Last month Brad Smith and I attended Zenger Folkman’s Extraordinary Leadership Summit and Coaching Symposium in Salt Lake City. A highlight of the three day event were Client presentations from, and panel discussions with, General Mills, General Motors, and McKesson Corporation (a Fortune 500 healthcare services and IT company). With implementations ranging from two to […]
Read post »Joe Folkman is a global expert in psychometrics or measuring psychological factors. He wrote his PhD dissertation on data he collected from 360 assessments. Over the decades he’s developed feedback and measurement tools around a growing database now compromised of over a half million assessments on almost 50,000 leaders. Long-time feedback, executive coaching, and leadership […]
Read post »How do you build a leadership strength from good to great? How do you sustain energy and endurance to keep working at developing leadership skills until others notice a substantial improvement? How do you ensure the leadership skill you’re developing is most relevant to what the organization needs or expects from you? The answers to these […]
Read post »It’s been three years since Jack Zenger and I had one of our periodic update conversations after we headed off in different directions over 20 years ago. Our previous companies, The Achieve Group and Zenger Miller, had worked together for more than a decade. When this conversation took place with Jack, my wife, Heather, and […]
Read post »In 2001 only 2 out of 10 people reported that they had a chance to do what they do best every day at work. In 2015 this more than doubled to 5 out of every 10 people. Michelle McQuaid is an honorary fellow at Melbourne University’s Graduate School of Education, holds a Masters in Applied […]
Read post »Are you concerned about building leadership skills in your organization’s supervisors, managers, or executives? Would you like to help leaders… Increase employee engagement by up to 8 times? Double/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? […]
Read post »Focusing on Strengths and Not Weaknesses Tricia is preparing for a performance review meeting with Tom. She’s very happy with his work and sees lots of potential for him to grow further in his role and move up to higher leadership roles. Tom is a strong communicator, good at building relationships, and inspires his direct […]
Read post »A University of Scranton study on New Year’s resolutions reports that 2/3 of Americans make one. 47% of these are “self-improvement or education related.” The study found that only 8% are successful in achieving their resolution! Many New Year’s resolutions are aimed at correcting our deficiencies or shortcomings. So is it any wonder that 92% […]
Read post »As I wrote in “Perceptions Are a Leader’s Reality” a leader’s impact on others is dramatically increased by the presence of a few towering strengths or sharply reduced by one or two glaring weaknesses. This halo or horns effect was first documented with empirical research by Edward Thorndike, an early 20th century pioneering American psychologist. […]
Read post »Last month we had over 500 sites from 30 countries registered for my 60 minute webinar on Building Leadership Skills and Coaching Culture. The webinar was divided into two sections. The first half outlined Five Keys to Building Extraordinary Leaders. The second part was on Six Keys to Building a Coaching Culture with Exceptional Leaders. […]
Read post »I’ve been guilty of perpetuating the misconception of the well-rounded leader. Like many training and development professionals I used to believe that leadership skills development comes from assessing leaders against a leadership framework or competency model and developing an improvement plan to round out the flat or weak spots. But this long-held view is no […]
Read post »Would you like to move beyond building individual leaders to building a culture of exceptional leadership and coaching in your organization? Are you concerned about succession planning, deepening leadership bench strength, cultivating teamwork, recruiting top talent, increasing retention and engagement, improving customer service, safety and wellness, and increasing sales and profits? These critical issues are […]
Read post »Fixing weaknesses is so deeply ingrained in our practices and beliefs. When coaching or having performance discussions with a team member, most leaders will quickly gloss over strengths to address “improvement areas.” After reading How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths, Janet Pierce, Vice President of Education for Certified General Accountants […]
Read post »In “Can Every Strength Become a Weakness?” I reported on the lively LinkedIn Strengths-Based Leadership Development discussion group on “How do you help leaders let go of focusing on their weaknesses?” Part of the discussion focused on the mistaken belief that strengths can be overdone and become weaknesses. If you’d like to follow this discussion […]
Read post »Eons ago Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough, and fulcrum strong enough, and single-handed I can move the world.” Leveraging strengths have proven to be a powerful way for leaders to boost their effectiveness. A few months ago my blog on “Letting go of Weaknesses is Really Hard” responded to commonly held beliefs […]
Read post »If you’re a LinkedIn member please join our Strengths-Based Leadership Development group. If you’re not already connected to me, please click on http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jimclemmer/ and send me an invitation to connect. As a reader of this blog you should find our recent discussion (How do you help leaders let go of focusing on their weaknesses?) useful. […]
Read post »An 11 Keys to Building Extraordinary Leaders and Coaches webinar participant e-mailed me with this observation and question: “It’s amazing that for so long our organization has been concentrating on improving employee weaknesses and seemed to forget about helping them achieve greatness by focusing on what they are good at. I assume I can use […]
Read post »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 »In the opening lines of the chapter entitled, “Making Strength Productive” in his 1967 book The Effective Executive, the “father of modern management,” Peter Drucker writes, “to make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weakness with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make […]
Read post »As with my webinar earlier this month, 11 Keys to Building Extraordinary Leaders and Coaches (now archived and available for viewing), when presented with the overwhelming research, reflecting on their own experiences with good and bad leaders, and thinking about what motivates them to stick with an improvement plan, most audience members experience a sharp […]
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