Your leadership and management skills can be dramatically improved by taking a page out of the motorcycling playbook. This past weekend I took a training course in how to drive a motorcycle from Rider Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota. To say I stretched myself would be an understatement. I was left fatigued at the end of each 9 hour day. [...]
Assumption Bias restricts the possibility of change for both the leader and followers. It acts like a steel safe, locking in a static belief system and locking out the possible alternatives. The greater the power leaders have, the more vulnerable they are to assumption bias because their coworkers are unlikely to challenge them. Here are [...]
Decision Model A model can be anything that defines a process (iterative, linear, or chaotic) in which you move from a particular starting point to a desired destination. Some models are rather straight forward. Take, for instance, planning a business trip from Rochester, MN (my home town) to Los Angeles, CA to attend a conference. [...]
While generating ideas comes easily for entrepreneurs, discerning which ideas to implement and which to discard does not usually come as easily.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made a deliberate power move to change the work environment of employees. It was wrong and alternative ways may have better effect for you when you consider changing your culture.
How do you stifle innovation? What roadblocks has your organization put in place to ensure that innovation is stifled? That is not a rhetorical question. Whether you know it or not, you have put in place, by design or circumstance, roadblocks to innovation. Maybe your argument stems from “regulatory” requirements, cultural bias, a tight inner circle, or [...]
Activate Your Goal It’s one thing to want a new job or career; it’s another thing to actively pursue it. If you don’t develop a plan with specific actions, deadlines, and accountability, what’s to keep you from getting distracted by your everyday concerns and obligations? You need leverage–both positive and negative–to move forward. Executive coaches [...]
Leaders don’t enjoy firing people. They may feel relief after they’ve done so, but rarely joy. Even Donald Trump seems to feel a measure of regret when he says, “you’re fired!” Leaders want to inspire their team members to improve and become success stories. They want to find a way—perhaps the only way—to turn struggling [...]
You can stumble on your next career or be deliberate about choosing one. This post explores how you can elevate your game and learn what career insights you may be withholding from friends and loved ones?
Many leaders want to change self-defeating behaviors and beliefs, but desire isn’t enough. Here are 10 ways to make changes stick: 1) Hire a coach or consult a mentor to help you locate and define the change you wish to make; 2) Brainstorm potential barriers; 3) Plan counter-moves for each potential barrier; 4) Break the [...]
As a leader, you know the importance of hiring good people (as well as the cost of making poor hires), so you lay out role and responsibilities for each position, using very specific and explicit expectations. You modify job descriptions to address past oversights or new circumstances. And yet, six months or a year after [...]
If you want to escape from the pull of earth’s gravity, you need to jettison away at 7 miles per second. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the greater the gravitational pull, the greater speed you must go to escape. When you’re looking to change your life and escape [...]
When you build a successful company, department, NGO, or team, you build upon successes. It’s tricky to reproduce success, however, because many decisions were both context- and time-bound. Had you made those same decisions with different people, in different circumstances, or at another time period in the growth of your organization, you may not have [...]
The first couple of meetings we have together, clients often want to vent about their organization. Each time it has a slightly different flavor, but the commonality is striking. So many of them struggle with the cultural fit. When I was younger, I went to synagogue because I was asked and expected to. It wasn’t [...]
Once you learn and successfully employ a specific process, you stop exploring alternatives with a child’s eyes. You turn your attention to other matters. Eventually, the daily management of your processes overwhelms your time and attention, such that you rarely if ever adopt a new process. You stay with the tried and true instead of [...]
