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Tagged with 'leadership development'

The Powerful Impact of a Learning Environment on Discretionary Effort

Decades ago, in a Harvard Business Review article, “How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead,” the founder and CEO of a food company made this connection between learning and agility, “Learning is change, and I keep learning and relearning that change is and needs to be continuous… change is the real job of every […]

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Leaders Need to Address the One Bad Apple That Can Rot the Team

Terence Mitchell, professor of management, organization, and psychology at the University of Washington Business School, along with doctoral student William Felps “analyzed about two dozen published studies that focused on how teams and groups of employees interact, and specifically how having bad teammates can destroy a good team.” They concluded: “A single ‘toxic’ or negative […]

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Growing Leaders at All Levels Even More Critical Today

A central theme in Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success, is dealing with change through continuous growth and development. As we’ve been revising our workshops — especially our core program, Leading @ the Speed of Change, that theme is resonating even stronger. We all need to be leaders regardless of […]

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Use Our 12 Point Assessment of Leadership, Coaching, and Culture

A few months ago I delivered a webinar on Essential Building Blocks for Leadership, Coaching, and Culture Development (click on the title if you want to view it now). The 45 minute webinar (plus 15 minutes of Q & A) was divided into three main sections: Foundational and time tested frameworks used for years in […]

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The Coaching Games: 4 Short Videos on Key Coaching Concepts

Research from our database of 250,000 multi-rater feedback surveys shows huge differences in results produced by leaders rated as having the highest coaching skills. These include 8 times higher levels of employee engagement, over 3 times more willingness to “go the extra mile,” half as many team members thinking about quitting, and dramatically higher levels […]

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Build Strengths that Play to your Passions

The “dark side” of fixing weaknesses is very alluring. Last week I was facilitating our Extraordinary Leader workshop with a group of senior leaders. This was a highly experienced team who were strongly motivated to improve their organization and their own effectiveness. All participants had been through 360 feedback assessments before. Many reported feeling beat […]

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3rd Canadian Conference on Positive Psychology

For the past few decades I’ve followed the ground-breaking work of Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. Based on his extensive research, articles and books, and his 1998 term as elected president of The American Psychological Association he’s now considered the founder of the burgeoning new field of positive psychology. This is defined as […]

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Don’t Lock the Door and Get Trapped in Old Thinking

The evening before a speaking engagement in Vancouver, I was in a hotel room on the 37th floor overlooking Stanley Park, English Bay, and The Lion’s Gate Bridge. After a pleasant dinner with a friend, I returned to my room. The sun was setting on a beautiful, warm spring evening. Wanting to enjoy the view, […]

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5 Causes of Leadership Team Communication Breakdowns

Communication is critical to team and organization effectiveness. Communication is the lifeblood of trust, cooperation, and teamwork. But communications is a complex topic with many interconnected elements. Communication breakdowns are a major problem that prevents many leadership teams from being highly effective and leading their organizations to peak performance. Many breakdowns in leadership communications can […]

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Webinar: How to Develop Strategic Vision – 8 Critical Behaviors

Alvin Toffler, former associate editor of Fortune and bestselling author of books such as Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift advises, “You’ve got to think about ‘big things’ while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.” This is an update of ancient wisdom from the Roman […]

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Archived Webinar now Available: Groundbreaking New Approaches to Leadership and Coaching Development

Would you like to help your leaders increase employee engagement by up to 8 times, double or triple their motivation to implement a personal development plan, build coaching and leadership skills around natural strengths, make performance appraisals an inspiring event people look forward to, and double rates of improvement from 360 feedback? As farfetched as […]

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How Recognition Programs Can Reduce Productivity and Decrease Motivation

A study recently published in Organization Science (“Motivational Spillovers from Awards: Crowding Out in a Multitasking Environment”) reviewed the results of data from an attendance award program at one of five laundry plants in the U.S. Midwest. They concluded: “Reward-motivated employees responded positively to the awards by reducing tardiness, but gamed the system to maintain […]

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Why Most Personal Development Plans Fail – and How to Fix It

A sure path to marital unhappiness — if not divorce — is when a newlywed sets out to change his or her spouse. Yet how many performance management discussions are built on the same premise? Too often managers set about trying to “improve” his or her direct report by fixing weaker areas. How enthused are […]

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Join My Groundbreaking Webinar to Boost Leadership and Coaching Development

Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything is an extremely entertaining — at times LOL funny — recap of some of the world’s biggest shifts in scientific understanding.  He cites many humorous, and sometimes tragic, examples of prominent scientists who can’t change their thinking despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Here’s an example: […]

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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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Fit the Pieces Together For Integrated Team and Organization Development

I’ve used this slide for some time to show a big reason for the 50 – 70% failure rate of organization change and improvement efforts. It shows that many of these common change and improvement initiatives are disconnected and don’t fit together to create a cohesive picture. “Fad surfing in the C Suite” wastes scarce […]

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Cross Training to Leverage Leadership Strengths

I was coaching a university vice president who was responsible for student and community relations. In reviewing his 360 assessment we aligned his strengths, passion, and organizational need to identify his “leadership sweet spot.” Strengthening his communication skills from the 75th to the 90th percentile is what he felt would help him elevate his leadership […]

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Thoughts that Make You Go Hmmm on … Leadership Team Effectiveness

Antidotes to “6 Dysfunctional Leadership Team Behaviors…“ Make sure everybody in your boat is rowing and not drilling holes when you’re not looking. – Anonymous The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the […]

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A Powerful Combination that Creates a Peak Performance Culture

Less effective leaders often fall into the either/or trap. Do you want results or teamwork? Do you want happy shareholders or highly engaged employees? Do you want us to hit short-term goals or focus on longer term vision and strategy? Our research clearly shows that extraordinary leaders (top 10%) focus on and/also rather than either/or. […]

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Same Old Approaches = Same Old Results

Our organizations desperately want and need much stronger leadership and coaching at all levels. But most organizations aren’t significantly improving employee engagement, customer satisfaction, attracting and retaining top talent, succession planning, increasing health and safety, or energizing organization culture. Traditional leadership and coaching skill development methods are producing very little behavior change. Current approaches are […]

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