Two readers recently posted comments voicing the common struggles many people have in letting go of weaknesses when developing leadership effectiveness. One reader responded to Zenger Folkman’s Harvard Business Review blog Three Myths About Your Strengths by naming a fourth myth as focusing on your strengths means you can ignore your weaknesses. He went on […]
Read post »Eleanor Roosevelt, American diplomat, writer, and U.S. First Lady once said, “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” My book, Growing @ the Speed of Change, was built around the fundamental choices of […]
Read post »I had lunch recently with Derek Alton to discuss his new role as Campaign Animator at the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. Derek is a sharp, creative, and ambitious young innovator who is very driven to fulfill Tamarack’s mission of “collaboratively creating vibrant communities by engaging learning leaders.” I’ve stayed in touch with Tamarack’s co-founding […]
Read post »Recently I had a coaching session with an operations vice president to review her personal development plan, following her participation in our Extraordinary Leader workshop. In that session she received feedback from 19 peers, direct reports, and others throughout her organization. Joanne rated herself very low on Builds Relationships and Collaboration and Teamwork competencies. Everyone […]
Read post »This month is the first anniversary of our strategic partnership with Zenger Folkman. Last August I kicked off that inaugural partnership issue with excitement about “a new era beginning” and our first attendance at Zenger Folkman’s 3rd Annual Extraordinary Leadership Summit at Sundance Ranch in Utah. Discussion of a potential strategic partnership between The CLEMMER […]
Read post »I’ve delivered hundreds of leadership workshops over the past few decades. Until our partnership with Zenger Folkman, these sessions were based on “timeless leadership principles” that encouraged participants to build their improvement plans around the weaker areas to round out and expand their leadership skills. That meant focusing on weaknesses. Last week I delivered another […]
Read post »One of the most celebrated anniversaries is birthdays. This month is the 10th birthday of my monthly newsletter The Leader Letter.I published The Leader Letter in April 2003 to coincide with and announce the publication of my fifth book, The Leader’s Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. I signed thousands of pre-ordered books […]
Read post »Given the overwhelming research on the power of optimism can leaders and teams be too positive? Intuitively we know that’s true. An overly positive view often leads to whitewashing issues as if pretending they don’t exist will make them go away. Over the top optimists often avoid those courageous conversations that address the difficult Moose […]
Read post »As 2012 winds down, ’tis the season for looking back at the year’s highlights. Harvey Schachter reviewed dozens and dozens of business, leadership, and management books for The Globe & Mail last year. As I contemplate my ever expanding must-read book list I am in awe of how many books he reviews. Harvey’s either a […]
Read post »Most organizations we’re working with today have declared a set of values. Posters, slides, banners, screen savers, newsletters, flyers, and framed parchments proclaim what the organization stands for. Many of these values statements assert a commitment to excellence, respect and integrity, customer focus, teamwork and collaboration, service/quality, responsiveness and the like. This is an important […]
Read post »I first encountered Martin Seligman’s work on the power of optimism in the mid eighties. I’ve been an avid reader of his research and groundbreaking work ever since. When he was president of the American Psychology Association in 1998, he founded the Positive Psychology movement. Last July, I attended the first Canadian conference on Positive […]
Read post »I’ve been delivering keynotes, webinars, facilitating workshops, and discussing our Strengths-Based Leadership Development System for the past month with many highly experienced HR, Learning, and OD executives. It’s been fascinating to see most of them go through the same struggle I did when I first dug into the compelling research. On the one hand, comments […]
Read post »My last blog announced that my September webinar hosted by the Canadian Society for Training and Development is now archived and available for viewing at The Strengths-Based Leadership Development Revolution. Right after the webinar was broadcast I received this e-mail from a participant: “I had a chance to attend your webinar on The Strengths-Based Leadership […]
Read post »The pace around The CLEMMER Group these days may not be as frenzied as the U.S. presidential race but some days it feels like it! We’re not out on the campaign trail kissing babies or slinging mud at our opponents. But we have been very busy spreading the word about Zenger Folkman’s revolutionary leadership development […]
Read post »How to Be Exceptional couldn’t come at a better time. We’re standing at a very critical crossroad. Our organizations desperately want and need much stronger leadership at all levels. But a torrent of studies show most leadership development approaches aren’t working. We need a better way. We’re also at the intersection of powerful and revolutionary […]
Read post »It’s both jarring and exciting to learn that I’ve been wrong. Most of my last few decades in the leadership development field I’ve fallen headlong into the trap ensnaring a vast majority of us in this business; focusing on closing organizational or managerial gaps or weaknesses. We’ve used needs analysis or facilitated a gap analysis […]
Read post »We’ve just finalized a Strategic Partnership with Zenger Folkman (www.zengerfolkman.com). After so many years of successful partnering with Jack Zenger at his previous company (he headed up Zenger Miller when I was a partner in The Achieve Group), I am quite excited to be working with him and his colleagues again. Their foundation program is […]
Read post »“…positive psychology researchers finished a ‘meta-analysis,’ a study of nearly every scientific happiness study available — over 200 studies on 275,000 people worldwide… happiness leads to success in nearly every domain, including work, health, friendship, sociability, creativity, and energy.” “Data abounds showing that happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better […]
Read post »Up until the late nineties psychology was overly focused on the “sickness model” and treating mental illness. In The Happiness Advantage Shawn points out, “as late as 1998, there was a 17-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio of research in the field of psychology. In other words, for every one study about happiness and thriving there were 17 studies […]
Read post »My last post reviewed Martin Seligman’s new book, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. Here are a few key excerpts: “When asked what, in two words or fewer, positive psychology is about, Christopher Peterson, one of its founders, replied, ‘Other people.’ Very little that is positive is solitary… Other people are the […]
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