What do the best leaders do that the rest of us don’t? I discovered the answer to that question for one top leader this past Tuesday. I was in the executive conference room at the headquarters of a large food-service company. With me, scattered around the gigantic table, were four of their 100 District Managers, … Read more
What’s the net net ROI of your IP? Oops. Sorry about that. I’m just getting over a case of idiom illness.Whether you call it slang, jargon, or buzzword bingo, there’s an epidemic of corporate-speak going on in our organizations. It’s so prevalent, many of us are not even aware we’re using it. It wasn’t supposed to … Read more
What was the best thing about 2015? I posed this very question twelve times, on twelve days, to twelve senior executives over the past two months. Now this was no casual, offhand question. I was speaking with these executives on a ballroom stage, in front of an invited audience of 300 of their company’s mid-level … Read more
How’s your day going? Busy. Really busy. Crazy busy.Shouldn’t this interchange be officially banned? After all, isn’t ‘busy’ what’s expected? Isn’t busy–and its variants (full, jam-packed, maxed-out, loaded-up) the new normal? You’re busy. Wow. Join the club. According to research from the Society for Human Resource Management, 70% of employees work beyond scheduled time and on … Read more
Leaders are in the job of creating experiences for the people they lead. Great leaders are particularly intentional about crafting the arc of that experience. They know what note they want to leave things on. They plan out their arc so that people walk away with a clear vision of what’s next. Great leaders plan … Read more
Connected. Collaborative. Creative.How well do these qualities describe the team you lead? In today’s workplace, no one gets far working on an island. Effective teamwork is critical for success.Intuitively, you already know that. When a team is ‘humming’, you feel it. On the flip side, when a team is struggling, you feel it too. You … Read more
Happy New Year!Did you create a list of goals for 2016? If you’re like most people, your resolution(s) focus on either achieving a specific goal (e.g., making more money), or improving yourself in one of the following dimensions: Physical (health, wellness) Emotional (relationships, mood) Mental (learning, focus) Spiritual (meaning, passion) It probably also involves taking … Read more
When was the last time you were in a meeting, and heard the presenter say: I know this next slide is an eye chart, but… And then you see something like this:Your eyes scan the page, but can’t stop moving.Your head starts to swim.You get nauseous.You want to run from the room screaming.Welcome to Death … Read more
How do your customers like working with you? Customer (in this context) can be either external or internal. External customers are what we think of as the ‘traditional’ customer.Internal customers can be anyone who is upstream or downstream in the value chain: colleagues, direct reports, managers, suppliers, contractors. We all like it when our customers are easy … Read more
Ken is a nice guy.Everyone says so. A senior VP of strategy at a major aerospace company, Ken prides himself on being pleasant and agreeable to work with. Ken works really hard to be nice. So what’s wrong? Being nice is killing Ken’s effectiveness and efficiency at work.It’s also impacting his team, his peers, … Read more
