A friend who hasn’t seen a doctor in years was recently diagnosed with serious heart disease. He was immediately prescribed medication to reduce his blood pressure, control cholesterol, and thin his blood. His wife is fanatically devoted to natural remedies. She found a book arguing for cayenne pepper and garlic to soften and dissolve arterial […]
Read post »As I described recently in “Courageous Leaders Ask for Feedback“, strong leaders encourage feedback, and reap the benefit in their improved leadership and coaching effectiveness. Feedback from others is twice as valid as our own self-assessment, and provides a double value: insight into how others perceive our current leadership effectiveness and assurance that our route […]
Read post »It’s all about perception. Eons ago the ancient Greek Philosopher, Epictetus, mused, “What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.” We so easily mouth the words “perception is reality.” But do we seek out and work from our customers’ reality? Or do we tend to dismiss […]
Read post »Customer service and quality is highly talked about and rarely delivered. Consequently, many companies pay a high “marketing tax” to counteract damaged brand perceptions and bad buzz from poor customer service. Part of the problem is because service/quality is a very slippery concept. It’s exasperatingly difficult to define and a source of great confusion to […]
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 »As I was preparing my slides for next week’s coaching and leadership development webinar I rediscovered a powerful description of coaching I’d cited decades ago in one of my first books. In A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference, Nancy Austin and Tom Peters write, “Coaching is the process of enabling others to act, of […]
Read post »Many managers either don’t address performance issues and negative behavior or do it poorly. Both cases lead to disengaged and demoralized team members. Survey after survey shows that a great source of frustration for most of us is not being given effective feedback when our behavior creates problems or performance falls short. It’s one of […]
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 »We’re working with the leadership team of a multi-billion dollar project that’s critical to the future of the company. Through a series of offsite retreats with dozens of the top managers and key professionals we’ve developed strong alignment on core Strategic Imperatives for the next year. We’re now forming SI Teams and solid implementation plans […]
Read post »American president, Thomas Jefferson, once said “the glow of one warm thought is worth more to me than money.” Reinforcing feedback produces a powerful afterglow that raises the positivity ratio, energizes and inspires, and provides the pause that refreshes. This is the perfect time of year for you and your team to reflect back looking […]
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The Conference Board of Canada recently published a report summarizing their research on leadership development from a cross section of public and private sector organizations. Participants identified their top leadership development drivers as: addressing declining levels of leadership capacity planning for succession and growing the talent pool engaging and mobilizing employees managing changing demographics and […]
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 »During one of my workshops we were discussing keys to building responsibility and ownership. One participant told us that he and his wife had their four year old grandson, Tyler, stay overnight at their house. In the morning he came running down the stairs and reported, “Grandma, Grandpa, somebody peed in my bed!” Kids will […]
Read post »International consultant and management author, Ram Charan, wrote a provocative article in the July-August issue of Harvard Business Review. In It’s Time to Split HR he declares “I talk with CEOs across the globe who are disappointed in their HR people.” He goes on to explain that CEOs would like to get the same sort […]
Read post »George Bernard Shaw, the highly creative Irish playwright (he wrote more than 60 plays and won a Nobel Prize in Literature), and founder of the London School of Economics, George Bernard Shaw once declared, “Some people see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream things that never were, and say ‘Why not’? Seeing […]
Read post »After listening to an angry customer vent his dissatisfaction with the organization’s service, a supervisor replied, “If it’s any consolation to you, we treat our employees worse than we treat our customers.” You’ve heard it said that no one can serve two masters. In too many organizations with their traditional top down hierarchy, that means […]
Read post »How can apathetic or disengaged frontline servers produce happy customers? Some exceptional employee will delight customers despite how they’re treated by their boss or the organization. Most don’t. The vast majority of employees directly reflect the care and service they experience every day in their team or workplace. “The Secret to Delighting Customers? Put Employees […]
Read post »Leadership competency models are now used widely by many organizations to define the skills and behaviors of effective leaders. They’re often used for “talent management” such as coaching and development, performance management, succession planning, identifying and developing high potentials/emerging leaders, and the like. Many competency models are multi-layered with differing competencies for supervisors, managers, and […]
Read post »Time is the great equalizer. We all get exactly the same amount of it every day. What a leader does with his or her daily time allotment distinguishes good, bad, and extraordinary leaders. Many less effective leaders are sucked into the busyness trap trying to keep up with their daily deluge of e-mails and stream […]
Read post »A friend with a past drinking problem has been a devoted member of Alcoholics Anonymous and not touched a drop of alcohol for many years. Recently he gave up most of his weekend to deal with a Client emergency. The next week his manager “thanked him” with an expensive bottle of wine. This breaks one […]
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