For too many new to the role of leading, we allow the urgent-unimportant to monopolize our time and dictate our priorities. Detailing the focus means ensuring that your eyes and efforts are locked on to the real issues in your new role. Here are 6 nefarious agenda killers of new (and experienced leaders) to avoid at all costs:
People are complicated, vexing and remarkable all at the same time, and the only way to tame these forces and harness the hearts and minds of the people around you, is to strengthen your effectiveness as a communicator. Every day. Here are 3 ideas to help you get started:
My first manager routinely asked a question that turned out to be a powerful teaching tool and a life-long reminder to pause before leaping. The question was, “Have you thought of everything?” While “thinking of everything” in a literal sense is impossible, her intent wasn’t to push us down to ground level in an endless field of details (as interpreted by my colleagues), but rather, it was to push us to think through and around a situation in as thorough manner as possible. Here are 5 situations where the questions absolutely must come first:
When it comes to sub-par performance on teams and between a supervisor and his or her department members, communication is almost always an issue, but rarely the root cause of the problem. Here are 4 ideas to help front-line leaders strengthen performance and improve communication with their teams:
Here are a few observations and annoyances from the world of management. Enjoy your week wherever your travels take you. May the airport lines run flawlessly and may you be spared the time sink of having to fight for the right to consume cell, satellite and digital services at the promotion price!
Part of the process of moving up or moving on involves a hefty amount of self-marketing, and it’s at this point where we attempt to share who we are and what we bring to the table that we often fall short. Here are 6 ideas to help you jump-start the process of creating an effective professional value proposition:
For many leaders, circumstances have an annoying habit of drawing our attention off of what we should be focusing on towards something more immediate or more novel. For anyone leading a team, this loss of focus (or loss of edge) is what I describe as “Leadership Drift.” Here are at least six ideas to help you and your team avoid the drift that can keep you from reaching your destination:
On the heels of yet another study indicating most U.S. workers are disengaged from their jobs, I recently had occasion to witness an interesting comparison and contrast in levels of employee engagement at two different organizations in the medical industry. One of those encounters provided an insight into what may just be the best measure of employee engagement.
Setting proper and challenging expectations is absolutely a part of promoting performance on your team. However, setting lofty expectations without doing the heavy lifting of forming an effective working environment is a hollow exercise in something ranging between comedy and futility. Here are 5 ideas to help you put the "Great" into your team's performance expectations:
Two job candidates walk into a coffee shop. One has a spotless record of achievement and accomplishments and a career that runs upward like a steep staircase from early career until now. His life reads like a storybook we can all smile about and wish ourselves to be so fortunate. This is a solid professional. The other candidate’s record is good, however, there are several points in time when things went wrong... . The first candidate is compelling, but the second candidate is likely my choice. Here's why.
