As students head back to school this is a good reminder to check our balance and leadership learning. It’s so easy to lose our personal, team, and organizational balance and not recognize that it’s happening.
Have you become trapped as your team’s chief technical problem solver? Are work days an endless series of fighting fire after fire? Is your in-box overflowing while meetings overload your calendar? Do you never seem to have time for coaching and development? Have you confused information dumps with real communication? Does your team or organization need a big attitude adjustment? Is your culture boosting or blocking learning, development, and growth toward your goals and implementation strategies?
These are a few of the key performance indicators of The High-Performance Balance. At performance balance videos you can view some of my video clips on balancing technology, management, and leadership and our management team exercise on finding the right balance.
An all too common imbalance is Management versus Leadership. In hundreds of interactive keynotes, workshops, and retreats over the past few years — after completing our Finding the Right Balance exercise — every single group has said they want to spend more time on leadership and less time on management and technical activities.
Shifting that balance demands strengthening core leadership skills. My international bestselling book, The Leader’s Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success, is built around a central leadership principle supported by six key skills. Go to Timeless Leadership Principles (Leading Others) and timeless leadership videos to do a leadership skill check.
An Offer to Turbo Charge Your Leadership
The Leader’s Digest has been purchased in large quantities by many organizations around the world as a foundation for their leadership and culture development. Feedback and re-orders consistently tell us they love the “boiled-down simplicity” of the principles and the book’s “browser’s digest’ format. This is especially popular with many busy supervisors, managers, and executives who often don’t read many traditional leadership books. The short, modular sections with snappy headlines and introductory headings, story sidebars, pithy quotes, are supported by the main text. This allows for “grazing” or in depth reading according to the needs, focus, or time of each reader.
I was especially delighted to get a glowing comment on the book from the grand sage of leadership, Warren Bennis. I have long learned from his dozens of leadership books and his pioneering work as Distinguished Professor of Business at Universityof Southern California. After reviewing The Leader’s Digest, he said, “If you’re looking for a book that illuminates the topic of leadership in a useful, readable and lively way, this is it.”
Want to discuss this post? Contact us!