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Five Concrete Actions Every Leader Should Take

Posted by on June 13, 2018

I spend my life in the world of leadership development. I am constantly reading and listening to all of the current best practices on how to lead yourself and your teams more effectively. The hard fact though is that knowledge is not growth. Unless what we are learning can be applied, it will all be soon forgotten. The priority of this post by Ken Gosnell is on execution:

“Leadership is about action. Real leaders are not afraid to take risks, make decisions and create ideas. In fact, the effective leader takes action every day to ensure the future success of an organization or a company. As Pablo Picasso is credited with saying, “Action is the foundational key to all success.”

Categories: Career Development Leadership Development | Comments Off on Five Concrete Actions Every Leader Should Take

10 Effective Ways To Help Manage Stress

Posted by on June 11, 2018

We all live with the reality of stress, it has become a part of the culture we live and work in everyday. What we don’t have to do is experience chronic toxic stress that drains all of the margin out of every area of our lives. To learn to live with the normal stress while eliminating the unnecessary is a key issue for every leader and this Forbes Coaches Council post is helpful:

“Little things you do while away from work can reduce stress and have a significant impact on how you do your job. Even better, many of them can be easily incorporated into your day, some of them even before you have breakfast.

So what works? Below, 10 members of Forbes Coaches Council share their best tips to help you keep your stress levels in check, in order to help you and your business grow and thrive. Here is what they recommend:”

Categories: Leadership Development Margin Personal Leadership | Comments Off on 10 Effective Ways To Help Manage Stress

5 Common Complaints About Meetings And What To Do About Them

Posted by on June 8, 2018

Meetings can be the most expensive waste of time within your organization. On the other hand, they can be the most effective strategic platform for collaboration and sustaining your competitive advantage in your market. So with those two extremes representing either potential failure or incredible potential for innovation, pay attention to Paul Axtell’s great post:

There are specific complaints that can be tackled, however. When I ask people in the workshops I lead what they most want help with, five issues consistently come up:

One or two people dominate the conversation and no one does anything about it.
My boss doesn’t lead meetings effectively.
Most of our meetings are just passing along information that could easily be sent in an email. We don’t talk about real issues.
No one is paying attention because they’re on their phones or laptops.
We keep having the same conversations because nothing gets done between meetings.

Categories: Leadership Development Meeting Effectiveness Teamwork | Comments Off on 5 Common Complaints About Meetings And What To Do About Them

The Critical Role Of Leadership Development During Organizational Change

Posted by on June 6, 2018

I am not working with any company that is not either going through significant change or actual disruption. The pressure to cut costs can be fatal, especially if it is the area of leadership development. If you don’t cast a hopeful vision for the future and develop everyone on your team the results will be disastrous. This Forbes post is comprehensive:

Most business leaders today would agree on two things: (1) organizational change is constant, and (2) leading change is one of the most difficult burdens of a leader’s command. In last week’s article I focused on the seven mindsets necessary for successful leadership development. In this article, I want to take it a step further and look at the role leadership development should play in organizational change.

Categories: Leading Change Organizational Culture Strategic Planning | Comments Off on The Critical Role Of Leadership Development During Organizational Change

The Right Way To Respond To Negative Feedback

Posted by on June 5, 2018

The major mistake I used to make in receiving feedback was to react to the negative instead of listening to what was helpful. Many times, what I was hearing was wrong and I was determined to change their mind. Now, I try to listen to what is true even if it only represents 30% of what they are saying. Feedback is your friend and this HBR post is excellent:

“Feedback, as they say, is a gift. Research bears this out, suggesting that it’s a key driver of performance and leadership effectiveness. Negative feedback in particular can be valuable because it allows us to monitor our performance and alerts us to important changes we need to make. And indeed, leaders who ask for critical feedback are seen as more effective by superiors, employees, and peers, while those who seek primarily positive feedback are rated lower in effectiveness.”

Categories: Leadership Development Pastoral Leadership | Comments Off on The Right Way To Respond To Negative Feedback

How Long Hours And Less Sleep Impact Our Character

Posted by on May 25, 2018

The quality of my daily decisions comes down many times to how much margin do I have physically, emotionally and spiritually. Its impossible to sustain good character based decisions when you are already looking for a shortcut because you have nothing left to give. This Forbes post will drive home the risk of margin-less living:

“Perpetual deadlines, challenging goals and objectives, urgent deal closures, multitasking, etc. — all have created a frenzied need to perform at super-human levels. The need to outperform by working long hours or pulling all-nighters has become a meme of professions such as finance, medicine, technology, military and shift workers.”

Categories: Core Values Margin Work Life Integration | Comments Off on How Long Hours And Less Sleep Impact Our Character

A 40 Year Debate Over Corporate Strategy

Posted by on May 23, 2018

This post by HBR was extremely challenging and helpful to me on this subject of corporate strategy. Michael Porter’s HBR article on “What Is Strategy ” has become my best practice in helping clients. The new factor in the conversation is how do you maintain a competitive advantage in a market that is almost in constant disruption. Both approaches are right but the challenge is to what degree do you value innovation as part of your strategy:

“When Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that “moats are lame” during the company’s earnings call last week, he was calling out Warren Buffett, the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, who uses “moat” to describe barriers to imitation that stave off competition. “If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long,” Musk continued.”

Categories: Strategic Planning Strategy | Comments Off on A 40 Year Debate Over Corporate Strategy

The Nine Surprising Secrets Of Elite Teams

Posted by on May 21, 2018

In my role of executive coaching I get to work with a lot of leadership teams. In my experience about 20% of the teams I see are excellent. The other 80% are average at best and many on the other extreme of being consistently marginal. I will acknowledge that some of the team members I have observed need to be terminated but the consistent factor in the top 20% is the team leader. This Forbes post is spot on:

“As a retired Navy SEAL and founder of six multimillion-dollar businesses, I view the current business landscape like a “VUCA” war zone in Syria and Afghanistan — it’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous — but fortunately for you, there are no incoming enemy rounds!”

Categories: Leadership Development Organizational Culture Teamwork | Comments Off on The Nine Surprising Secrets Of Elite Teams

Defining The Elusive Work-Life Balance

Posted by on May 18, 2018

There is this constant tension between the priorities of learning and living. The first stage of improvement is to learn something new that will help you set new goals. I have reached that point several years ago on this subject but I still find myself having a very hard time consistently living out the practices. This post by Karl Sun was very specific on how to live it out:

“For me personally, I can try to silo work and life all I want, but in order to really build something meaningful, compartmentalizing is borderline impossible. But I recognize everyone doesn’t think or even work like I do. So, what’s important is individually figuring out the best way for work life and personal life to work together.”

Categories: Church Scattered Margin Work Life Integration | Comments Off on Defining The Elusive Work-Life Balance

4 Questions To Ask Yourself When You Are Stuck

Posted by on May 16, 2018

I used to think of being stuck as these major times in my life where big decisions needed to be made and I could not find the answer. Now I see it as almost a daily event because I have to decide what is next in the midst of seemingly endless new inputs. It does require you to clearly know what the big rocks are for your life so you can say No to everything else. Great post by Jeff Boss:

“The good news is when you’re in a state of chaos (which I define as an unpredicted or unwanted change that impacts our physical, mental, emotional or spiritual well being) the only next step is to move toward clarity.”

Categories: Personal Leadership | Comments Off on 4 Questions To Ask Yourself When You Are Stuck