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I’m striking a blow this week against Boss-Blame…that world class sport that so many engage in as part of rationalizing why their own results might just be falling short of something resembling excellence. It's time to engender a new sense of personal and professional accountability in the workplace.
Sometimes we learn lessons in interesting ways. I learned the power of "keeping things simple" in an amusing but instructive manner from an early mentor at Panasonic. For leaders looking to manage complexity during these difficult times, I offer my own Six Power Tools for keeping things simple and driving high performance.
Your weekly dose of Leadership Caffeine offers reminders and tips for improving communications, engaging your team members and helping knock down obstacles. Oh, and take a second sip of the iced coffee and spend a few minutes thinking about how you might leverage your firm's values as powerful leadership tools.
Welcome back for this week’s double-shot of leadership motivation. I’m taking my leadership cues this week from Michael Beers, a Harvard Professor with a forthcoming book: High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage. While I’m not certain that a Harvard Professor is the first one that I seek out to help me lead my way out of a crisis, I like what he has to say. Mr. Beer’s focus is on building high performance teams and organizations on the back of what he describes as high commitment leaders.
Intuitively, it makes sense that leaders that are more engaged and engaging tend to elicit better responses and better results from their teams. Perhaps nice people can finish first. Now, the father of the concept of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman (What Makes A Leader), along with Richard Boyatiz are pushing the envelope by integrating new research in social neuroscience with their studies of effective leaders. Their recent Harvard Business Review article, Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership, is fascinating reading for anyone intrigued by the role that our biological makeup plays in our leadership abilities.
One of the great things about leading workshops with talented professionals is how much I learn about the very real challenges that people face in trying to get work done inside their organizations. After spending a day together working with a group technical professionals at The Data Warehouse Institute's World Conference, I gained some insights into the challenges and barriers that are slowing down progress and inhibiting performance improvements inside organizations.
It’s easy to focus on the bad news. Everyone’s talking about it. We’re bombarded with news flashes and human disaster stories as the layoffs mount and the foreclosures climb. And make no doubt about it, these are tough times, but let’s start giving some coverage to the firms, leaders and entrepreneurs that have turned off the news channels and are too busy building or rebuilding to worry about the dire forecasts. For a good dose of “can do” spirit, get out of your office and go talk with some smart people working to strengthen, build or start businesses. I’m doing just that, and here's why I continue to be optimistic:
Product Managers face significant organizational challenges in their quest to expand their roles and increase their value-creating contributions to their firms. Through a recent and on-going series of interviews with senior executives as well as product managers across a variety of technology and manufacturing organizations, it is becoming clear that more and more organizations recognize the potential for product management to create tremendous value. It is also clear that enlightened executives increasingly recognize that the professionals that wok in product management roles are a ready-made source of high potential contributors and emerging leaders. Senior executives are looking for their emerging senior contributors in product management to bring more advanced skills to the party, in the areas of: Leadership, Strategic Thinking, Executive Presence and Process Optimization.
Note to RSS and e-mail subscribers: thanks to readers for pointing out that my weekly Leadership Caffeine posts were not publishing to e-mail subscribers. It appears that the name must change otherwise the system thinks that it is redundant. I will include the date in the headline from this point. I apologize for any inconvenience in republishing this post. -Art The focus this week is on strengthening team performance by improving your own leadership practices. You as leader directly control the quality of your team’s working environment. The health of this environment is a critical indicator of your leadership effectiveness. Here are three ideas to help jump-start your program to improve your team's working environment.
As someone who is passionate about leadership development, it is heartening to see articles like the one that ran recently in the Wall Street Journal, indicating, “Despite Cutbacks, Firms Invest in Developing Leaders.” Good for these businesses and the leaders. The notion that it is always time to work on identifying and grooming leaders is healthy. However, if you happen to work in one of the firms that is not as fortunate or as enlightened as the ones highlighted in the article, don’t despair. You don’t have to have a stinking budget to improve your team’s/firm’s leadership development practices. You do however, have to have your head screwed on straight about this process, and you need to be committed to executing on it as a core, everyday part of your job.
