An elderly gentleman went to the doctor about a gas problem. “But,” he told the doctor, “it really doesn’t bother me too much. When I pass gas, they never smell and are always silent. As a matter of fact, I’ve passed gas at least 10 times since I’ve been here in your office. You didn’t […]
Read post »A few years ago, our family visited a corn maze. It was a series of pathways cut through a large cornfield. The corn was 7-8 feet high. Once in the maze, there was no way to see over the corn. It was a long and complex maze with many dead-ends and circular loops. Before we […]
Read post »One of our most recent popular blogs was on bully bosses and featured a quiz to help determine if your boss is a bully or just a poor leader. A follow-up blog on leading up included five ways to deal with a bad boss. But what if you’re a bully or poor boss — and […]
Read post »In our executive coaching and Extraordinary Leader workshops, we see a wide variety of responses to leaders receiving their 360 assessment feedback. We generally see one of these four responses: Prisoners of Score These participants are most often in workshops where the leader was forced to participate. They want to serve the minimum time in […]
Read post »The use of 360 degree assessments has exploded in the past few decades. They’re now widely available in a bewildering variety of tools used for leadership development, executive coaching, performance management, personal growth, etc. Do a Google search on variations of 360 degree feedback, assessment, or tools and go shopping among millions of options. The […]
Read post »We’ve just completed a series of blogs on leadership hypocrisy and bullying or bad bosses. You may have completed our bully boss quiz. It’s very easy to see bad or bullying leadership in others. It’s much tougher to recognize our leadership shortfalls. As American social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership, Jonathan Haidt, says “we […]
Read post »Most leaders don’t live by the motto: “do what I say, not what I do.” Their apparent hypocritical behavior is innocent and sincere. They simply don’t know that their actions are seen as out of step with their words. Not checking blind spots can lead to deadly highway accidents. Leaders who don’t seek feedback often […]
Read post »At our youngest daughter’s sixth birthday party, a five year- old boy hit Vanessa on the head. Asked to apologize, he politely refused: “Mr. Clemmer, I don’t apologize unless I see teeth marks or blood.” Many managers don’t realize the problems they’re creating unless they see teeth marks or blood. The most insensitive managers are […]
Read post »André Gide, French writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature said, “The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.” Sincere hypocrisy came to mind when a workshop participant complained about how badly his manager and their bosses needed that very leadership development session. He said […]
Read post »Aesop, the ancient Greek story teller, tells of an old legend that we were all born into this world with two bags hanging around our necks. A bag in front is filled with what we see in others. The other bag behind our back is filled with what others see in us. That’s why it’s […]
Read post »As we heard at last month’s Canadian Positive Psychology Association conference, strengths-based approaches are rapidly spreading across fields of personal growth/development, education, leadership, organization effectiveness, community building, coaching, counseling, and others. In our field of leadership/organization development we’re hearing more talk about strengths-based tools and techniques. But we’re often not talking about the same thing […]
Read post »Many succession planning processes involve identifying and developing high potential leaders. As with promising amateur athletes working to secure very scarce spots at the professional level of their sport, not every leader considered to have strong potential grows in their career to ever higher leadership roles. Through our evidence-based approaches to identifying key leadership skills […]
Read post »Cornerstone OnDemand analyzed their dataset of 63,000 employees spanning 250,000 observations and concluded: Good employees are 54 percent more likely to quit when they work with a toxic employee, if the proportion of toxic employees on their team grows by as little as one on a team of 20. As toxic employees make their co-workers […]
Read post »“Ignorance is bliss,” and “what you don’t know can’t hurt you,” is dangerous thinking in today’s fast changing world. Perceptions don’t improve because they’re ignored. American writer and philosopher, Eric Hoffer, wrote “far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.” Leaders often rely too […]
Read post »Many leaders find courageous conversations to give corrective or redirecting feedback very difficult. Emotions can get in the way, perceptions of the issue can differ widely, relationships may be damaged, and reactions can be volatile. Leaders may be scarred from past conversations where they gave or received tough feedback in a poorly structured and awkwardly […]
Read post »Plato once observed “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when people are afraid of the light.” Ignoring or failing to understand how others see our behaviors keeps us in the dark and diminishes everyone’s perceptions of our leadership effectiveness. Those perceptions then shape […]
Read post »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 […]
Read post »A few weeks ago I reflected on the last three years of partnering with Zenger Folkman (“Re-Fired with Building Strengths“) and their powerful strengths-based leadership development methodology found in The Extraordinary Leader. 360 feedback is critical to building strengths or addressing fatal flaws (as long as it avoids the “Nine Problems with 360 Multi-Rater Assessments“). […]
Read post »Our research shows that leadership self-assessment correlates to performance outcomes like employee engagement, turnover, safety, customer service, or profitability only half as reliably as ratings from everyone else (manager, direct reports, peers, and others). Some leaders rate themselves much higher than all the other raters. Other leaders don’t see their own strengths and assess their […]
Read post »Last year Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman conducted a survey among readers of their Harvard Business Review blog readers. 2,700 responded to the online survey with questions about positive and negative feedback and attitudes about feedback experiences. This was an international survey with over half of the respondents coming from outside the United States. Here […]
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