For most of us, the answer to the question, “Are you pushing yourself hard enough?” is “No.” If we’re honest with ourselves, there are parts of our lives, including our careers, our relationships and our own personal development, where we are leaving progress, achievement and satisfaction on the table.
If as Woody Allen indicated, “80-percent of success is just showing up,” the gross majority of the rest of success must be attributable to adopting the right attitude. I’ll leave a little wiggle room in there for the propensity to act and our good friend, luck. Here are six ideas to help you prepare your positive attitude daily.
The modern-day practice of alchemy is only metaphorically about the search for a method to turn lead into gold. Instead of the medieval pursuit by alchemists of a magical chemical conversion process to change one element into another, modern practitioners are focused on the magical and easy transformation of people and organizations from one level of performance to another. Here are 12 questions to help you keep the alchemists in check.
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.
The art and science of management is much about coping with risk. There are few certain outcomes in business, and that’s particularly true when we factor in the reality that people are darned complex and don’t always act rationally. More often than not, I see managers and leaders looking at their world through the eyes of “what can go wrong?” and basing their decisions solely on attempting to minimize those identified adverse outcomes. Here are 5 ideas that leaders can use to help experimentation flourish on their teams.
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.
There’s an awful bad case of the “serious” malady running through our society right now, and for just a moment, we all deserve to unclench our jaws, breathe and even form that rare but powerful facial expression, the smile. Consider this my attempt (albeit a weak one, I’m certain) to take a little of the seriousness out of your day while offering ideas that might just have something to them. Or, they might not, but, I’ll leave that for you to judge.
