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It’s easy to start believing the praise you hear in the hallways about your leadership approach. Easy and dangerous. I’ve always been leery of the unfounded and saccharine-sweet praise that is bestowed upon leaders. While you may call me cynical, I prefer to think of myself as pragmatic. Here are five ideas for appropriately responding to positive praise:
Like good health, you cannot have too much credibility as a leader. You build credibility as a leader one interaction and one decision at a time over a long period of time. Here are 15 suggestions to help build your leadership credibility.
’ve made a number of mistakes over the course of my leadership career that make my head spin and my stomach turn just thinking about them. No life or death or business impacting mistakes, but, definitely some people and team impacting issues that created ill will and most definitely didn’t show me off at my leadership best. Learning from those mistakes helped me evolve my thinking on the role of a leader and on my true priorities in supporting my business, my peers and my team members.
The short, important and seemingly harmless word, "I," is a potentially lethal weapon of morale and credibility destruction when used for evil or ego instead of for good. It’s so powerful in fact, that I envision a future world where leaders wear the equivalent of a dosimeter badge to warn leader and followers when the use of "I" is in danger of creating a toxic event…most likely a spillover of b.s. into the workplace.
Spend enough time writing, speaking and thinking about management and performance, and you’re likely to find yourself looking for lessons in all of your dealings. This certainly held true for me this past weekend, as I engaged in the annual fall ritual of cleaning up the leaves at the northwoods home. While the management guidance here might not make the next issue of HBR, if you ever face several hilly acres of ankle deep leaves, this might just save your back from breaking and your relationships from crumbling!
I’ve not met a person yet that doesn’t need help from time to time, and this goes double for anyone in a leadership role. Leadership is frequently lonely and those that take their role seriously truly fret over decisions surrounded by ambiguity. The pressure to “figure it out” is tremendous, partially imposed by our fast moving and politically charged working environments, and partially imposed by our own misguided sense that to show that we need help is to show weakness. Here are seven ideas for properly and professionally asking for help.
Take a few minutes to think about the best leaders that you’ve ever worked for. What terms best describe them? Chances are the word “consistent” didn’t show up in the top five. Perhaps it should. Consistency may just be the very unsexy and uninspiring element to your leadership style that will help you grow your credibility and allow you to create and sustain a working atmosphere that allows your team members to prosper.
Power and influence are topics in the workplace that everyone recognizes but that few talk about. I suspect that after reading Jeffrey Pfeffer's newest book, Power (available 9/14), this will change. I connected with Jeffrey recently to hear more about his perspectives on this career-critical topic, and came away with some great and practical insights and even a health tip! Enjoy the conversation!
You’re good, but do you have it in you to be great? I work with a lot of good professionals. These are smart people, all technically adept at their jobs and committed to working hard for their organizations. Only a few of these good individuals push themselves to become great.
I’ve written on the topic of Strategy Fueled Leadership several times, and fresh off of a great podcast interview with Gary Harpst, author of Six Disciplines Execution Revolution (stay tuned for my posting) and my recent interview with Jocelyn Davis for Strategic Speed, I am on my soapbox again. It is critical to link leadership with strategy and vice-versa and the failure to do this is one of the root causes of strategy and execution failure in organizations.
