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Category Archive: Leadership Development

Why Emotional Courage Is So Essential To Great Leadership

Posted by on July 9, 2018

I hear all the time in working with clients the concern that we are taking too much work home. I rarely hear from leaders the acknowledgement that we also bring home to work everyday. The emotional awareness we have personally is a combination of both worlds. How we feel about that is important but what we believe is critical. This Forbes post is helpful:

“In my work as a career and leadership coach with mid- to senior-level leaders each year, I’ve seen that the vast majority of the “leadership” or “career” challenges that my clients are facing are actually not career-related or professional in nature at all.”

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It's Time To Redefine Executive Presence

Posted by on July 6, 2018

I am a passionate believer in Situational Leadership as the best way to lead anyone based on the context of the person and the challenge. However, just as daily leadership challenges are constantly changing so is the market context in which we lead. So today with disruption everywhere, the old leadership best practices need to change as well. This post by Forbes provides much needed clarity:

“If an executive recruiter or anyone else suggests you need executive presence, stop and ask, “How do you define executive presence?” Traditionally, executive presence has been a hard-to-describe, elusive characteristic. It’s how individuals package their looks, style and demeanor to give them an advantage for being considered for a promotion into the executive ranks.”

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5 Behaviors Of Smart Leaders

Posted by on July 4, 2018

One of the most significant changes in executive leadership is moving from being the person who has all the answers to the person who knows how to ask the right questions. In reality, this is not a diminished role for the leader but an expanded one that maximizes the potential from every leader present. This post by Jeff Boss is a great read:

“Some of the best experiences in my life have come from perceived failure. I use the term “perceived failure” because where others see failure as a roadblock to success, I tend to see it as a pathway to get there. Failing is about putting in your time and learning hard lessons along the way–lessons that shape you as a person and as a leader.”

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The Most Productive Meetings Have Fewer Than 8 People

Posted by on June 27, 2018

My soap box these days is that there is an over value given to collaboration. I see too many people spending time in long meetings for the expectation that everyone being involved will produce the best results. In my experience that is almost never the case. This HBR post drives home one critical aspect of why this is true:

“There are many problems with the way most meetings are run. One of the most political is the invite list. Deciding who to include can be tough but too many managers default to including everyone. In an effort to not make anyone feel left out, they unknowingly decrease the quality of the meeting. Robert Sutton, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, looked at the research on group size and concluded that the most productive meetings contain only five to eight people. Why? There is a tipping point beyond which the quality of the conversation begins to erode.”

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Seven Daily Rituals That Will Help Leaders Dominate Their Day

Posted by on June 18, 2018

The ability to consistently accomplish great things is not found in complex project management but in the daily routines that prepare you for every day. When I find myself loosing margin, I always return to the short but very powerful list of my daily priorities. Consistently accomplishing this short list helps me be able to deal effectively with all of the major challenges. This Forbes Coaches Council was great:

“My to-do list is always too long to accomplish in one day. The key to being effective is rating each item A, B or C. The A’s are the priority: Everything that will make a sizable difference in my business or life.”

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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.”

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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:”

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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.

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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.”

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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!”

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