerful, simple-to-learn approach to helping you and your teams achieve clarity and consistency with your most difficult and strategic communication situations.
The major “people mistakes” of my career have occurred as a result of investing too much time and effort in trying to change people. As leaders, we can enable change. We can help people that want to change. But trying to change people on our own is ultimately a fool’s errand.
In my not inconsiderable experience, too many people in business are in search of the proverbial Silver Bullet. Unfortunately, there are no true silver bullets.
