Sustaining Results: Balancing People, Values, and Business Over the years several books have addressed why some companies are more enduring than others. What distinguishes the great from the merely good? What factors contribute to sustaining success in today’s rapidly changing economic environment? Built to Last, Good to Great, Hidden Value, The Knowing-Doing Gap, and Peak Performance are just a few of … Read More
Feeling Good: Creating Emotionally Intelligent Teams
Feeling Good: Creating Emotionally Intelligent Teams When Daniel Goleman wrote his landmark books on emotional intelligence in the 90’s (Emotional Intelligence, 1995, Working with Emotional Intelligence, 1998), managers in organizations everywhere nodded heads in agreement. Finally, what they knew to be true about dealing with people had a name and was clearly articulated. For the past 15 years, research in … Read More
Conversational IQ: 5 Conversational Blind Spots
Conversational IQ: 5 Conversational Blind Spots “Human beings are the most highly social species on this planet. When we succeed in connecting deeply with others – heart to heart and head to head – trust is at its all-time high, and people work in concert in extraordinary ways.” ~ Judith E. Glaser, Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust & Get … Read More
The Case for Clarity: A Key Leadership Quality
The Case for Clarity: A Key Leadership Quality “Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant…They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the human universals – our need for security, for community, for clarity, for authority, and for respect – our need … Read More
Driven to Lead: What Makes People Tick
Driven to Lead: What Makes People Tick “Our understanding of leadership can be no better than our understanding of what makes humans, all humans, tick – what are the ultimate motivators of our behavior.” ~ Warren Bennis Leadership is about relationships with others. You cannot lead without understanding the innate drives that are essential to human development and survival. Decades … Read More
Coaching Conversations: Teaching People to Think
Coaching Conversations: Teaching People to Think One cannot teach a man anything. One can only enable him to learn from within himself. ~ Galileo Galilei With so many employees being paid to think, leaders and managers should find ways to cultivate their staffs’ cerebral capabilities to boost workplace performance. But most leaders wouldn’t know where to start. The process begins … Read More
Overcoming Leadership Blind Spots
Overcoming Leadership Blind Spots “Leadership is a struggle by flawed human beings to make some important human values real and effective in the world as it is.” ~ Steven Snyder, Leadership and the Art of Struggle There’s no escaping it: Everyone has blind spots. No matter how hard we try to be self-aware, everyone – including the best leader – … Read More
Put Positive Leadership into Action
Put Positive Leadership into Action Executive coaches and leadership consultants who encourage positive thinking often encounter cynical, hard-driving executives with a close eye on the bottom line. But positivity coaches have come a long way since author Norman Vincent Peale preached his positive philosophy of faith and miracles. Today’s positive-psychology movement is founded on empirical evidence. Social scientists have documented … Read More
Do Ask, Don’t Tell
Do Ask, Don’t Tell “Carpenters have hammers, dentists have picks, and physicians have stethoscopes. It is hard to envision any of these people working in their chosen fields without their basic set of tools. Managers, too, have a basic set of tools: questions.” ~ Terry J. Fadem, The Art of Asking: Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers (FT Press, 2008) Good communication … Read More
Rethinking Motivation
Rethinking Motivation Most business leaders have lost sight of what motivates people at work. In fact, some companies haven’t updated their management practices in years, which means they’re incapable of creating high-performance teams. Companies continue to ignore the obvious: Offering incentives and rewards is less effective than tapping into truly meaningful intrinsic motivation. Leaders operate on old assumptions about motivation … Read More