While an incredible number of people move every year, and everyone knows what a miserable project it is, there are a surprising number of leadership lessons in these situations. Here are a few I gleaned from our recent move efforts.
People resist anything that threatens their autonomy and safety. Quit leading with what you need and start focusing on what’s important to them, and you’ll watch resistance melt.
Here are at least five ways a major organization misfired with the search for talent. Are your firm’s screening practices getting in the way of survival and success?
Creativity—the ability to look at complicated situations and identify novel solutions that solve problems, advance initiatives, or rewrite old rules—may be the most critical skill of all in our workplaces. As leaders, we need to foster it, stimulate it, and do everything we can to ensure we’re not the ones suppressing it. Sadly, creativity is something that many leaders trample all over in their daily activities.
Any event that brings people together and doesn’t tap into the knowledge and ideas of the participants is an event that misses the mark. It’s time for something different! Introducing the Leadership Caffeine Jam Sessions!
While we live and work in interesting times where traditional elongated planning processes no longer fit, leaders still have the responsibility to define a coherent strategy. Choosing the right tools for strategy work in today’s environment is critical for a successful process.
During the past few weeks, I ran three different cohort sections of my live-online Manager Development Program. While initially geared toward new(er) managers, we had many veterans in the groups, all working on sharpening their skills around the fundamentals of leading and managing. As always, the wisdom of the crowd adds value to the pre-planned content.
Effective decision-making demands discipline and process. A good starting point is asking yourself and your team some key questions.
It’s easy to swallow the dogma that has emerged around the “Cult of Speed” in our management thinking and teaching. Yet, the pursuit of speed in poorly designed systems exposes weaknesses and often precipitates project, strategy, and even organizational failure. Said simply, raw speed kills. Sometimes you have to tap the brakes and slow down to ultimately move faster.
It’s an understatement to suggest this is a time for creative problem-solving in our organizations. Yet, too often, we react to symptoms or throw solutions at poorly defined problems. The failure to get to the root cause and underlying assumptions behind something that seems to be a problem results in half-measures and new, resultant problems. Here’s a technique to stop the madness!
