E-mail continues to be a huge challenge for many leaders. In our workshops, leaders often assess how much time they spend dealing with technical, management, and leadership issues and where they’d prefer to invest their time (“Check Your Balance with the Performance Triangle“). Every poll we’ve ever taken with participants shows that 80 – 90% […]
Read post »I was saddened to hear of the passing of Warren Bennis. Over the past 30 years my views and practices on leadership have been profoundly influenced by his research and writing. After reading his personally revealing and deeply thoughtful memoirs a few years ago (“Review of Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership“) […]
Read post »One of the highlights of the Leadership Summit was a keynote presentation by Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman on a critical topic that’s vital to the future of many organizations. In much of the Western World we’re on the edge of a dangerous talent precipice. For many it’s becoming a crisis. In America 60% of […]
Read post »Our Business Development Director Brad Smith, and I just returned from an intensive week in Park City, Utah. This idyllic setting in the mountains above Salt Lake City is famous for their natural beauty, numerous ski hills and resorts, and the Sundance Film Festival. We didn’t have much time to enjoy this beautiful location with […]
Read post »Research shows that extraordinary leaders are made, not born. Ultimately it boils down to motivation. How much does a leader want to move their skills from good to great? Perhaps an even more important question is why. Why do you want to lead? I recently came across Harvard Business School professor Bill George’s article on […]
Read post »“Do You Have What It Takes to be a Good Coach?” showing our research on the connection between coaching effectiveness and employee commitment. This blog also provides a link to take a coaching evaluation to see how you compare to outstanding coaches. This follows from Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman’s recent webinar on becoming a […]
Read post »This week I am attending my third Extraordinary Leadership Summit in Park City, Utah. This Zenger Folkman annual conference is a wonderful time to reconnect with ZF’s great people and international partners. These conferences provide updates of ZF’s new and revised programs and services. They also feature Clients outlining their successful approaches, plans for further […]
Read post »As I outlined in “Exceptional Leaders Aren’t Well Rounded” and “Outstanding Major League Baseball Players Aren’t Well Rounded” extraordinary leaders aren’t defined by the absence of weaknesses but the presence of a few profound strengths. In The Extraordinary Leader workshop we help participants uncover the power of leadership perception from their own experiences with a […]
Read post »“… everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” “… the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences […]
Read post »I often find biographies of accomplished leaders or thought pioneers inspiring and instructive. Having read the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl’s, classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning years ago I recently came across his autobiography Viktor Frankl Recollections. I enjoyed reading about his story and it drew me back to reread Man’s Search for […]
Read post »It’s really annoying to watch a video with the audio slightly out of sync. Too often this is what people see from their leaders in matching their behaviors to their bold proclaimed core values. Here are a few examples of how leaders in extraordinary organizations ensure they’re role models of the organization’s values: The CEO […]
Read post »As part of a larger culture development effort, we’ve worked with dozens of executive teams over the years to articulate or revise their core values. An almost universal core value is some variation of respect, integrity, or equality, or fairness. Whether our espoused or aspirational values become the real or lived values to everyone inside […]
Read post »Talent Management including succession planning, developing high potentials, and attracting and retaining top people is now a critical issue. During the financial crisis and economic downturn of the last few years organizations slowed or stopped leadership development. As executives now face a wave of retiring Baby Boomers and take a longer term view, “leadership bench […]
Read post »There’s an old story about a man walking into a drugstore to use the pay phone: “Hello, ABC Company, sometime ago you had an opening for an operations manager. Is the position still available?” After a slight pause, he continued: “Oh, you have. Six months ago, huh? How’s he working out?” A somewhat longer pause. […]
Read post »Since the mid-sixties, there have been a large number of experiments with animals and people revealing that helplessness can be a conditioned or learned response. An early experiment with learned helplessness was demonstrated with rats. When they were put directly in ice water, they could swim around for forty to sixty hours. But if the rats were […]
Read post »It’s all about perception. Eons ago the ancient Greek Philosopher, Epictetus, mused “What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.” We so easily mouth the words “perception is reality.” But do we seek out and work from our customers’ reality? Or do we tend to dismiss […]
Read post »Customer service and quality is one of todays most talked about and least understood concepts. Service/quality is a very slippery concept. It’s exasperatingly difficult to define and a source of great confusion to many managers. There’s a wide range of differences in premises, concepts, and even in the meanings of key words. Definitions of “service/quality” […]
Read post »Surveys show that when we’re asked to rate our own driving skills, over 75% of us score ourselves as above average. Similar self-assessment distortions show up when managers are asked to rate their own coaching effectiveness. In researching and developing The Extraordinary Coach development system, Zenger Folkman identified four powerful reasons for asking coachees for […]
Read post »In an organizational survey at a large telecom company, managers were asked to rate how well they coached the people reporting to them. They scored themselves high. The people reporting to those managers were asked to rate the coaching they received. They scored their managers very low. A big part of the problem is around […]
Read post »Free Coaching Assessment and Webinar Ask 100 people if they have good common sense and more than 95% will tell you they do. Similarly, if you ask 100 managers if they are good coaches the number may be lower than 95%, but not by much. The managers we talk to assume that if they are […]
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