If you’re interested in dramatically boosting personal, team, or organization leadership and coaching skills there’s an incredibly rare opportunity you’ll want to seize this summer. And you could combine this powerful Leadership Summit with vacation and leisure time in picturesque Park City — one of Utah’s top tourist destinations favoured by entertainment stars during Robert […]
Read post »Symantec is a global leader in software security, storage, and systems management. Sometimes people enviously argue that a company like Symantec can afford to invest in leadership and organization development because of their success. But a large part of Symantec’s success has resulted from these development investments. Symantec attracts highly effective leaders from around the […]
Read post »My last blog looked at using multi-rater feedback to pinpoint our leadership location. This is proving to be twice as accurate as self-assessment in identifying leadership strengths that we can magnify toward exceptional leadership. Not only does feedback help leaders build strengths — or identify fatal flaws that could derail their career — asking for […]
Read post »We’re currently facilitating a customized version of The Extraordinary Leader development sessions with hundreds of supervisors and managers in an organization using just self-assessments. Executives in this company had very negative past experiences with using 360 feedback assessments. They agreed that those experiences came from the all too common weaknesses-based approach grounding most 360 feedback […]
Read post »In recent keynote presentations and workshops with HR and leadership development professionals, more and more participants have been embracing the approach of building on strengths. When presented with the powerful evidence and logic of strengths-based leadership development, most people are convinced. But it’s tough to let go of deeply ingrained practices and “conventional wisdom.” One […]
Read post »How would you describe the organizational culture of your dreams? What are its essential elements? How would people treat each other? What core values would shine brightly every day? If you could eavesdrop on members of your team describing their workplace at a family gathering or social event, what would you hope they’d say? We […]
Read post »Leadership likability has many meanings. And the implications go much deeper than whether a leader has lots of “Like” button clicks. Zenger Folkman’s research shows that leaders who score high on the Likability Index are also rated as being highly effective leaders by their direct reports, peers, manager, and others. These ratings correlate to sharply […]
Read post »The founder of MacDonald’s hamburger chain, Ray Kroc, was well known for his motto, “when you’re green you’re growing, when you’re ripe you rot.” May is a great time for us in the Northern Hemisphere to reflect on whether we’re greening ourselves with new growth or stagnating and decaying. Once again this spring I’ll be […]
Read post »Soundview Executive Book Summaries has released a summary of Zenger Folkman’s new book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths. The summary covers: • How to pinpoint your best leadership traits and choose the right development target for yourself. • How to use feedback and action learning on the job to […]
Read post »“I don’t care about being liked, I just want to be respected,” is a statement repeated by many less than extraordinary leaders. Trapped in either/or thinking, these narrowly-focused leaders often push hard for results while leaving a trail of damaged relationships and enervated people scattered behind them. Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, is perpetuating a related […]
Read post »Last week’s two blogs reviewing and excerpting Joe Folkman’s book The Power of Feedback drew very positive reader responses. One wrote, “‘I’d like to give you a little feedback’ really does send a shiver up my spine! Eeek! I am going to read this book because I need to change my mindset.” The reader went […]
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 »Far too many organizations squander training dollars by “sheep dipping” supervisors, managers, or executives through development workshops and hoping something will stick. Decades of studies show time and again leadership behavior change rarely lasts in a “once and done” approach. One study by a large international learning and development firm found that the optimum ratio […]
Read post »Jack Zenger was recently talking with long-time Client, Symantec, a prominent Silicon Valley software firm about the remarkable success they’ve had using Zenger Folkman’s Strengths-Based Leadership Development System. The company has gathered compelling evidence that “leaders who participate in their development programs are getting higher scores on essentially every leadership competency they measure …. Upper […]
Read post »Needs assessments and performance evaluations look for gaps and design training programs to fix weaknesses. This is a major reason participant motivation to build skills has been very low and transfer of learning poor. On Monday I delivered a 60 minute webinar on The Strengths-Based Leadership Development Revolution and its refreshingly different impact on leadership […]
Read post »On March 4, HR.com is hosting my complimentary webinar on Double Learner Motivation with Revolutionary Strengths-Based Leadership. In this fast-paced session I’ll discuss why a huge part of the leadership development gap is caused by traditional needs assessments and gap analysis. This weakness-based approach is ineffective and undermines participant motivation for change. I’ll show pre […]
Read post »Tomorrow’s publication of The Leader Letter pulls all the January blogs together in one place. Most of these were focused on coaching as we completed our certification for Zenger Folkman’s very powerful and unique Extraordinary Coach development process. It’s fitting that we wrap up “the month of the coach” with Zenger Folkman’s insightful white paper […]
Read post »In our Extraordinary Coach development system we define coaching as interactions that help the individual being coached to expand awareness, discover superior solutions, and make and implement better decisions. This is a broad leadership skill set that is most often used in career and performance coaching. Extraordinary coaches can exist in an ordinary or even […]
Read post »I’ve long found January to be a great time of year for reflecting on the journey so far and looking ahead to what direction I’d like to take in the coming year. This year’s R & R time coincided nicely with revising my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn has become a major tool for connecting to people […]
Read post »click to enlarge In his introduction to The Extraordinary Coach: How the Best Leaders Help Others Grow, bestselling leadership author and executive coach, Marshall Goldsmith, points out, “a leader who is an adept coach can greatly enhance the organization’s success; one who dabbles and doesn’t take the process seriously can cause harm.” Marshall’s insight […]
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