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Tagged with 'Harvard Business School'

A Trust Cause: Leadership Stimulates or Stifles Trust and Engagement

Recently I was asked if I could deliver an online workshop for executive team leaders to “relearn/develop trust and empowerment in his/her team members when the team members feel they are not getting the trust or empowerment from their leader to do their jobs. How does a team lift this message upward, have the message […]

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Leadership and Culture Multiply or Minimize Value-Based Strategies

This month’s issue of Harvard Business Review features an article on how to “Eliminate Strategic Overload.” Harvard Business School professor, Felix Oberholzer-Gee shows “how to select fewer initiatives with greater impact.” He concludes, “creating value for customers, employees, and suppliers sits at the very heart of strategies that result in stellar performance. In the best […]

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Humor at Work: Take my Boss…Please!

If you’re a father, I hope you enjoyed Father’s Day and were treated like a king. Over the years I’ve tried to get our three kids to give me the gift of laughing at all my Dad Jokes for just that one day. Still no luck. I think they’re afraid of pulling a groan muscle. […]

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Layoffs Rarely Pay Off: Here are 15 Alternatives

Your values are showing. Tough times are when the tide goes out to sea and exposes the jewels or junk that’s been under the surface. Words like, “our people are our most important resource” now prove to be empty rhetoric or compassionate reality. Leaders who care about people and building long-term trust, treat layoffs as […]

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We Can’t Let the Pessimism Plague Infect Us As Well

Wouldn’t it be nice if we all woke up this morning and the Coronavirus pandemic was a big April Fool’s joke? Unfortunately, it’s not and won’t go away soon. But it will go away. In 1848 William Blackwood wrote in Blackwood Edinburgh Magazine, “When an Eastern sage was desired by his sultan to inscribe on […]

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This is Critical to Building an Agile, Change Adaptive Organization

“Workers are more adaptive and optimistic about the future than their leaders recognize.” That’s a key conclusion of a major study by Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute. The study encompassed 11,000 lower income and middle-skill workers and 6,500 business leaders in 11 countries. […]

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Moose Mess: Boeing’s Culture May Have Caused Those Tragic Crashes

In the wake of two fatal crashes of Boeing’s new 737 Max jets, Harvard Business School professor and author of a new book on creating psychological safety in the workplace, Amy Edmondson, published an article on Boeing and the Importance of Encouraging Employees to Speak Up. She writes, “The accidents and the resulting media attention […]

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Do You Agree on What Customer Service or Quality Is?

We complain that “it” is disappearing. We all want more of “it.” When asked to define “it,” we say, “I’ll know `it’ when I see ‘it’.” Organizations want to be known for delivering high levels of “it.” Many understand that “it” will increasingly determine their success. Team members would like to be known for delivering […]

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Time to Assess How You’re Using Your Time?

An old fable tells of a farmer with a wagon brimming full of cabbage heading to a new market. He stops for directions and asks, “How far is it to the market?” The man replies, “It’s about an hour if you go slowly but if you rush it will take all day.” It was a […]

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Coaching Head Check: Do You See Eagles or Turkeys?

A leader’s coaching skills are vital today. Millennials especially want direct feedback and supportive guidance. Leaders aspiring to build coaching skills need to do a “check up from the neck up.” Am I in a growth or fixed mindset about the people I am coaching? Ineffective managers ask, “How am I expected to soar with […]

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Are You a Culprit in The Great Training Robbery?

Is your organization using a “spray and pray” approach to training and development? What kind of return are you getting on your investment? Michael Beer is Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He and his colleagues are working on a paper focused on “The Great Training Robbery.” They’re finding that some […]

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Steps to Strengthening Authentic Leadership

In their book, Learning to Lead, Warren Bennis and Joan Goldsmith write, “To be authentic is literally to be your own author (the words derive from the same Greek root), to discover your native energies and desires, and then find your own way of acting on them. When you have done that, you are not […]

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The Multiplier Effect of a Strong Leader

“We all have our boss horror stories. The underminer. The bad communicator. The credit hog. The snake. Then again, if we’re lucky, we’ve all had those amazing bosses as well — the supervisor who encourages all employees to take their work up to the next level; the manager who makes everyone around them look better.” […]

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Good Advice on Seeking and Giving Advice

A recent Harvard Business School newsletter summarized research from David Garvin, the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Joshua Margolis, professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School. They point out that effective leaders need good advice and need to give useful advice to others. “Yet business […]

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Why Do You Want to Lead?

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 […]

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Do You Agree on What Customer Service or Quality Is?

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” […]

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‘Tis the Season of Prophecies, Forecasts, and Predictions

We made it through yet another doomsday prediction! The world did not end on December 21 as some felt the Mayan calendar predicted. Around the world interest in survival pods, underground bunkers, and one-way tickets to “apocalypse safe havens” soared as D-Day approached. You should be able to pick up a Mayan calendar at half […]

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360 Feedback Tools Can Help or Hurt Leadership Development

360 multi-rater feedback assessments are now used by more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies. They’ve become a foundation of leadership development efforts because they’re like a GPS unit showing leaders their current leadership effectiveness (“you are here”) and mapping a route to increased effectiveness. 360 feedback tools derive their name from getting feedback in […]

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Book Review: “Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All”

This is a very timely, inspiring, and practical book for leading in turbulent times. It’s the culmination of a nine year research project that began in 2002 “in the aftermath of 9/11 and the bursting stock bubble, watching the exponential rise of global competition and the relentless onslaught of technological disruption, hearing the rising chant […]

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Thoughts that Make You Go Hmmm on…. Leading Culture Change

Here are especially vital findings and powerful observations about just what it takes to build a peak performance culture. These are drawn from Harvard Business School professor, James Heskett’s new book, The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force That Transforms Performance: “Culture really matters. As Lou Gerstner wrote, reflecting on his experiences in […]

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