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Difficult decisions and challenging conversations are inextricably linked. You don't get to the big decisions on strategy, structure, or talent without some tough discussions. Yet often, we as leaders fail to model the right behaviors. Here are eight ideas to help you and your team strengthen discussion and decision-making processes.
Every week, I provide a few simple (but not simplistic) ideas for you to Do/Experiment/Explore in support of your professional development. This week's focus on achieving better alignment with your manager, improving the effectiveness of brainstorming and improving your effectiveness in leading group discussions. Use them in good health and great professional development!
The Leadership Caffeine series is 200 installments strong and is dedicated to every aspiring or experienced leader seeking ideas, insights or just a jolt of energy to keep pushing forward. Thanks for being along for the journey! -- We all know that leading and succeeding with change of any type is hard work. As humans, [...]
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.
The best leaders I’ve worked with and for are not only good decision-makers, they are effective decision-coaches. They understand the importance of teaching their teams how how to navigate the pitfalls and complexities of decision-making in pursuit of the best results for the organization. Here are 6 great habits of effective Decision-Making Coaches:
Having fulfilled my lifetime quota of attendance at poorly run meetings, I’ve developed a bit of a crusade mentality to guide others on how to run these sessions effectively. Here are my latest top 11 ideas for taming the meeting beast and actually getting something out of these infernal sessions. Please add to the list and we'll all save some time and aggravation!
Meetings are interesting beasts to deal with as a new leader. Some (OK, very few) are incredibly productive and many (most) are gigantic and misdirected time sinks. Here are 15 ideas to help you develop some effective meeting habits:
The medical community and drug companies have their ED malady and cure, but too many management and project teams suffer from their own form of ED…with two more D’s…EDDD… Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder. It’s not that people aren’t talking. There’s no deficit of hot air swirling around most meeting rooms. The issue is all about the quality of the dialogue. Here are 5 ideas for you to use immediately in pursuit of stomping out Effective Dialogue Deficit Disorder:
Getting to a good decision on big issues is challenging. Navigating the discussions leading up to a decision however, often resembles something on the difficulty of slogging through the Amazonian jungles in search of a mythical lost city made of gold. If you survive the process, you are bound to come out a very different person. It doesn’t have to be so hard.
There are few situations more challenging to teams than dealing with a tough, emotionally-charged issue and decision-choice while facing significant time pressure and seemingly contradictory data. If that type of situation sounds uncommon or unrealistic, consider that many firms and management teams make critical priority calls and strategic choices under just such circumstances. The decision to launch Challenger was a prime example, with all three factors playing a huge role in this tragic call. Countless corporate strategic misfires owe their outcome to this triple-threat of data, time and emotion. While many situations don’t involve life-safety issues, this triple-threat is something that every manager should be critically sensitive to in their group and strategic decision-making.
