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Assessing Process Capability
In Minitab 16; you can carry out process Capability Analysis by calculating the process; performance capability indicators; and indices of a given process. In this video; Wesley Miller demonstrates how to use Minitab 16 to obtain a process capability report using a sample data set.
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Conducting a Normality Test
In Minitab 16; you can perform Normality tests to determine how well a given data set fits a normal distribution model. In this video; Wesley Miller demonstrates how to carry out a Normality test on a sample data set in Minitab 16.
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Conducting a One-Way ANOVA Test
In Minitab 16; One-Way ANOVA tests are used to observe how the means of two or more groups of data vary with each other. In this video; Wesley Miller discusses how to conduct a One-Way ANOVA test by using a sample data set.
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Conducting a Two-Sample T-Test
In Minitab 16; T-Tests are used to determine whether the statistical difference between two normally distributed variables is significant. In this video; Wesley Miller discusses how to conduct a Two-Sample T-Test on a sample data set.
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Conducting a Two-Way ANOVA Test
In Minitab 16; you can conduct a Two-Way ANOVA test to measure the significant effect of multiple independent variables; in addition to multiple observations for each independent variable. In this video; Wesley Miller discusses how to conduct a Two-Way ANOVA test and analyze the results by using a sample data set.
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Conducting an ANOVA Test Using the General Linear Model
In Minitab 16; you can use the General Linear Model for conducting an ANOVA test when the data is unbalanced and/or when multiple comparisons are required. In this video; Wesley Miller explains how to use the General Linear Model to conduct a Two-Way ANOVA test.
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Creating an X-bar Chart with R Chart
In Minitab 16; an X-bar and R Chart pair is a control chart that is used to monitor process; mean; and standard deviation when the process sample size is less than 10 samples. In this video; Wesley Miller discusses how to generate an X-bar and R Chart pair.
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Creating an X-bar Chart with S Chart
In Minitab 16; an X-bar and S Chart pair is a control chart that is used to monitor process; mean; and standard deviation when samples are collected at regular intervals and the sample size is greater than 10 samples. In this video; Wesley Miller discusses how to generate an X-bar and S Chart pair.
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Exporting Data Columns to a File
Minitab 16 allows users to export data in select columns to external applications. In this video; Wesley Miller explains how to export select columns of data from a Minitab worksheet to an Excel spreadsheet.
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Exporting Data to a File
Minitab 16 allows users to export data to external applications. In this video; Wesley Miller explains how to export Minitab data to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
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Generating a P-Chart
In Minitab 16; P-Charts are used to observe the proportion of nonconforming or defective items in a given test sample. In this video; Wesley Miller discusses how to generate a P-Chart for monitoring the proportion of defective items in several separate test cases.
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Importing Data from Excel
Minitab 16 allows users to import external data and conduct additional statistical analysis. In this video; Wesley Miller explains how to import an Excel spreadsheet into a Minitab project.
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Obtaining Descriptive Statistics
Minitab 16 allows users to obtain basic statistical information for a given data set. In this video; Wesley Miller explains how to obtain basic descriptive statistics.
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Using Minitab Sample Data Sets
In Minitab 16; you can access a vast range of Sample Data Sets that can be used to aid in exploring Minitab statistical reports and capabilities. In this video; Wesley Miller demonstrates how to work with the Sample Data Sets provided by Minitab 16.
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Using the Minitab Assistant
In Minitab 16; you can use the Assistant tool to determine the appropriate test to apply to a given data set. In this video; Wesley Miller discusses how to use the Minitab Assistant to conduct hypothesis tests on various sample data sets.
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Credibility: The Foundation of Leadership
Credibility is the foundation of leadership.
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The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: Model the Way
The two keys to "model the way" are 1) clarify your values, and 2) set the example.
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The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: Enable Others to Act
Foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships, and strengthen others by increasing their self determination and developing their confidence.
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The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: Inspire a Shared Vision
Leaders have a clear vision of the future and share that vision in a way that allows others to see themselves in it.
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A Positive Mindset Leads to Success
Success only moves the goal posts further away, which pushes happiness over the horizon.
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How to Increase Your Happiness
You will increase your happiness and optimism if, every day, you write down or say three things you’re grateful for.
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How Recognition Increases Performance
Recognition can have powerful effects because it helps our brain believe our behavior matters.
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Emotional Contagion in the Workplace
A positive manager spreads positivity throughout the team.
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Rational Optimism
When we are surrounded by negative input our brains start to think negative things are more true than positive things.
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Fingertip Knowledge
The age of fingertip knowledge is upon us; we will type our way into the future.
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Four Generations, One Workplace
Each generation, from new hires to people in their seventies, brings its own experience, challenges and opportunities.
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Democratization of Content
Tools are now available for many people to contribute to the creation and extension of documents.
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Social Networks as a Learning Disruptor
Knowledge systems should be supported by social networks of people who talk about that knowledge.
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The Value of Socially Constructed Environments
Socially constructed environments apply a collective intelligence to problems.
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Organizational Learning
Organizational learning morphed into competency training, which measured employees against goals but did not encourage them to go beyond their job description.
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Increasing Productivity by Influencing Mood
Happiness is not always the goal. Moods can be influenced by body language, tone of voice, and room setting.
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The Importance of Purpose in Life
Sue Langley believes in life balance, not work-life balance. It’s all who you are.
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Co-Develop with Consumers
To learn how customers respond to a new product, find where the customers are, then develop and display measures of customer behavior.
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Resources Versus Success
Success is unrelated to the money and resources you have when you start. “Risk homeostasis” says if you lower risk in one area, you raise it in another. If you have a lot of money, you tend not to take chances. Better to spend the money on several different ideas.
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Building Cathedrals
Good companies are focused on themselves. They know their own strengths and they operate in those strengths every day. There’s nothing wrong with that, Gary Krahn says. But if you want to be a great company, you have to take it a step further.
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Training Through Delegating
It’s generally easier to do something yourself than to hand it off to someone else to do – particularly if you’ve been doing the task well for a long time and you’re a Type A personality. But if you don’t learn to delegate, Cheryl Gray says, the people under you won’t grow.
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Planting Seeds for Succession
A leader’s role is not only to lead, but also to ensure that new leaders are being developed and prepared to step up, explains Cheryl Gray. Here she talks about how to prepare new leaders for that transition.
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Give Them Options, Not Answers
Whether they’re in a formal or informal mentoring relationship with you, people will often come to you for answers. To truly help them grow in their careers, says Cheryl Gray, you shouldn’t give them answers. You should guide them in arriving at the answers on their own.
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How to Change a Bad Habit
If you rely on discipline and self control to change a habit you will fail.
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How to Have a Difficult Conversation
Peter Bregman waits for the third time before engaging in a difficult conversation. To wait longer makes the conversation more difficult.
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Plan Success in 18 Minutes Per Day
You are more likely to do things if you decide when and where to do them.
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Why We Procrastinate on Things We Care about Most
The things we care most about are often multi-step and challenging.
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Stay Focused on Top Priorities
Most time management systems focus on organizing work, not on managing work and time around priorities.
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Connect Your To Do List with Your Key Objectives
Peter Bregman selects five things to focus on. All his daily activities are organized around a to-do list that lists those five things plus the “other five percent.”
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Look Inward for Your Vision and Goals
Don’t define your vision and goals by looking at the outside world. Look inside instead.
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Connection Through Knowledge Flow
Knowledge flow means giving people voice. It occurs when everyone proactively seeks the ideas of others, shares ideas and opinions honestly, and safeguards relational connections.
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Employee Engagement = Connection
Jason Pankau offers three definitions of employee engagement.
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Raising Rules to the Level of Principles
The three rules are 1) better before cheaper—compete on value, 2) revenue before cost—increase volume or price premiums, and 3) there are no others. Follow the rules even when the data point in a different direction. Examples explain why.
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The 5 Elements of a Connection Culture
Inspiring identity, human value, voice, committed members, and servant leaders are the five elements of a connection culture.
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Executive Intelligence: Working With and Through Others
The best executives know how to “read” and work with others. An example is given of how Avon turned itself around.
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Executive Intelligence: Managing Yourself
Great executives recognize and adapt to their mistakes.
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What is Executive Intelligence?
Executive intelligence is asking the right questions and probing for the truth.
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Interviewing for Executive Intelligence
To interview for executive intelligence, ask the person to solve a real-world problem.
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The Ninth Freedom: Influencing for Legacy
The ninth freedom is the freedom for employees to leave. Create an experience that will make them cheerleaders when they do.
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Building a Team Connection the U2 Way
Michael Stallard tells how members of the rock band U2 have demonstrated their commitment to each other over 30 years.
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Shifting to a Collaborative Mindset
The shift from competition to collaboration is a slow, complex process.
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Three Requirements for Collaboration
Helpfulness, curiosity, and time are the three main elements needed for great collaboration.
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Incentivize Collaboration
In order to foster collaboration, companies have to create team performance rewards.
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The Need to Identify Team Assets
A team that knows and understands its own assets is much more effective.
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The Need for Collaboration
Having the best people in the business is useless if they don’t work together.
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Scratchy Relationships Improve Collaboration
Margaret Heffernan explains what a scratchy relationship looks like.
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Barriers to Collaboration
Individualism is a huge barrier to high-level collaboration.
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Use Collaboration to Motivate Teams
Leaders have an array of tools that can foster collaboration.
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The Golden Rule of Resilience
Resiliency to change is a matter of limiting stress by controlling more of what you can and letting go of what you can't control.
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Seven Ways to Message Change To Your Team
Despite the distractions created by change, leaders can keep their teams engaged and accountable and get their projects finished on time.
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Three Mindsets to Embrace Change
The three mindsets for embracing change include a growth mindset, an opportunity-seeking mindset, and healthy detachment.
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How to Ask for a Raise
Sharon Melnick shares her surefire advice for asking for and getting the raise you deserve.
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How to Instantly Calm From Anger
When you're feeling frustrated or angry, it's time for the cooling breath technique.
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How to Stay Calm
Learning to stay calm means learning to balance the on–off button in your nervous system.
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How to Ask for Referrals
Most people are happy to give you referrals, but they need you to first help them identify whom to refer.
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The Law of Influence
The Law of Influence is all about putting other people's interests first and creating good will so that you can develop relationships with them.
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Before You Become a Mentor
Mentors need some amount of training and a lot of empathy.
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Get to Sleep and Stay Asleep
When you wake up in the middle of the night with your mind going 90 miles per hour, left nostril breathing gets you back to sleep fast.
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Reacting to Critical Feedback
When faced with critical feedback or when dealing with negative situations, it is important to act with intention rather than react with emotion.
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Involve Individuals in the Mentoring Process
The secret to good mentoring is asking questions, not providing pat answers.
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One More Hour of Uninterrupted Time to Think
To get more time think, you need to eliminate whatever distractions you can and learn to manage the rest. Taking advantage of the acronym ACT lets you do both.
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Attitude of Gratitude
Practicing an attitude of gratitude can reap benefits in health, relationships, and even careers.
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Culture of Continuous Learning
Time spent on learning isn’t wasted; in fact, it may be a company’s best competitive advantage.
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Retain and Attract High Performers
Mentorship can attract and, importantly, retain high-performing employees.
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Mentorship: Identifying Skills to Develop
Mentors help people discover what areas they need to work on.
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Skills: Mentorship vs. Apprenticeship
Mentoring and apprenticeships focus on two different areas of skills, and you need to understand the difference.
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The Job of Mentors
Mentors act as process consultants, teaching mentees how to solve problems on their own.
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How Mentors Help Others Understand Their Weakness
Most people are naturally resistant to negative feedback, so it should be handled with tact.
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When Mentors Don’t Have the Answers
Even the best mentor doesn’t have the ability to solve every problem, and that’s okay.
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Mentoring Informally
Teachable moments can happen anywhere and at any time.
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The Impact of Mentoring on Succession Planning
One of the jobs of every supervisor, regardless of level, is planning for succession.
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Mentoring in the Digital Era
Mentoring will evolve in the digital era but retain its key principles.
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Becoming a More Effective Mentor
Mentors have multiple options if they want to improve in their role, many of which Paul Levy shares here.
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Managing Your Boss: Keep Them Happy
If you do your part to keep your boss happy, your job will be much more pleasant.
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Negotiating in Everyday Life
Negotiation doesn't just happen in boardrooms; it's part of everyone's everyday life.
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Negotiating is a Form of Selling
Negotiation can be viewed as a final step in the selling process.
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The Leader Sets the Example
Leaders are constantly being observed and evaluated by the people around them. Learn how to set the right example.
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Negotiating is Talking and Listening
In negotiations, your words can make or break a deal. Rob Brown gives you seven tips to get the best outcome.
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Negotiating Mistakes
Mistakes can be difficult to recover from, so it’s best to avoid them from the start.
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Negotiating Signals
In a negotiation, even your body language can influence the outcome.
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Negotiating Tips
Not everyone plays nicely in negotiations, but that doesn’t mean you have to be the victim.
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Negotiating Conversations
When your mind is prepared, you’re in the best possible position to get the results you want.
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Learning How to Listen
Listening is one of the most important skills you have as a leader; learn to do it better.
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Managing Your Boss: Giving Your Best Work
Your boss needs to know how to get the best work out of you.
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Managing Your Boss: Success
The secret to success may lie in how successfully you can manage your manager.
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Customer Service: Looking After Customers
The old myths about customer service just aren’t true.
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Customer Service: Myths
If you want to keep your customers happy and loyal, let go of old ideas about customer service.
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Managing Your Boss: Moving Up
Your ability to move up in an organization depends on your relationship with your boss.
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Managing Your Boss: Preventing Overwork
Your time is a resource that needs to be protected and utilized well.
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Customer Service on a Personal Level
A customer-centric culture has easily identifiable hallmarks, and your employees should know what they are.
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Create a Customer-Centric Culture
Creating lifetime customers is a smart strategy for to reduce marketing costs and improve profitability.
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Customer Service: It Starts with You
Customer service is a culture that begins with each individual employee.
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Customer Service: Culture is the Fabric
Your company culture is the biggest influence on how you treat customers.
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Controlling Emotions
Embrace your emotions, but don't let them totally control your reactions and decisions.
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Belief Systems
Each person has a unique and individual belief system that influences any given situation.
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Money Is Not the Target
Bob Burg explains why making money is not the objective of selling.
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Influence is Pull, Not Push
Influence is the act of drawing people in by attraction, not pushing them or using force.
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The Law of Value
Successful salespeople give more in value than they charge in payments.
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Selling is About Giving
At its core, selling is actually about giving.
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Empathy
People skills are possibly the most important skills you can master as a leader.
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Respond Instead of React
Instead of reacting, respond with persuasion. You'll be more like to get the result you want.
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The Law of Compensation
The Law of Compensation says that the more people whose lives you add exceptional value to, the more money you'll reap as reward.
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Characteristics of Feedback Groups
Feedback groups described in the book “True North Groups” are voluntary, with diverse viewpoints and experiences, that provide honest feedback for each other. A set of twelve topics is recommended for the first twelve meetings, dealing with personal life experiences.
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Creating a Feedback Group
The best way to start a group is to pick two friends you like to be with, then invite others to form a group of about 6-8 people. The group should start with a two-day off-site retreat, to break down barriers. Once they get going, groups can meet via Skype or other media.
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Why It's So hard to Eliminate Tasks
To maximize productivity eliminate low-value tasks. That’s hard. Some people can’t do it for fear they will pick the wrong one tasks, even though knowledge workers spend 41 percent of their time on tasks that provide little satisfaction and could be delegated.
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The Simple Math of Found Productivity
Busyness costs American business $300 billion in absenteeism, disengagement, and the like. Juliet Funt then adds the costs of just ten minutes of mindless activity per hour, and one mindless meeting per week. Reducing email cc’s, meeting length, etc. have a big payoff.
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The Invisible Habits of Excellence # 4: Make Room for Creativity
Whatever your problem, creativity is the answer. But creativity needs space; it cannot be summoned on demand. Juliet Funt’s creative moments come when she is lying in bed with her kids, waiting for them to go to sleep. Schedule time to just think. Protect that time.
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Life At Home: Don't Miss the Ride
Juliet Funt tells a story that illustrates the importance of taking time for your family. Because happy people are more engaged than their unhappy colleagues, 50 percent more motivated, and 50 percent more productive.
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Raising Engagement Through Email Relief
Email is addictive. Checking email elicits dopamine, a drug that makes us feel good. To dial back, define an elapsed time to response, times when you’re not checking email, use the phone or talk directly, control your email settings, and pack information in the subject line.
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Tapping Into Intrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivators – such as pay and benefits – can motivate people for a short while. But over the long haul, shares Stephen Harding, it’s the intrinsic motivators that keep employees engaged, growing, and productive.
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The Best Managers Catalyze Strengths
A manager who has a cookie-cutter approach to management is limited in his ability and is potentially limiting employees in their own abilities and careers, Stephen Harding explains. He outlines a much better way to develop employees.
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Managing by Walking Behind Them
The best managers are those who create opportunities for those under them to succeed, says Stephen Harding. Here he explains how managers function most effectively.
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The Opportunities of Technology
EMC Corporation used an internal social network to solicit ideas for cost reductions and make people feel part of the process.
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The Power of Culture
A company culture can encourage individuals to dissent, and feel their voice is heard.
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The Role of Ambition
Great managers have high ambitions, perseverance, high purpose, are wary of hubris, and know when it’s time to leave.
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Make the Most of Meeting Presentations
Presentations are a regular part of meetings, so learn how and when to use them for the greatest benefit.
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Be Your Whole Self
Blending in at work is tempting, but it is better in the long run to be yourself.
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Virtual Meetings That Work
Virtual meetings are infamous for their bad behaviors and poor participation, but there is a better way.
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Keys to High-Performing Teams
Swift-forming expert teams have the characteristics to be high-performing.
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Effective Meetings Require Structure
Meetings require structure to be effective. Using the PALPAR acronym makes it easy to frame discussion and produce better results.
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Overcome Meeting Conflicts
Solve conflicts during meetings with a "forces review" that looks at the positive and negative pressures affecting progress and gets team members to move forward.
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Use the Wisdom of the Group for Better Decisions
Utilizing the wisdom of an entire group results in better, longer-lasting decisions.
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Resilience Versus “ Presilience”
The concept of resiliency is insufficient; that's why you need presilience.
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Laughability and Alignment Create Perspective and Purpose
Laughability provides perspective while alignment provides purpose. Both are necessary for moving forward despite obstacles.
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To Adapt, Change Your Vantage Point
True adaptability is being able to see a situation from multiple points of view.
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Beware of Adaptability Demons
Adaptability demons are the forces that stop you from thinking positively and moving forward.
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Change Perspectives to Think Strategically
Strategic thinking is a skill that can be developed by changing three perspectives.
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Performance Goals Are Not Learning Goals
Learning goals are different from performance goals. With learning goals, the focus is on potential and results in hard work and perseverance.
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Involve Others to Create Change
Wherever there is change, there will be resistance to that change. Involvement makes change possible.
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Mapping Your Career Strategy
To reach your career destination, you need to map out a strategy, recognizing that the straightest course is not necessarily the best way to get there.
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Say No Without Alienating Others
When you are pulled in multiple directions, something has to give. It is possible to say no without endangering your relationships.
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Create a Mastermind Group to Grow Your Career
Give your career a big boost by creating a group of like-mind professionals to learn from and with.
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Building Influence Inside Your Company
To build your influence as a leader, share your ideas and knowledge.
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Wheel of Change: Planning for the Future
Improving your life or work, or the life or work of those around you, is easier using the four quadrants from the Wheel of Change as your guide.
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Establish Expertise to Secure Your Career
To acquire "career insurance," you need to establish your expertise within your organization. That means learning continuously, sharing your knowledge, and communicating your value.
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The Right and Wrong Way to Network
Success at networking takes effort, but these five simple steps show you how to make a good first impression and sustain the relationship for the long term.
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Getting Others to Listen When You’re Not Seen as an Expert
To get others to listen, you need to make them see you as an expert—even if they do not see you as one.
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Networking for Introverts
Introverts and others can ease networking jitters by preparing for networking opportunities before coming face to face with them.
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Persuasive Presentation
Give the appearance of ease even if you’re nervous, use a dynamic tone of voice, and speak directly to different people.
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Think Before Reacting
Reacting badly to a situation does not solve the problem—it makes you the problem. Always take the time to stop, breathe, and think before responding.
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Responding to Feedback
Keep your response to leadership feedback positive, simple, focused, and fast. Say thank you and avoid promising to change what you cannot.
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To Be Better, Ask For Input
You cannot be better on your own. Being better means asking others "What can I do to be better?"
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Listening Requires Caring
Listening requires caring and there are some really simple steps you can take to become a better listener.
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To Make a Change, Involve Others
Want to create a long-lasting change in your behavior? Set the goal, write it down, and state it publicly. Then, ask others to help you.
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Becoming A More Effective Delegator
You don't get better by delegating more—you get better by delegating more effectively. That means talking with employees about their responsibilities and yours.
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Six Question Coaching Process
Becoming a better coach is easier than you think. It takes only six simple questions to make you—and your organization—better.
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Developing Yourself As A Leader
You are a leader when others see you as a leader. It all starts with this question: How can I be a better _____?
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Providing Positive Recognition
Recognizing others has a multitude of benefits, as long as you approach it the right way. Learn how you can succeed where others fail.
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Be an Olympic Listener
Leadership is about listening. Be a sponge, open to everything. Be the last one to speak. His executive coach said he had to be an Olympic listener. To make the transition from Olympic talker to Olympic listener, Carl Ortell practiced with mentorships and staff meetings.
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Build Partnerships for the Future
Customer focus means building relationships for the long term, not for short-term gain. Lose the battle to win the war. Offer new solutions, like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs. Build relationships up to the C-level. Customer service means customer service plus one.
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Play Your Own Game
Early in Jeri Finard’s career she was offered an assignment that was not a promotion, but sounded like fun. A mentor said, “Play your own game.” It’s not about promotions. It’s more important to love what you do than to worry about the title on your card.
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Five Easy Ways to Stop Wasting Time
Five simple but critical steps can prevent you from wasting your time.
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Meeting Malpractice
Like most classic crimes, meeting malpractice begins long before the main event.
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The Best Leaders are Great Teachers: Part 2
On-the-spot feedback is a major component of being a great leader and a great teacher.
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What Most Bosses Get Wrong About Millennials
Smart leaders know how to provide what millennials are seeking.
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The Cohort Effect
The world’s best teams combine seemingly counter-productive work styles to create unusual success.
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The Best Leaders are Great Teachers: Part 1
The best leaders are those who teach values and ethics by example.
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Live Event: Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life
This Live Event was initially webcasted on May 14, 2019.
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Involve Your Audience to Improve Presentations
Getting listeners actively involved in your presentation raises your efficacy exponentially.
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Storytelling Improves Retention Rates
Storytelling is the best way to help listeners retain information.
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Use Leverage to Resolve Conflict
When you know why people want to resolve conflict, your role as facilitator becomes easier.
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How to Give Charismatic Presentations
Four clear steps can make you a more charismatic presenter.
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Better Presentations Improve Audience Retention
Speeches are often belabored with too much information. Nick Morgan shares two key ways to improve audience retention.
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Love Your Job, Don't Leave It
Jordan-Evans shares four steps for how to get what you need in order to love your job.
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Live Your Vision
You need to live your vision all the time, wherever you are.
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Giving Employees Space Fosters Engagement
Giving your employees more space might be the best way to keep them close.
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Follow the Blinking Word to Better Listening
Follow the blinking words to help you pay attention when people are talking.
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Achieve Your Goals By Looking Ahead
Following a straight line to reach your goals happens rarely; be prepared to reset as needed to reach your destination.
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Unrealistic Demands
Work is only going to get more demanding, and employees need to find healthy ways to deal with it.
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Increase Your Visibility
If you want to be noticed, you have to stand in the line of view.
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What to Do When You’re Being Undermined
It is inevitable that at some point in your career, another employee will try to undermine your reputation.
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Be Proactive About Opportunities
There is more to getting promoted than just doing a good job.
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Gain Trust to Attend Important Meetings
You’ll have to prove to your boss you’re ready if you want to take on more duties.
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Getting Recognition
If you want recognition, sometimes you’re going to have to toot your own horn.
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Be the Boss’s Favorite
Build a good relationship with your boss if you want to be the favorite.
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Break into the Inner Circle
Breaking into the inner circle takes planning and intention.
-
Influence Senior Management
To get ahead, make sure that your boss is getting ahead.
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3D Printing Is Here
3D printing is no longer the slow, junky process; instead, it’s the path to the future.
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Promote Myself
Promote yourself in a positive way that suits your ethics and integrity.
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The First 90 Days: Relationships
In the first 90 days at a new job, you should focus on building relationships.
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What is 3D Printing?
3D printing is a type of additive manufacturing that creates layers of materials to build a product or part.
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The Versatility of 3D Printing
3D printing has incredibly diverse capabilities that will revolutionize nearly every industry that currently exists.
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The Implications of 3D Printing
3D printing will change how businesses act and interact.
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Pan-Industrial Companies and Their Spheres of Influence
Once companies become pan-industrial, they’ll begin to create new spheres of influence.
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The Implications of 3D Printing on Society
The widespread creation of pan-industrial collectives could have enormous impact on world politics.
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3D Printing Platforms
The complexities of 3D printing will be beyond what humans can manage and will be delegated to software platforms.
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3D Printing Is Changing the Competition
3D printing will give rise to pan-industrial firms, which will in turn create pan-industrial collectives.
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Political Savvy Versus the Influence Effect
Being politically savvy carries a lot of negative connotations, but understanding how corporate culture works is key to moving up. For women who think politics is too sleazy, there is another way.
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Scenario Planning
When you're heading into unchartered territory and trepidation sets in, scenario planning alleviates anxiety and empowers you to press onward no matter how enormous the job ahead is.
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Keep Influence Groups in the Loop
Don't leave your influencers wondering what happened. Maintain momentum for your initiative by looping back to the people who support your idea.
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The Power of the Informal
The power of the informal is putting relationships to work for you.
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Relationship Mapping
Whatever change you desire, you can use the technique of relationship mapping to ensure all the right people are on your side.
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Women Being Political
Women and men view being political at work very differently, but fortunately, there are specific strategies women can use to reframe the topic in a more positive light.
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The Influence Effect
Just as wearing an off-the-rack suit can be uncomfortable, being political in a way you don't like is also going to be uncomfortable.
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Exceptional Operations Management: Focusing on the Customer
In this video Virginia Barnes talks about an operations manager who sets a new standard for operations and project management.
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Communication During Downsizing
Honest communication is critical during a force reduction.
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Listening: You Need to Hear the Unspoken
As a leader, oftentimes it’s challenging to hear the unspoken – read what’s happening around you and interpret it correctly – as you’re moving in a fast-paced world. For leaders the only way you will hear the unspoken, is by bringing the outside in.
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Fear of the Perfect
The fear of perfection can be a mighty foe. Colleen Albiston describes the effects of taking too long to craft the perfect message about decisions that have been made.
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The Four Ps and the C
Harry Halloran’s explains the phrase “The Four Ps and the C” - his motto for success.
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Playspace: Serious Business for Organizational Innovation, Learning, and Change
When organization are pressured and tested, this should be a time when organizations experiment with new approaches and innovative perspectives – creating more playscape – when it comes to innovation, learning, and change.
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The Importance of Mentoring Your People
A manager’s most important job is to develop his or her people.
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Engage Your Employee
It’s important to let employees have a voice in your decision-making.
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The Synergist
Leaders tend to be visionaries, processors, or operators.
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How To Be Persuasive
Jay Conger identifies four key things it takes to become a powerful persuader.
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Managers Sit in a Powerful Spotlight
As managers, it’s important to realize you’re often in the spotlight. People are watching, paying extra attention to your words and deeds. You are a model for people.
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Message to Women: Celebrate Your Success!
By celebrating their successes, women create momentum to go bigger and take on influential positions of power.
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Modeling Ethical Behavior
To create an environment of ethical behavior, the entire organization must behave that way. Venkatesh Valluri explains why it’s important to model ethical behavior.
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Tomorrow's Leaders Will Need Conceptual Flexibility
Traditional leadership models are becoming a thing of the past, especially in emerging markets. Venkatesh Valluri explains the concept of conceptual flexibility and why it will be a key trait of future leaders.
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Get Smart Before Your Next Meeting
Identify the players, the business conditions, and how it relates to the meeting agenda. Research the people thoroughly. Focus on the mood of the room. Boil all this down to bullet points. And don’t forget what you need to discuss.
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Habits for Highly Effective Meetings
Have a leader and a scribe, send agendas ahead of time, make decisions not talks, keep meetings to 45 minutes or less, keep presentations to 18 minutes at the end, no gadgets, and list who promised what in the last 5 minutes.
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How to Spot a Potential Great Leader
Potential leaders have followers. They prefer action to studying, listening to talking. They focus on the problem, not the product. They have emotional intelligence and generosity. They are “multipliers” not “diminishers.”
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How the Best Leaders Run Meetings
Start on time with what’s going right, stick to the agenda, focus on the decision, listen deeply, lead the meeting to as logical conclusion, leave when the time for the meeting is up, and avoid the meeting after the meeting.
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How to Be a Great Meeting Partner
Prepare for the meeting ahead of time, show up early, volunteer to take notes, don’t bring gadgets, don’t interrupt, help to keep the meeting moving along, and write down each promise you make, including a due date.
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How to Use Skills and Contacts
When you draw on assets from different areas of your life in both skills and contacts, you can expand your circle of successes.
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How to Delineate and Maintain Boundaries
Knowing how—and when—to delineate boundaries puts you in control of your own life.
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Communicating with the People Most Important to You
For meaningful and important communications, role-playing ahead of the actual conversation leads to greater clarity and insight for those involved.
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Warmth Drives Behavior and Loyalty
To demonstrate that your intentions are worthy of others' loyalty, apply the principle of worthy intentions.
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Treat Mistakes as Opportunities to Increase Loyalty
When managers handle mistakes by putting others' interests before their own, they create opportunities to build customer and employee loyalty.
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Loyalty in the Digital Age
Despite the fact that technology enhances our ability to conduct business, the struggle to build loyalty is greater than ever. To understand why, we have to look at human evolution.
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How a Leader Can Develop Their Own Brand
Personal branding is about your leadership style and incorporating into all that you do professionally.
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Branding in the Digital Age
Digital branding goes far beyond social media. Companies need to be able to back up what they promote.
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Customer Centricity and Focus
Every company says it is customer-focused or customer-centric, but the proof is in the pudding.
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Eliminate Loyalty Blind Spots to Improve Performance
What impression do your words and actions convey? If you don't know, you could be unwittingly driving away employees and customers.
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Creating a Great Brand
A great brand is more than just a logo; it touches every aspect of your organization.
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The Scale of Progress
The scale of progress has turned business from long-standing, face-to-face relationships to cost-conscious transactions that are void of the human touch and bad for the bottom line.
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Why You Need Power Skills
It’s a tough world. You need power skills to keep your job.
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A 21st Century Learning Framework
Nick van Dam explains the concept of a 21st century learning framework – a framework that shows different learning modalities, the different learning solutions that support both formal and informal learning.
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Put Your Focus on the Top Line
The most important advice he ever received was to focus on the top line.
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Be Courageous and Authentic: Call it Like it is
The culture of a company should be intellectually honest, courageous and open, where people are free to speak the truth.
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Smashing Radios and Anger Control
Throwing a radio won’t fix a mistake. In fact, explains John Snook, it’s only the beginning of a bigger set of problems.
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Terminating a Long-Term Employee
Sometimes the most outrageous ideas are the ones you need most. Colleen Albiston explains how she learned that firing people was actually good for employee morale.
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Enabling Creativity in an Organization
Creativity is needed in every aspect of business, especially as business environments change.
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Solving Complex Problems
When faced with a complex problem step back, de-conflict the priorities, and find the root of the problem.
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Innovation: Paint a Picture of the End Game
Innovation begins with collaboration.
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First Clarify the Client's Problem
Every sales conversation is different. Don’t ask leading questions. Clarify problems. Ask where the client is in their decision-making, then ask questions to get them emotionally engaged. Do your due diligence. Learn as much about them as they know about you.
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Use the Language of the Client
Trust is key to selling. To build trust, use the client’s language, especially when mirroring emotions, because people buy on emotion justified by logic. Using the same language demonstrates you’re listening. The same applies to coaching. Peri gives examples.
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Listening Builds Trust
Trust improves performance. Team members who trust their manager work harder, provide more feedback, are more adaptable, accept coaching, and treat their clients better. The best way to build trust is to listen. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
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Smartcuts: Accelerating Innovation, Managing Change, & Thinking Differently
Breakthrough innovation happens when we rethink conventional wisdom. But how do you train yourself—or your organization—to think differently? How do you foster an environment where it’s safe to do so, where innovation can thrive without destroying your business? In this clever and surprising keynote, Snow debunks myths of success, shares unforgettable research and stories, and fires audiences up to 11. You will never think the same.
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The Necessary Art of Persuasion
Jay Conger studies influential leaders and change agents who are masters of constructive persuasion. He’s distilled their skills into four fundamental dimensions that anyone can learn. In this keynote, Jay shares the techniques and practices that you can deploy to get your colleagues to support your ideas and initiatives. These are skills you never learned in school but are the trademarks of influential people.
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The Power of Insight: How Self-Awareness Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life
For most leaders, the increasing rate of change—at work and in life—is downright dizzying. They face industry disruption, growing to-do lists, shrinking budgets, and the challenge of managing a demographically diverse workforce. And the behaviors that helped them in the past aren’t the same behaviors they will need to succeed in the future. Fortunately, reveals Dr. Tasha Eurich, the foundational skill of future-ready leadership is also highly learnable.
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Your Competitive Advantage Is Not What You Think It Is
Everyone says their competitive advantage is their people, culture, and relationships. Those can’t be advantages if everyone claims them.
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What Makes Great Performers Great
All the world’s great performers engage in “deliberate practice."
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Radical Customer-Centricity
Customers vary in their individual wants, needs, and profitability to the company.
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Your Network is Your Net Worth
The importance of networking can never be underestimated. Glain Roberts-McCabe discusses why you can never stop networking and how you can continually build your network.
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The Customer is King
To delight customers first understand and align with them.
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Sustainability and Profitability
According to Geoff Sharples, sustainability and profitability has three levels. The first being for sustainability reasons - for employee morale, doing right by the earth. The second is cost saving. And lastly, turning it into a revenue initiative.
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Be a Part of the Solution
Sometimes, leaders need to take a step back. Pam Laycock explains the benefits of putting employees in charge of problem solving.
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The Power of Team Problem Solving
Leaders don’t always have to have all the answers. Lauri Curtis shares why some of the best solutions to problems come from letting employees address the issues.
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Always Be Opening
Sales offers should be proportional to the trust you have earned.
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The Contrarian Effect to Sales
Most sales people move too fast. Sales offers should be proportional to the trust you have earned.
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Working Through Influence
In the absence of positional authority, everyone at W.L. Gore has to sell their ideas and work through influence.
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Defining Moments Come During Difficult Times
Terri Kelly reflects on a moment of truth in her career at Gore, when she was part of a management team of the fabrics division.
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Organizations Respond to Authenticity: Be Who You Are
As a leader, it’s important to be genuine, authentic. Organizations will respond to a person when they believe they’re really hearing the real person, not a rehearsed speech.
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Four Types of Conversations
The four types of conversations are building relationships, developing others, making decisions, and taking action.
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Provide Clear Guidelines with Secret Doors
A friend installed an invisible electric fence for his dog but didn’t train the dog. Results were disastrous. Establish clear goals, reward meaningful progress within clear expectations, and let people decide, but also encourage them to jump the invisible fence.
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Learning Is the Foundation of Leadership
Knowing is about the past. Learning is about creating the success of your people, your organization, and yourself. Learning is the foundation of leadership.
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The Best Use of Emails
Vent first, then delete. Pick up the phone instead or have an in-person conversation.
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Leadership is an Act of Bravery
Campbell Jones, COO of a large Australian company, spends almost all his time in the field, meeting, listening, delegating, and supporting different divisions. Such behaviors are acts of bravery — choosing to be uncomfortable in a series of new situations.
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Assessing the Value of Your Employees
Employee value equals current performance plus future potential minus emotional expensiveness. Weigh emotional expensiveness three times.
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Use Empathy Instead of Sympathy For Better Results
Sympathy means agreeing that employees are victims of their circumstances. Empathy means calling employees to greatness, telling them they’re so great they’re bulletproof, that they can succeed under any circumstances.
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Customer Service is an Ongoing Relationship
Companies like Harley-Davidson, Zappos, Running Room, Uber, and Apple offer several ways to access customer service. They don’t use scripts, but empower customer reps to make decisions and surprise and delight customers. Sarah Robinson gives examples.
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The Ethics of Business Decisions
Most business decisions have ethical dimensions.
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Adapting to Changing Market Conditions
Terri Kelly discusses how teams at W.L. Gore reacted to recent changes in the market and how they adapted to it by putting the enterprise first.
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Are You Working at Your Maximum Level of Productivity?
To increase productivity: 1) keep it neat; organize as you go; 2) stay hydrated with water; caffeinated beverages are diuretics; 3) stop being a perfectionist; 4) quit procrastinating; set deadlines for small chunks; and 5) visualize success at the start and end of each day.
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Time is the Most Precious Resource
Good time management is crucial to success. The eight biggest time wasters are the Internet, socializing, personal communications via electronic devices, personal business, smoking, arriving late and departing early, job-hunting, and spacing out.
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Don't Forget the Family
To create family time rearrange your work schedule, telecommute, hire household help, have a sit-down meal together, combine business travel with vacations, limit your kids’ extracurricular activities, and turn off the electronics. Focus on the family.
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What is Stress?
Positive stressors include exercise and a promotion. Even negative situations such as fear of failure can drive productivity. Stress and productivity increase together up to a point; further stress lowers productivity. Disengage at that point to recharge your batteries.
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Avoid Distractions at Work
Distractions include technology, people, and your brain. Disable email alerts, except from important people, and other communication devices. Discourage drop-in visitors through signals and barriers. If your brain distracts you, write it down and keep working.
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Slip Your Electronic Leash
Paying too much attention to your email can lower your IQ by up to ten points. Constant connection to electronic devices can have the same effect as missing a night’s sleep or smoking marijuana. Disconnect to socialize, recharge, and increase productivity.
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The Get Better Mindset
Social psychologist and researcher Dr. Heidi Grant explores the mindsets needed to ensure personal growth. She advises we should avoid a “Be Good” mindset — one where we are constantly attempting to prove ourselves and outperform others. Instead, we should embrace a “Get Better” mindset — where we always perceive ourselves as having more to learn, we welcome risk and are less afraid of failure, both keys to personal and professional success, and resilience in the face of change and challenge.
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Captivate Everyone You Meet and Never Be Forgotten, Overlooked or Interrupted Again
As a human behavior hacker, Vanessa Van Edwards created a research lab to study the hidden forces that drive us. And she’s cracked the code. In this keynote, blending powerful research with hilarious stories, Vanessa shares shortcuts, systems, and secrets for taking charge of your interactions at work, at home, and in any social situation. These aren’t the people skills you learned in school.
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Work-Life Flexibility
"Work-life balance" is really about a flexible work schedule.
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Social Influence Networks in the Workforce
Companies are more likely to recruit using social networks like LinkedIn, facebook, and twitter than from job boards.
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Guided Learning and Reverse Mentoring
Since young employees prefer to learn from mentors and coaches, not in classrooms or via elearning, companies are learning how to mentor in real time using media tablets and mobile devices. In reverse mentoring, young people help their elders apply social media.
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The Consumerization of Learning
Workers use their iPads at work to go on Amazon, check restaurant reviews, and contribute reviews. Similarly, workers will also expect to contribute to their own learning, not be passive consumers of training materials.
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Building an Uber Connect Strategy to Drive Collaboration
Corporations are creating internal social networks so employees can connect with other, submit suggestions and reports, collaborate, and accelerate innovation. Build the network into the workflow of individuals, teams, and senior executives as home pages.
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Four Reasons People Don't Do Things
When someone doesn’t do what you ask him or her to do, ask why. If they really can’t do it, move or fire them. If they think they can’t, coach or train them. If they don’t want to, tell them they can. If they don’t know how to do it, coach or train them.
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Do You have Any Questions?
Typically, when you tell someone to do something, you end by asking, “Do you have any questions?” and they say “No.” Instead, ask, “What are you going to do first?” or, “What am I expecting?” Also, break long assignments into pieces with short deadlines.
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Magic Phrases That Persuade Others
Magic Phrase #1, “I suggest,” says what you want. Magic Phrase #2, “Notice,” says what to pay attention to. Magic Phrase #3, “You can,” encourages the other person to imagine what you want. Magic Phrase #4, “Now,” says when you want it done.
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Body Language for Persuasion
Matching body language says you two are alike, which relaxes the other person by lowering their stress, and helps you get to “yes” more quickly.
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Verbal Language for Effective Influence
People are kinesthetic, auditory, visual, or auditory/digital (interested in details). To persuade someone use words they prefer, like “grasp” (kinesthetic), “see” and “appear” (visual), “that sounds good” and “rings a bell” (auditory), and “consider” (auditory/digital).
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Emotional Intelligence in Effective Leadership
Paul Hiltz shares a story of how people can be so emotionally charged about issues near to their heart and explains what leaders can do to prepare resistance to change in the work world.
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The Performance Paradox: Less Effort Yields More Results
A NASCAR pit crew improved its time when they were measured on process, not on a stopwatch. Increasing motivation improves performance only to a point. Don’t measure innovation teams on extrinsic goals like number of ideas; concentrate on the process.
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Two Techniques for Enabling Breakthrough Thinking (on a Team)
To every idea presented in a team, someone will respond, “Yes, but.” To keep divergent thinking alive, require that people say, “Yes, and” instead. Objections stated as facts, such as lack of time or money, are recast as challenges. How can we create time or do it faster?
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Challenge Your Assumptions to Avoid Confirmation Bias
Army research showed a tendency to focus on evidence supporting an hypothesis and ignore disconfirming evidence. This “confirmation bias” was counteracted by instructions to seek out disconfirming evidence. We should do the same in the innovation world.
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The Importance of Experimenting
A successful experiment is any that helps you understand and shape your hypothesis.
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Problem Solving: Focus on Pains Instead of Gains
People are more interested in solving their pains than in gaining something. For example, people would rather lose their gut than gain six-pack abs. Citibank ATM machines finally took off during a blizzard when banks were closed and stores had no money.
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Finding the Best Solution: Use Line-Thinking to Connect the Dots
Steve Jobs said creativity is having enough dots to connect—finding solutions in different places. Asking for uses of a brick is different from asking to connect a brick to a random object.
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Innovative Teams: The Four Personality Styles You Need to Have
Innovation is a collaborative process that requires different personalities at each step: analytic people to define the challenge, creative people to generate solutions, people who plan and execute to get things done, and emotional people to manage the change.
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Innovation: Staying One Step Ahead of Your Competition
Innovation isn’t about new products, new processes, or new business models. It’s about adaptability and nimbleness. It’s about staying one step ahead of the competition. Innovation is not an event. It’s a repeatable, predictable, sustainable process.
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Expertise: The Enemy of Innovation
Experts come up with solutions quickly and stop looking for anything more innovative. Breakthrough solutions almost always come from cross-disciplinary teams that look at problems from different points of view.
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Innovation: Spend More Time Defining the Problem (and Much Less on the Solution)
Asking the right question in the right way is the one of the most important parts of the innovation process. Ask concrete questions. Not how do we clean up the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, but how do we keep the oil in the water from freezing?
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Qualities of Influential Managers
Influential managers 1) don’t worry about what other people think; leadership is not about popularity; 2) are resilient; everyone has setbacks; and 3) have empathic understanding of other people; they can see the world through other people’s eyes.
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Leadership & Empathy
You are not a leader if no one is following.
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The Knowing-Doing Gap
Leaders should both know and do.
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How to Be a Better Decision-Maker
To be a better decision maker pay attention to data, not assumptions.
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Leadership and Power
Leadership is about power.
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Understanding Feedback
At her first job out of grad school, Patricia Crull was given enormous amounts of feedback, a habit she has adopted for herself and taken with her throughout her career.
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How to Run a Creative Meeting
According to Lorraine Heggessey, conducting a creative meeting requires that participants be in relaxed environment, often off-site, which can produce the right mood. That right mood brings out a free-thinking state where new ideas flow.
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Don't Overlook Good People
Good people often get overlooked. As Lorraine Heggessey shares, a bit of praise, a new challenge, and new responsibilities can convert an employee from one who is about to be written off to one who works at his full potential.
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Being a Leader is about Creating a Positive Atmosphere
Being a leader, according to Lorraine Heggessey, requires cultivating a workplace atmosphere that is positive, energizing, and dynamic. Praising and rewarding the resulting good work of your staff means that you will see more of that same output.
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Dirty Dozen Rules of Talent Management: Rule #6 - Let the Malcontents Go First
Particularly in a downsizing adjustment you want to make sure your remaining work population is not just the cynical ones. Retaining those with a strong positive attitude contributes greatly to organization performance.
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Dirty Dozen Rules of Talent Management: Rule #11 - Encourage Alliances and Networking
Be a corporate matchmaker and align people with similar passions.
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Dirty Dozen Rules of Talent Management: Rule #8 - Give Talent Time to Recharge
If you put your employees on a treadmill, you will create high mental fatigue and low moral and performance. Tim Sanders explains the practices at SAS which lead to one of the highest retention rates in North America.
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Dirty Dozen Rules of Talent Management: Rule #2 - Pick Talent Against the Corporate DNA
If you focus on the candidates values and characteristics you will build a workforce with diversity that also holds the core beliefs of the organization.
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Dirty Dozen Rules of Talent Management: Introduction
In this series Tim Sanders explains how to build a complete talent management plan.
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Dirty Dozen Rules of Talent Management: Rule #1 - Advertise for Alignment
Tim Sanders believes that one of the most important talent attraction strategies is to start with your talent advertising process.
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Sustainable Solutions
Everyone is asked to do more with less. Matt May argues that working with less can prompt innovative and imaginative solutions.
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From Confrontation to Influence: Selling Up
When a team wants to introduce a change, they put together arguments that show how the change benefits the manager.
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The "Values" Value Proposition
We can’t reinvent ourselves, but we can get closer to our core values and attract people who share those values.
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Building a Shared Vocabulary
To build trust among team members quickly, the person who signs the paychecks is not allowed in the room when team members present their values to the group. The person who signs the paychecks returns at the end when the team decides on its core values.
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Why Vision Statements Fail
Vision statements fail because they paint pictures of the future that appeal only to leadership. Vision statements leave out the people who work there.
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How to Develop Confidence in Yourself and Others
Confidence is not all or none; there are four levels: 1) the confidence to try—to attempt; 2) the confidence to learn—to progress; 3) the confidence to do—to be competent; and 4) the confidence to teach—to fuel the confidence of others to try.
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Relationship Building Begins with Interest
If you’re not interested in people and their development you probably won’t be an effective leader.
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Mindsets and Methods
To make the most of opportunities we need to know both how to think and what to do—mindsets and methods.
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Integrity Is a Character Issue
Character is who you are when nobody is looking. Integrity is the distance between your lips and your life—between what you believe and what you do.
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Pay Attention to Your Customers
All businesses are, or should be, customer-driven. But, as John Foster explains, being customer-driven goes beyond simply meeting customers’ needs.
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Tips on Team Collaboration
You can take several practical steps to ensure a healthy and productive team collaboration. John Foster shares how he develops highly effective teams.
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Tips on Coaching
To grow as a company, leaders need to shift responsibility to others, grow more leaders within the company. John Foster talks about effective ways to do this.
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Live Event: Creating Order Out of Chaos--Staying Afloat in a World of Too Much to Do
This Live Event was originally broadcast on Wednesday, March 7, 2018.
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The CLO: Chief Listening Officer
Marketing in the social media world means you have to listen as hard as you talk. Chief Listening Officer is a new position in Fortune 500 companies. People look for social proof from each other. Do they like you, are you responsive, and do you have a personality?
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Leadership Defined
Leadership is of critical importance to business executives. Vishen Lakhiani defines his vision of great leadership, and how that vision changed over the years as he gained experience in the business world.
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Customer Focus Increases Profits
Businesses all want a great bottom line: profits. But, as Vishen Lakhiani reports, focusing on profits is not the best way to either increase the profits or run a business.
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Survival Is Not Mandatory
Survival might not be mandatory, but for organizations that want to beat out their competitors, attention to speed and security is key.
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Learn to Motivate People Internally
External motivation has a finite impact. In this lesson, Stuart Symington describes why real and lasting motivation must be born internally.
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Communicating Virtually
Virtual communication has replaced much of traditional face-to-face communication, and it can sometimes lead to confusion.
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Email and Emotions
Email tends to overwhelm people at every level of employment, but it can be controlled.
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Putting Emotions into Digital Communications
The digital era of communications requires intentional adding-in of emotional expression.
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Connect With Others
Humans aren’t meant to live in isolation, either at work or at home. People need socialization.
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Email Triage
Email saves both time and money, but it does need to be managed appropriately. Are you managing your email, or is email managing you?
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The Social Media Diet
The only way to strengthen emotional connections and make good business decisions in a virtual world is to go on a social media diet.
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Avoid Making Decisions on Audio Conferences
On the phone, emotions get taken out of human voices, so it’s best to make decisions after you hang up.
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Keep Video Conferences Short
The unconscious mind makes hard work of video conferences, so keep those calls short.
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Paying Attention on Conference Calls
Virtual communication is great as long as people don’t tune out of the conversation. Get people engaged by getting them to participate.
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The Biggest Problem with Virtual Communication
Because virtual communication limits sensory feedback, people new to learn a new way of talking to each other.
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Ethics: Penalties to Potential
Ethics is more than avoiding fines, penalties, and sanctions. Ethics also involves care. Not hitting people in the workplace means we should care for them. Envision organizations where people feel valued.
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Hire Ninjas, Jedi's, & Pirates
Hiring is the core organizational process, not search or innovation. Facebook, for example, hires Ninjas to write great code, but also Jedis to look for and solve real problems, not just ones the boss identifies, and Pirates, who are entrepreneurial and willing to rock the boat.
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Scaling Trust
To scale trust, model it. For example, a leader published the results of his 360-degree feedback. For people to trust each other they must have confidence in themselves. Adobe eliminated reviews in favor of constant feed forward, and let managers distribute bonuses.
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How Women Can Succeed in a Male Environment
Despite rising numbers of women in the workforce, females still face an uphill battle in some business environments. Monhla Hlahla shows how female leaders take on and win these battles.
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Leaders Build Excellence in Others
It might sound like a cliche, says Monhla Hlahla, but the heart of leadership is seeing the best in others and bringing them alongside you.
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How to Disagree
You can disagree without being disagreeable, and knowing how to disagree helps everyone.
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Get to the Point
Skip the yawn-inducing introduction and get down to business—you’ll build a more persuasive case.
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Clear Communication
Don’t assume you’re being a clear communicator; make sure you’re being heard and understood.
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Five Best Practices to Prevent Business Writing Blunders
Poor writing skills can hinder or even sink your credibility, but a few smart tips will keep your writing in top form.
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Elevator Conversations
Ditch the worn-out elevator pitch and aim for an engaging conversation instead.
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Tame Your Anxiety
Fixating on yourself can make anxiety turn into a monster but focusing on others has a calming effect.
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Fight Imposter Syndrome
Do you ever feel like an imposter? That's just anxiety talking, not the truth.
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Three Questions to Lessen Anxiety
Define your anxiety and you lessen its power over you.
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How to Feel Less Nervous
Putting your own special twist on a presentation can actually make you less nervous.
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How to Feel Comfortable at Social Events
Unstructured social events are a main driver of anxiety, so introducing structure can lessen that nervousness.
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Safety Behaviors
The very safety behaviors that people use to calm stress may actually be counterproductive.
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Receiving Feedback
Receiving feedback with a positive attitude and growth mindset is preferable to acting defensively.
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Ways to Gain Confidence
The learning curve at a new job can be intimidating, but confidence will come with practice.
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Small Blunders Increase Your Likeability
Little mistakes can actually make you more likeable as a person.
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Positive Versus Negative Motivators
Negative motivators, such as reducing budgets and insisting on quick results, can be effective in the short run but have negative long-term consequences. Motivators such as encouraging employees to be passionate about goals have a better longer-term result.
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Reduce Anxiety by Breathing
Feeling stressed? Skip the deep breath and try to blow a bubble instead.
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Uncover Personal Agendas Through Trust
Most senior executives don’t know the personal agendas of key stakeholders. You won’t learn those agendas by asking. To open up a personal agenda you must invest time in a long-term relationship. It works both ways; you must share your own personal agenda.
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Establishing Personal Connections Remotely
Most senior executives don’t know the personal agendas of key stakeholders. You won’t learn those agendas by asking. To open up a personal agenda you must invest time in a long-term relationship. It works both ways; you must share your own personal agenda.
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LGBT Diversity
LGBT diversity creates a competitive advantage for businesses, allowing their talent to bring their full selves and everything they have to offer to the workplace.
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Employee Resource Groups Improve Diversity
When it comes to recruiting and retaining diverse talent, employee resource groups (ERGs) offer many benefits.
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Diversity and Covering
Diversity issues have expanded from the original definition, and covering for these expanded diversity issues is costly for both individuals and organizations.
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Three Steps to Accelerating Your Career
Knowing your passions and goals are the starting point for accelerating your career.
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The Secret to Building Stakeholder Relations
Stakeholder relationships can help you advance your career at any stage.
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Culture and Salary Isn't Everything
Employees want more than a salary; they want a job with meaning.
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Three Strategies for a Better P&L
Managing your P&L is much easier if you think of it as one giant checkbook.
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Unconscious Bias and Its Role in Diversity
Overcoming natural and necessary unconscious bias takes slow, deliberate steps that can lead to innovation gold.
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Get Ready for the Millennial Generation
Millenials will be the largest generation in the workplace by 2020, and if you're not already adapting to their preferences, it's high time you follow Brown's advice.
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Leading from the Balcony
A leader should have an eagle-eye view of a team that encompasses more than what each individual sees.
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Coaching Across Distance
Coaching at a distance takes more effort, but it can yield results in the same way as face-to-face coaching.
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First-Time Managers
Becoming a manager for the first time is a major developmental change in your career and your personal life.
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Managing Uncertainty
Everyone manages in uncertainty, and the best weapon of defense is the ability to adapt.
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Developing Talent
Recruiting talent isn't enough—companies need to know how to retain good employees through development.
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Embrace Who You Are to Realize Your Potential
To realize your true potential, says Natalie Maroun, you must embrace all that you are, instead of just the factors that you believe the business world wants to see.
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The Power of a Mantra
To find the soul of your organization, Grattan Kirk explains how you can use the power of a mantra to change its entire culture for the better.
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Execute Or Be Executed
The best strategy is nothing without the ability to execute. Grattan Kirk explains what it takes to deliver on strategy from the top down.
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On Becoming a Better Leader
Becoming a better leader is a multi-step process, and Natalie Maroun gives her perspective on the most important parts of the undertaking.
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Ethical Leaders Commit to Learning
Ethical competence is a moving target. We need to embark on a life-long personal learning journey. Linda Fisher Thornton tells of a baker who bakes gluten-free bread. He switched to rice flour, which is cheaper but has arsenic. He didn't know because he hadn’t kept up.
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Honoring Ethics and Profit
If we talk more about profits than ethics, employees will assume that profits are more important. Your core values should help employees choose when ethics and profits appear to conflict—when the right thing to do may lower the quarterly numbers.
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Leading for the Long Run
Ethical leaders maximize their positive impact and minimize their negative impact. They do good without doing harm. They think in terms of long term impact, not just short-term gain. The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.
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What Is Ethical Leadership
The seven lenses of ethical responsibility are profits, laws, character, people, communities, the planet, and the greater good. All seven perspectives are important in order to live ethically in a global society.
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Leading from a Strong Moral Center
Profitability is not a strong guiding value when we make ethical decisions; profitability substitutes money for morality. Keep ethical expectations and values on the wall, on the meeting agenda, and on the radar. Describe what ethics looks like, especially in gray areas.
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Qualities of Good Leaders
In the eternal quest for a good leader, there are three qualities to look out for.
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Defining a Coaching Culture
Creating a coaching culture starts with defining a coaching culture, and there’s much work to be done before that can happen.
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Two Contexts of Mentoring
Mentors help you learn about your internal and external worlds in order to make better choices.
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Coach vs. Mentor
Mentoring and coaching have different origins but work similarly to accomplish goals.
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At the First Mentor Meeting
During their first meeting with a mentee, it’s critical for mentors to identify whether they’re the right person for the job.
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Powerful Questions
What makes a good question? The answer is a PRAIRIE: questions should be personal, resonant, acute, incisive, reverberant, innocent, and explicit.
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Building Coaching Culture Inside Teams
A high-performing team is reliant on effective coaching, a process that involves greater complexity than coaching individuals.
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The Power of Intent
When a child is born in Africa, the mother writes a song. If the child cries while the mother is in the field the mother feels it, sings the song, and the child stops crying. Employees can feel your intent as a leader. You must be consistent in your intentions and actions.
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Admit You Need Help
Leaders should connect the dots between intentions and actions. A plumber doesn’t care about your house; he only wants to know where the leak is. A CEO needn’t talk about his or her organizations; they need only say to employees, “I have a problem. Can you help me?”
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Admit You Don't Know, Hypothesize, Test, Repeat
Like vegetables, everything gets stale — ideas, strategies, markets, relationships. Unless we reinvent them they will fail. We become more irrelevant every day. The answer we think we know is already obsolete. Admit you don’t know, frame a hypothesis, test it, repeat.
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What vs. How
Apple develops products on the “what” axis, but for every success there are ten thousand failures. For Southwest and Virgin airlines the “how” is more important. Vineet Nayar achieved “impossible” growth by concentrating on the company-customer interaction.
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The Power of 'I Don't Know'
On becoming the new CEO, he was asked, in front of 5,000 employees, “What are you going to do?” He answered, “I don’t know. You know. You tell me.” This transferred ownership to the employees. The job of the CEO is to enable employee performance.
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Trust Through Transparency
The wife of a colleague who often worked late thought he was having an affair. The wife locked him out of the house until she saw his credit card statement. He refused. Vineet Nayar asked whether his purpose was to have the conversation or to get into the house.
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Challenges Senior Leaders Face Most
Challenges include 1) trying to make the organization better while dealing with crises and day-to-day issues; 2) people decisions, especially not moving fast enough to replace people; and 3) focus; making decisions in the morning when you’re fresh, not in the afternoon.
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You Can't Lead Others Until You Lead Yourself
It’s hard to lead if you don’t have a clear purpose, an ability to absorb shocks, and an ability to manage your energy, as opposed to managing your time.
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How to Energize Others
To energize others, raise their ambition. Inspire them to reach beyond where they think they might go, to a place they might never have thought about. And tell the truth. Be honest. Barton Dominic found honesty helpful in his own career.
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Evaluating Your Career Satisfaction
Dominic Barton wants to make a difference in the emerging world, and evaluates himself with respect to that purpose. A co-worker he trusts periodically asks him questions like, “Why do you to do this? Do you think it makes a difference? Do you have enough time?”
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Unleashing the Potential of your People: Inspire Hope not Fear
Fear makes us concentrate on survival and security, not engagement and innovation. Inspire hope, instead.
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How to Increase Collaboration and Innovation: Differentiate between Fact and Truth
“Incestuous amplification” occurs when aggressive people shut off others who are less confident.
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Using Vulnerability to Increase Mutual Accountability
A young CEO who tried to lead through force confessed his ineffectiveness and vulnerability to his top leaders and asked for their help. This led to a snowball of mutual accountability down through the organization, and great corporate success.
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Authenticity: The Two Masks that Inhibit Leadership Effectiveness
Leaders may hide behind masks. Ask, What are the costs of a mask, and how you can be more authentic at work?
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How to Shift your People from Passive to Purposeful
A call to action includes what, so what, and now what.
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Leadership with Impact: Close the Gap between your Intentions and Actions
We tend to judge ourselves by our intentions, but everyone else by their actions.
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My Day Got Away! How to Turn an Unproductive Day Around
Try these techniques when you feel like you’re not accomplishing anything.
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Reduce the Unimportant - Maximize Your Productive Potential
Laura Stack identifies four steps to take to increase your productivity.
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Horizontal Teams
Most organizations are hierarchical. By contrast, workers in horizontal teams are empowered and mutually accountable.
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Treat Feedback As Data
When you depersonalize feedback you can view it as data, not as someone who is attacking you.
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Five Keys to Effective Meetings
To make meetings work, 1) someone is in charge, 2) an agenda explains why people are there, 3) the people at the meeting are the people who need to be there, 4) the meeting has clear outcomes and responsibilities, and 5) someone keeps the meeting on track.
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Prudent Risk Taking
Risk-taking is a dance. The risk should be small, to allow for failure.
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The Neuroscience of Motivation
The brain responds to stimuli as threats or rewards. The threat response is five times stronger than the reward response, so threats get more attention, but also reduce creativity and collaboration. Rewards produce better, faster, and more sustainable results.
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How Leaders Can Improve the Quality of People's Thinking
Leaders usually try to help people’s thinking by suggesting what to do. Ask questions instead. Have a conversation. “What are you trying to achieve?” Help them come to their own insights. This is motivating, changes the brain, and helps them develop general rules.
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What Brain Research Says About Leadership
Successful leaders are adaptive. They are conscious of their options in the moment, and choose effectively. Depending on the situation, they may display strong emotions to inspire and motivate, or be calm, or care about what others are thinking and feeling, or not care.
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The Most Important Habits for Driving Change
About 70 percent of change initiatives fail, most from failure to change behavior. To succeed, focus on a concrete vision as the reward, ask questions to help people see the world in new ways, and embed these new habits by repeating them over and over.
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Why Organizations Fail to Execute on Their Strategy
We think about goals and people with different parts of the brain. Thinking about one shuts off access to the other. Thus, leaders tend to focus on goals and ignore the implications of those goals for the people who are asked to achieve them.
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Leadership Self Development
To be a better leader, pick one area for development. Check it with allies. Ask what the new behavior would look like. Then get feedback. For a CEO who wouldn’t listen, a subordinate reported the percent time he talked, and encouraged him to ask opened-ended questions.
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Effective Feedback
To provide effective feedback, 1) explain why you are providing the feedback; 2) identify specific behaviors, with examples; 3) describe the consequences of those behaviors; 4) brainstorm a new behavior together; and 5) share your fears about providing the feedback.
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Coaching Team Members
When someone come to you for coaching, ask them for several solution options, invite them to consider the pros and cons of each option, then brainstorm the best option with them. Don't rush to the first solution. Step back. Ask what outcome you are trying to achieve.
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Coaches Build Self Confidence
Great coaches build self-assurance in the people they coach, so they have the confidence to tackle new challenges. As an example, Jay Conger tells how he taught his daughter to visualize a small change that helped her avoid belly flops while diving into a pool.
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Inspirational Messages
The story line of inspirational messages emphasizes the future over the status quo, notes that you as the leader have succeeded in similar situations, describes what new mindsets and behaviors are needed, and expresses confidence that you will succeed together.
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Delegating
Delegate to team members according to their capabilities, with checkpoints and milestones. Define what needs to be done, but not how. Depending on his or her experience, let the team member bring you a recommendation, options, or baseline information.
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Live Event: Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence
This Live Event was initially webcasted on March 6, 2019.
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Live Event: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
This Live Event was initially webcasted on April 16, 2019.
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Live Event: Unlocking Creativity: How to Solve Any Problem and Make the Best Decisions
This Live Event was initially webcasted on February 6, 2019.
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Dancing Between Global and Local
Manufacturing companies that moved overseas didn’t globalize; they simply added manufacturing locations.
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The Link Between Business and Workforce Strategies
Businesses have business strategies but not workforce strategies. The workforce strategy identifies the workers needed to implement the business strategy.
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The Importance of Having a Vision
A vision is like an internal compass; it tells us what is important and guides us through good weather and bad.
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Forging Strengths in the Flames of Adversity
We create our missing strengths in the flames of adversity, through will and skill.
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Alchemy - Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Think of adversity not as an impediment but as a pathway to greatness.
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Pioneering Possibilities: Problem-Solving and Innovating
The most exciting times in life occur when one reaches out and becomes a pioneer.
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Leading a Team Through a Vision
On a climb, you win together or you lose together; there's no middle ground. It can be the same with teams.
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The Multiplier Effect
Leaders can be multipliers or diminishers. Liz Wiseman tells of a woman who moved from a micromanaging boss to one who offered her a grand challenge. The change in leadership resulted in a dramatic increase in her capability.
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Asking the Right Questions
Liz Wiseman tells how she got her young children to go to bed by asking them what to do, instead of telling them. The approach works well for leaders. Don’t tell your people. Ask the questions and let them find the answers.
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Leadership Presence: When to Go Big and When to Go Small
Liz Wiseman gave a too-talkative leader 5 poker chips, representing five chances to speak for 30-120 seconds during a two-day strategic retreat. When the leader used his chips effectively the team built and owned an effective strategy.
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Better Decision Making Through Debate Making
When an important decision must be made, announce the meeting well in advance. Encourage participants to arrive with strong, well-researched positions. Also require participants to switch and argue their opponent’s position.
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Performance Management: Three Areas of Focus
In order for performance reviews to be relevant, they have to focus on the right areas.
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Change Is Hard
Suggest that people make changes in small increments. Forcing a big change too soon ignites the amygdala and an emotional response associated with fear. It also releases Cortisol, which shuts down learning. Better to recognize and acknowledge your fears.
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Managing Peformance
Performance management is not about new and different but about what drives success in the organization year to year.
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Declining Performance
Managers need to understand why performance is declining in order to know how best to address it.
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Dealing with Employee Plateau
When an employee's performance plateaus, managers have to decide if it is acceptable or not.
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Developing Others
Developing employees is accomplished by bring new experiences to the employee and the employee to new experiences.
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Navigating a Career Like a Climbing Wall
The traditional career ladder has been replaced by a new and updated climbing wall, which offers more opportunities.
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Balancing Performance and Potential
Talent leaders need to consider how they can balance developing performance and potential in their staff.
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Feedback That Can Have the Biggest Impact
Short, frequent feedback is more useful than scheduled meetings to address issues.
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Managing a Virtual or Matrix Team
Managing a virtual or matrix team is becoming more common, but the basic principles still apply.
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How Leaders Can Influence Others
To influence others in times of change ask, “What do you want?” People are not asked that question very often. They usually tell you what they don’t want. Keep asking, “What do you want?” It’s a simple way to influence others.
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Choose Success
How we respond to adversity determines our success and happiness. Our greatest resource is the ability to choose our mindset. We seek evidence to support our outlook, whether it is positive or negative. Our success is determined by our choices, not by our circumstances.
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Persevere through Desire
Terry Fox was a Canadian cancer amputee who ran across Canada on only one leg, to raise money for cancer research. He said he did it “one telephone pole at a time.” We persevere when our desires are more powerful than our disappointments.
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Consistency is More Important Than Perfection
You win a point in tennis if you hit the ball over the net one more time than your opponent. To perform consistently you must distinguish fear from anxiety. Fear is based in reality; anxiety is imagining a negative event. Anxiety disables us and holds us back, not fear.
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Hire for Potential
Jason Jeffay explains why you should hire for potential, not just the current job opening.
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Great Coaching: Don't Give the Answer
Good coaching is not about finding better answers; it is about asking better questions.
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Leaders Need To Be Talent Experts
Someone who doesn’t know how to identity, deploy, and nurture talent is not a leader. Talent is a competitive differentiator.
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The Three Elements of a Great Execution
A manager can be a brilliant strategist but not get things done; the world pays for results, not brilliant thinking.
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Constructing a Powerful Presentation
For a dynamic presentation, follow the steps that Tracey Matisak outlines in this video.
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Owning the Room: Keys to Presenting with Confidence and Credibility
Most people fear public speaking more than they fear death, but public speaking only takes practice and P-R-E-S-E-N-C-E.
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Competitive Advantage: It Isn't What You Sell
Business has never been so competitive. You can no longer establish a long-term competitive advantage based on a world-class product. The quality of the interaction is the differentiator.
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Global Markets and Competition
Managers of tomorrow will be competing with everyone, from everywhere, for everything.
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Crafting Compelling Message Points
Decide what you want your audience to remember. Boil it down to two or three key points, then collect information to back up your message points.
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Success at Execution is About Enabling Others
Success as a manager means being great at execution, but execution doesn’t mean doing it all yourself.
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Globalization and the Changing Business Landscape
Companies need to rethink how they do business in a global economy.
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The Sumo Growth Mindset
If you are the sumo—the big company in your space—entrepreneurs can be great assets. They are risk-takers, true believers, and passionate. The sumo growth mindset leverages their passion and resources to grow your business. Bernie Brenner gives an example.
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Why Will Some Customers Leave?
Call a customer you lost, find the real reasons, and fix them. Then tell that customer you fixed the problem and earn their business back.
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What is The Meaning of Sales?
Sales means hard work, preparation, engagement, getting a commitment, and earning the sale, reorder, referral, and testimonial.
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What is the Difference Between a Stall and an Objection?
A stall is, "I want to think about this." An objection is, "Your price is too high." Both indicate interest.
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What is the Best Way to Ensure I Get a Reorder?
Getting the order is easy; getting the reorder is the measure of who you are as a business and a salesperson.
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How Do I Become the Successful Person I Dream About, and Deserve to Be?
People don't achieve goals because they don't write them down, plan, commit, and make goals that are achievable.
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What is the Best Way to Get Past the Gatekeeper?
Jeffrey Gitomer offers 10.5 techniques for getting past the gatekeeper.
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Connect Vision to Action
Only about 30 percent of change efforts succeed. To beat those odds, increase productivity five-fold by ensuring that employees are at their peak. This occurs when the basics of project management are present, execution is high, and people have a sense of meaning.
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Mindsets Matter
Performance equals potential minus interfering mindsets. Scientists said a 4-minute mile was impossible, but when Roger Bannister did it 17 others followed within 18 months. Scott Keller gives examples of mindsets in the workplace that interfere with performance.
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Doing Cartwheels in the Hall
What would it take for you to do a cartwheel in the hall? Incentives are: formal mechanisms in an organization that influence how people think and behave, story telling, role modeling, and skill building. Applying all four incentives can produce a profound effect.
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Write Your Own Lottery Ticket
People who write their own lottery number value their number five times more than people who are handed a number. Scott Keller tells how “writing your own lottery ticket” can be applied in the workplace—how employees can be encouraged to invest themselves.
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Social Contracts
Market contracts often motivate with money. Social contracts are more powerful. Examples include having everyone over for dinner, and hand written thank-you notes, especially to spouses. Sam Walton said a thank-you is absolutely free and absolutely worth a fortune.
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Meaningful Motivators
When team members choose which word gives them the most meaning at work—“me,” “team,” “customer,” “company,” or “society—about 20 percent choose each word. This means that you as the leader must tell five stories at once, one for each group.
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When People Will Change
People will change behavior when they are offered new information that resonates with them—helps them connect the dots— AND they perceive a 51 percent chance that change will more them forward AND they feel supported or prepared to make the change.
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Be Comfortable with Fear
When she starts getting scared, she asks, “Am I alive? Is my family okay? Yes!” Then it’s not so scary. Richard Branson’s book taught her to not let fear run her business. Ask, “Will I regret this decision when I’m 90 years old?” Do something every day that scares you.
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Great Collaboration
Great collaboration occurs when everyone in the organization wants everyone else to be a winner—when everyone is generous with each other, and have common objectives.
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Real Influence
To be more influential 1) go for a great outcome; 2) listen past your blind spot; 3) go to their there, let go of your here, and satisfy their three gets: their situation, them in their situation, and where they want to go; and 4) when you’ve done enough, do more.
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Dealing with Adversity
Dealing with adversity is a five-step process: 1) own it; 2) identify the best short term and long term outcomes; 3) do something you can do without asking permission; 4) identify someone you need to influence to achieve a desired outcome; and 5) take action.
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Delegation: Use the Wince Conversation
When you delegate, ask the person to explain back what they will do, and how they want you to be if they go off track and you need to step in. Then repeat what they say. This makes it easier for you to confront people when they do go off track. You wince and remind them.
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Performance Reviews: Focus on the Future
Reviewers and people reviewed both dread performance reviews. Focus on the future, not the past. Describe the results you want to see on the next review that will make you look good to your boss, and hence encourage you to reward the employee.
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Listen Without Memory or Desire
When you listen with memory or desire you’re trying to stuff the other person into a personal agenda. Instead, listen as a PAL — Purposeful Agenda-less Listening. Your purpose is to make them feel understood, validated and inspired to work with you.
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Who's Got Your Back?
Who can you count on in the work place? Who always tells you the truth? Who will let you hold them accountable? Who holds you accountable? You need people you respect and who make you feel safe. Reach out to them. Make a bond to make sure neither of you fail.
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Four Levels of Listening
Removed listening is insulting; others feel you’re not involved. Reactive listening is infuriating; you’re taking everything personally. Responsible listening is listening as usual. Receptive listening is empathic; it tries to understand and respond to the other person.
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Engaging Virtual Employees
Ensure that there is two-way feedback in real time. Encourage others to say what they’re thinking. Be sure you’re getting input from people who work with the employee. Have frequent check-ins. Hold two-way video meetings if you can’t meet face to face.
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Redefining Staff Meetings
Shift meetings from report-outs to collaborative problem solving. Identify the problem in advance. Then discuss it in groups of three or four. This allows everyone to speak, which encourages candor, diversity of opinion, truth telling, innovation, and inclusion.
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Characteristics of Effective Teams
Jan leads wilderness expeditions that include Green Berets transitioning to civilian life and business executives seeking clarity in their lives. Effective teams incorporate three S’s: Selflessness, Simplicity, and a willingness to Slow down to speed up.
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Where Does Innovation Come From?
Innovators possess four perceptional habits.
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The Arithmetic of Innovation
It takes 1,000 ideas to find one that can make a difference in the world.
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Evidence-Based Management: The Keys to Great Decision Making
What gets companies in trouble is what they think they know that isn't true.
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Creating a High Performance Culture
Jeffrey Pfeffer describes factors that help build a high-performance culture
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Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap
Jeffrey Pfeffer explains why people don't act on what they know, and provides suggestions for encouraging more action.
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Get the Right Talent in the Right Job
A promotion isn’t a reward if it doesn’t allow a person to succeed. Finding the right talent for the right job, explains Vivek Badrinath, can lead to some difficult decisions.
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Partnering with your Competition
Partnering with your competition may sound counter-intuitive and even downright destructive, but Vivek Badrinath shows how this strange relationship can actually help your business be more successful.
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Managing Change: Give People the Why
To drive change, you need to explain the why. Without the purpose, you are never going to get there.
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Business Partnerships: Trust and Trade-Offs
If you try to do business with people you don’t trust, the relationship will not last.
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Choosing What to Do
Jot down every task you do in a given week. Eliminate or delegate 50-75 percent. For each remaining task, ask whether you feel frustration or reward from its completion. If it’s frustration, do it quickly or delegate the task.
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The Importance of a Global Perspective
Performance improved when white workers in a Texas plant created their own goals and performance measures. However, there were misunderstandings when workers with different ethnic backgrounds in another plant tried to do the same. Communication is key.
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Culture Affects Choices
When students in ex-Communist countries such as Russia were offered seven types of soda, they perceived them all as “soda, ”not seven choices. As a leader, ask what choices will inspire the employee or customer, not the choices you want.
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Creating Workplace Environments for Millennials
If you want to know what a Millennial wants in a job, then ask a Millennial.
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Company Values: The Online Dating Syndrome
Whether you're talking about online dating or company values, what is advertised doesn't always turn out to be true.
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Managing Up with Reverse Mentoring
Millennials who want to manage up may need to adjust their expectations on entering the workplace.
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Honing Your Leadership Effectiveness
Bill George describes five characteristics of authentic leaders.
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Reducing Customer Risk
To protect against changes in customer preferences use a continuous, proprietary, detailed customer feedback system.
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Staying True to Your True North
Bill George tells the story of a businessman who allowed his ego to pull him off his true north.
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Knowing Your Authentic Self
Learning to know yourself involves a cycle of experience, feedback, and introspection.
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Creating the Employee Experience
The employee experience and work environment should feel up to date, not like something from the 1970s.
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Focus on Results, Not What You See Employees Doing
Just because your boss cannot see you working does not mean you are not working.
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The Crucial Starting Point for all Powerful Change Leaders
About 70 percent of change efforts fail. If people are unmotivated, add more “heart” — the benefits from change. If they work hard but unsuccessfully, add more “head” — the “what” and “why.” If they are paralyzed, add more “hands” — plan, process, and skills.
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Change at Different Levels of the Organization
Executives focus on purpose, managers on process, and supervisors on people. Executives should translate their visions into plans and tactics, managers should insure that key players are on board with change, and supervisors should give constructive criticisms.
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Setting the Consequences of Performance
The consequences of performance in sports are easy to see. The consequences of high and low performance in business should also be known. Some organizations are comfortable in the mediocre middle where it’s safe. He wants to be in a company that aspires to greatness.
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From Me to We
An important lesson as an emerging leader was his move from team member, where he was responsible only for himself, to manager, where he could no longer do it all himself. He remembers exactly when and where his boss explained the importance of enabling others.
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Mindsets and Performance
To change performance you must change mindsets. They explained how individual roles relate to other roles, and introduced training that includes an accreditation system and an academy that provides on-demand training identified on individual “passports to success.”
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Comfort Zone Is the Enemy of EQ
If you’re an introvert you avoid social situations. That’s not emotionally intelligent if the situation calls for social skills. Remind yourself what’s in it for you to change, and create accountability mechanisms to keep the change. Raising your EQ increases your happiness.
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EQ and Income
Jen Shirkani has been described as someone who teaches unimportant “soft skills.” However, people with high EQ make $29,000 more per year than others. The ideal combination is competence, an average IQ, and as much EQ as you can develop.
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What is EQ?
EQ is Emotional Intelligence, the ability to 1) recognize yourself — your strengths, weaknesses, moods, etc.; 2) read situations and other people, and 3) respond appropriately. EQ isn’t taught in school and it gets harder as we ascend the career ladder.
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Problems with Hiring for 'Culture Fit'
It’s common for people to surround themselves with similar people. This leads to the same strengths, but also the same weaknesses. You don’t have people who will challenge group thinking. Hire diverse people who also have sufficient EQ skills to present their views.
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Your Downstream Impact
As we climb the corporate ladder our actions have ripple effects. If you bypass managers to ask for something it upsets priorities. If a boss on vacation remembers something it’s as if a submarine just surfaced and blew all the boats out of the water. Manage your impulses.
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Gen Z Demands Transparent Purpose
Gen Z wants to understand why you are doing what you’re doing. Whether you’re selling a cup of coffee or an automobile, they want to know how you’re supporting social institutions they think add value to the world. If you’re not completely transparent, they will walk.
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Who Is Gen Z?
Gen Z includes people born after 1995, and everyone who makes similar choices. Gen X, Y, Z and Millennials represent a renaissance of community, connected by the Internet. Gen Z is becoming a global society where everyone can contribute and extract economic value.
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Reverse Mentoring
When Cisco hires a young person out of school, they assign that person to a senior executive, to teach the older person how to navigate social media. It’s a form of reverse mentoring that benefits both parties. And the cost is zero.
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Resilience When Things Are Tough
You can’t control all the factors that determine business outcomes, but you can control how you feel about them and how you choose to deal with them. Taking control derives from a mindset that says you need to be resilient when things are tough.
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A No-Barriers Mindset
People are quitters, campers, or climbers. We know who the quitters are. Campers stop when they hit an obstacle. Climbers have a no-barriers mindset.
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Align Your Goals with a Vision
Goals can be fragmented and lead us in different directions. A vision should come first, a vision of how we want to live our lives—what kind of legacy we want to leave behind.
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Be a Pioneer
Erik Weihenmayer sees himself as a problem solver, a modern day pioneer motivated by a sense of discovery, not a crazy risk taker.
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Turning Adversity into Greatness
Although paralyzed from the waist down, Mark Wellman climbed El Capitan in eight days by doing 7,000 six-inch pull ups. After Hugh Herr lost both legs while climbing, he got a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT and built prosthetic legs that help him climb even better.
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Success Requires Trust
Individual talent can take you only so far. Great things are done with a great team.
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Leadership Is a Relationship Built on Trust
Leaders typically fail because of a failure in a relationship. People will work harder for people they like, which is in proportion to how they make them feel.
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How to Build a Relationship
To build a relationship ask yourself, for every interaction, however long, whether the other person feels more competent, capable, powerful, and able to execute at the end of the interaction than when you started.
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Leadership Is Personal: The Ron Sugar Story
When it was his turn to speak at a conference, the Chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman started by playing the piano. He explained that people should know who you are, what you care about (such as playing the piano), and why they should follow you.
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Teams That Are Linked Together Are Unstoppable
People doing similar things at similar times aren’t a team. Climbing teams, on the other hand, are roped together. They link their fates.
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The Most Important Leadership Practice: Inspire and Share a Vision
The most important practice for leaders is to envision the future and communicate that vision in a way that others can see themselves in the vision.
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Envisioning Paris France
“Paris France” conjures concrete images and emotions in people who haven’t been there, because they have seen pictures, movies, etc., over a long period. Similarly, leaders should repeat a phrase, over and over, that triggers images and emotions of a shared future.
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Fixed versus Growth Mindsets
A fixed mindset assumes we are born with our abilities. A growth mindset treats failure as a learning experience.
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The Importance of Authenticity
Personal credibility is the foundation of leadership, and trustworthiness and honesty are at the core of credibility.
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Courage and the Importance of Brick Walls
In Randy Pausch’s last lecture, he said brick walls are there to remind us how badly we want something. As a leader, ask, what do you want, and how badly do you want it? Courage is the virtue that governs all others.
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Awareness Is Key to Unlocking Blind Spots
Everyone has blind spots, and leaders need to be particularly self-aware.
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Be a Leader That Others Want to Follow
John Maxwell shares the three things that people all over the world want from their leaders.
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Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
The best leaders work with people, not over them or around them.
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Leaders See More and They See Before
In a fast-forward world, business leaders need to see more and see before.
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Invest in Yourself
If you haven't invested in yourself, you won't have anything worth giving away to others.
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People Follow What They See
Modeling the behaviors you want to see is the most motivational way to lead.
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Be a Belief Magnet and a Belief Maker
People who are belief magnets and belief makers draw other people close to them.
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Be Intentional to Be Successful
John Maxwell gives his absolute best single piece of advice to people who want to win.
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Give Your People the Authority to Make Decisions
People on the front lines know what the problems are, but don’t have the authority to fix them. Organizations can delegate that authority when the front line people have technical competence and understand the organization.
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How to Behave to Empower Your Team
When workshop participants were asked what good could happen if didn’t know anything about leading a new business, they said they’d have to trust their people, be curious, and listen. That's good leadership.
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Leading Change: Act Your Way to New Thinking
When you want to change a culture, act your way to new thinking; don’t think your way to new action. On the submarine Santa Fe, when problems were attributed to “they,” a saying was born: "There’s no 'they' on Santa Fe." Inside the Santa Fe “they” became “we.”
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Create an Environment for Leadership Development—Not a Program
Developing leaders is a natural concept—like breathing air. We under-appreciate the environment and overvalue programs. Eliminate programs and focus on the environment.
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Empowerment to Emancipation
We are naturally empowered; to be alive is to have power. Empowerment becomes emancipation when leaders give people decision-making authority that allows them to express their natural empowerment.
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The Most Important Role of a Leader: Give Control and Create Leaders
The role of a leader is to move people up the “ladder of control,” from “tell me” to “I did it.” To make people think, question their intent at all levels of the ladder.
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The Power of a Thank You
Working in the airline business, William Mitchell has learned in recent years how important it is to make people feel valued. A word of thanks, he says, can go a long way.
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Follow Your Own Path
Ultimately, people have to decide for themselves which career path they want to follow. Sharon Wood talks about when to listen to others’ advice and when to rely on your own instincts.
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Situations vs. Problems
A situation is not the same thing as a problem, explains William Mitchell, and it shouldn’t be treated the same way.
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The Difference Between I and We
William Mitchell has noticed how potential employees’ speech patterns can be a good indicator of their suitability for a position. Listening for “I” and “we” statements is a key component.
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Managing Your Talent
It’s easy to provide the tools and techniques that a leader can use to develop talent in others, but as William Mitchell explains, getting them to own it personally is the true challenge.
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Not Just Shareholder Value but Societal Value
Business leaders have to think deeply about purpose, the purpose of their company, the mission of their company, not just relying on shareholder value.
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The Difference Between Responsibility and Accountability
Compliance means that you follow rules and regulations; but on the other hand, accountability means that you try to enhance the common good, that you are interested in the interests of a higher purpose, interested in the interests of a higher purpose.
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Five Traits of Successful Leaders
In today’s world, leaders need to be continuously growing and developing their leadership. Steve Arneson, author of Bootstrap Leadership, describes five key self-development practices for building your leadership skills.
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Collaboration: Me to We
Unlike his own childhood, his kids don’t know what it means to live alone. They are connected to others continuously. The shift from me to we brings tolerance, and creates a more productive and sharing society that believes there is virtue in collaboration.
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The Gen Z Attitude toward Failure
Previously if you wanted to start a business you needed a lot of resources. Now you can build a business overnight, at very little cost, and keep experimenting until you win. Gen Z understands that failure is a byproduct.
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Collaborative Leadership
Collaborative leadership means 1) identifying important partners through a broad network, 2) modeling collaboration for team members, and 3) knowing when to stop collaborating. Collaborate with different people to innovate and get out of the daily routine.
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Track Your Relationships
List the contacts in key external and cross-functional groups, the depth of your desired relationship with each person, and how you’re going to do it, e.g., once a month over dinner with these two, coffee with those five twice a year. Then measure your progress.
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Affluence to Influence
Political systems try to influence through capital, but Gen Z is showing that you don’t need money. You only need access to a community of like-minded people. Dove’s™ online campaign for real beauty was successful with few dollars. Influence is a new form of capital.
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How to Leverage Gen Z Values
To lead Gen Z, managers should create a culture that values them. Gen Z values are transparency, a clear purpose, sincerity and authenticity, and the ability to have a voice. It’s not about work-life balance; it’s about integrating work and life in a way that’s meaningful.
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Managers Need Three Networks
Managers need an operational network to get things done, a personal network of friends and colleagues, and a strategic network of internal and external relationships that helps you stay informed of events you may not be aware of, and connect the dots.
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The Importance of Strategic Networks
Internal networks produce no new information. Managers are aware of the importance of external strategic networks but don’t work on them, because they’re busy or they think networking is sleazy. It’s important to reach out to people who are not like yourself.
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Situational Leadership
Situational leaders tailor their approach to the situation. Styles range from autocratic to participative, from push (fact based) to pull (listening and asking question), from analytic to relational. Practice different styles in venues that are outside your usual domain.
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Barriers to Women Leaders
Women encounter obstacles to leadership because of a bias that favors males for critical assignments, because women have mentors instead of sponsors, and they don’t match stereotypes about what leaders look like. Use your job as a platform. Grow it and network.
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Competency Traps
“What got you here won’t get you there.” Indeed, what got you here won’t even keep you here. We keep doing whatever made us successful while the world keeps changing. This is a competency trap. We need to work on things that don’t come naturally.
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Transitional Leadership
To avoid being left behind, you need to evolve your job, especially as the environment changes. You also need to evolve your external network, so you’re in touch with what’s happening. And you need to evolve yourself as a leader.
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The Difference Between Fixed and Growth Mindsets
People with fixed mindsets believe their intelligence and abilities can’t be changed; their talent is fixed at birth. People with growth mindsets think they can learn from failures and become better. “Fail early and often to succeed sooner” is a growth mindset.
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Characteristics of Growth-Mindset Leaders
Growth mindset leaders love learning. They don’t pretend they know everything. They are committed to helping their people develop. They want to deal with reality, good or bad, because that’s how you learn. They think about long-term growth, not short-term results.
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How to Identify Fixed and Growth Mindsets
Does the person talk about who’s smart? Who’s passionate? Does he or she worry about mistakes? Is the person defensive about suggestions for improvement, or eager to improve? Answers indicate whether he or she has a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.
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How Mindsets Are Fostered
Companies with a fixed mindset foster a culture where employees fear failure. Companies that nurture employees promote growth mindsets. Praising results backfires; that encourages a fixed mindset. Praise the effort, instead. That encourages a growth mindset.
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How to Develop a Growth Mindset
Some companies teach a growth mindset in classes. You can think of how you became good at something, or how people you know succeeded. The company can recognize and praise process, reward effort more than results, and value risk-taking and teamwork.
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How to Change a Fixed Mindset
Tell them their brain forms new connections when they move out of their comfort zone, and that a growth mindset improves learning. Encourage them to talk back to their fixed mindset voice. Remind them that people they admire had setbacks before they succeeded.
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Reach Outside Your Comfort Zone
Imposter syndrome is a real thing, but it can be easily overcome with a few reminders.
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Get Noticed as a Young Professional
Young professionals who get involved get noticed. Participating in meetings is a great way to get started.
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Being Assertive
Being assertive is essential for communicating effectively, building relationships, and getting you more of what you deserve.
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The Five Sandwich Approaches to Delivering Feedback
Delivering feedback is challenging, but the task becomes less daunting when you can choose one of the five "sandwich" approaches.
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Delivering Bad News
For managers who have to deliver bad news, avoiding these five dysfunctional conversation types makes the process better for everyone.
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Culture and the Global Workplace
Myths about cultural differences can trip you up if you accept them at face value.
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Going Global and Crossing Cultures
Companies don't go global; people go global. Crossing cultures requires those people to be thoughtful and self-aware.
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Avoiding Situations
Avoiding life-threatening situations is natural, but most work situations aren't going to be do-or-die.
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SWOT Analysis for Individuals
Though generally used on businesses, a SWOT analysis can be just as useful for evaluating yourself.
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Step Outside Your Comfort Zone: Hidden Truths
You are flexible, brave, and capable. And you can step outside your comfort zone.
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Overcome Your Inner Critic
Nearly everyone struggles with an inner critic, but it can be defeated.
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Lessons Learned from the Bulova Acquisition
Andrew Tisch shares the lessons he took away from the acquisition of Bulova.
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Managing Projects—The RASCI Approach
RASCI assigns responsibility for bringing projects to a conclusion.
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Handling Terminations
Mr. Gooch disagrees with the commonly used method of ‘hire slow and fire fast’ methods when restructuring a department or the company as a whole.
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Effective Internal Communications
Communicating what’s going on inside the institution is tough, particularly when there’s not a need to know to do the job.
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Trust Your Leaders to Grow the Business
Mr. Gooch explains that growth is supported through delegation of responsibilities and non-interference with daily management with the exception of when it is needed due to the life-cycle of the organization.
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Career Advice: Balance Responsibility, Capability and Risk
Employees signal where they want to be in the organization by their initiatives and their commitment to the organization over time.
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Three Questions to Ask to Determine if You Are in the Right Job
Peter Bakstansky outlines three questions to ask yourself when questioning if you are in the right job.
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Leadership: Know Yourself, Treat People Well and Listen
The sooner you know your strengths and weaknesses, the better you’re going to be.
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Find Possibilities, Then Execute
Dan Glaser asked his managers to pursue possibilities, not probabilities. Possibilities leave the future open to be created, the landscape to be defined by wide-open opportunity.
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Results-Only Work Environments in Practice
Dan Glaser, CEO of Marsh, describes a next generation work environment experience they are currently conducting within their organization.
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Start with Financial Performance Discipline
Focus on Clients, Colleagues and Financial Performance means at Marsh that when considering any initiative or activity, every associate at Marsh must ask if it fits into at least one of those three pillars of focus.
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Think Like a Client, Act Like an Owner
To build discipline and continuity in the organization Dan Glaser believes it’s important to first define what your core beliefs and goals are, and then to “think like a client, act like an owner.”
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Managing Uncertainty through Scenario Planning
You can be proactive in managing uncertainty – including both worst-case and best-case scenarios.
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Talent Management & Career Cycles
Twentieth-century corporate pyramids were characterized by simple career cycles: join a company, move up, and retire. That model is obsolete today for both men and women.
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How Organizations Lose Women Leaders
Companies tend to identify potential leaders when they are aged 30-35. The policy applies equally to men and women. But this is exactly the time most women start a family.
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Reframing Work for Success
Reframing can shift the way people perceive situations and experiences at work—and can mean the difference between success and failure.
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How Leaders Learn from Failure
Not all failures are the same, and they have important lessons to teach us.
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Psychologically Safe Work Environments
Psychologically safe environments foster innovation, creativity, candor, and inclusivity.
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The Principle of Dialog + Listening
Are you having “nonversations”? Traci Fenton describes how to foster an environment of authentic dialogue and listening as part of a democratic organization.
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Decision Making As a Skillful Collaboration
The collaborative decision-making process takes skillful leadership to pull off. But when you do pull it off, Larry Dressler says, its rewards are significant.
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The Importance of a Human Connection in Negotiations
Negotiations are often difficult encounters, and can easily stall out or break off. But finding common ground and adding a human element to it, as Larry Dressler illustrates, can make all the difference.
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Leadership Is About Convening
The skill set that effective leaders possess today is complex and varied—but one of the most important skills a leader has is the ability to bring diverse people together and tap into their collective wisdom, explains Larry Dressler.
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Executing Strategy
1) Leaders can set strategy but the followers are the real players. 2) Most work occurs across silos, not via the organization chart. 3) Use visual media to follow up, not reports and speeches. 4) Emphasize goal setting and alignment over performance appraisals.
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Leveraging for Personal Change
We can intervene with people at four levels: 1) teaching, 2) helping them imagine situations they may be in, 3) improving their attitudes by showing personal benefits, and 4) helping them change their beliefs.
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The Importance of Pushing For Introverts
Jennifer Kahnweiler tells of an introvert who pushed outside his comfort zone by signing up for an online course on public speaking. Any step, however small, an introvert takes to live in the world of extroverts is a good step.
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Managing Change
Five ways of thinking about change determine success.
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Ego: Ignore at Your Peril
Bob Burg tells of a U.S. Senator who demanded extra butter because he was a Senator. The waiter replied that he, the waiter, controlled the butter. There will be times when others control your butter. To get what you want, treat them with kindness and respect.
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The Four P's: A Roadmap to Improving Performance
Introverts can use four P’s to improve their performance: prepare, have presence, push every day to get out of their comfort zone, and practice.
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The Law of Influence: A Counter-Intuitive Principle
Your influence increases as you put other people’s interest first. Focus on them, not yourself. Ask how you can add value to the other person’s life by asking them questions, including how you can identify business prospects for them.
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The 8 Key Words of Powerful Persuasion
To persuade another person to take an action such as waiving a fee, begin by agreeing with them, with tact and kindness. Then say, “If you can’t do it, I’ll definitely understand.” This communicates respect and value while providing a win-win result.
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Why Selling is About Giving
Selling is about giving—time, attention, counsel, education, empathy, and value. Top sales people understand it isn’t about them or their product or service. It’s about filling the other person’s needs. Create an environment where your offering fulfills their need.
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The Law of Value: The Foundation of Business Success
Price is a dollar amount; value is the desirability of something to the end user. Provide clients more in value than you take in payment. For example, a tax accountant charges a fee but saves you money and provides peace of mind. Focus on value, not money.
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The Law of Compensation: The Essence of Making a Huge Income
Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. Good service brings referrals and borrowed trust; you can sell referrals on value rather than price. Exceptional value + significant reach = high compensation.
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The Happiness Advantage
Happiness and success are correlated better than smoking and cancer. To provide connections and happiness in virtual teams, use visits, videoconferences and phone calls; find something outside work that connects the team; and link members to a larger goal.
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The Meaning of Work
Knowing there is a higher goal raises success rates. The Manhattan Project was falling behind schedule until its purpose was revealed. Then two-thirds of the work was completed in one-third the time. A higher meaning brings greater job satisfaction.
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Creating Positive Team Environments
Praising people is important, but how you praise matters more. Instead of praising outcomes like report cards and work products, praise the process. This shows that behavior matters. Praise the process that leads to the desired outcomes.
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Innovation Vs. Sheet Music
If your boss gives you a “sheet music” assignment, where all the notes are spelled out, you can still add your creativity. Innovate around the melody and chords. John Kao gives an example.
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Explain Why, Then Get Out of the Way
Leaders should frame a need for creativity and innovation by explaining what it is, why it’s important, some ideas about how it could be done, perhaps some expectations, with emphasis on the vision that propels it. Then get out of the way.
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Judgment and Creativity
Freedom from judgment is important at the beginning of the creative process. People who brainstorm understand this. But at some point the tree must be pruned in order to move from openness to closure. That requires judgment.
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Delegation Equals Freedom
Because women are taught that they can do everything themselves, they often don't want to delegate. What they may not realize, however, is that delegation gives them the support they need.
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Unleash Your Talent Potential
Finding out why your female talent pipeline is leaking and actively solving the problem unleashes your organization's untapped talent potential—which ultimately improves your organization's performance.
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How to Support Other Women
When shut out of conversations in male-dominated workplaces, and even in the White House, women who band together and amplify their ideas make sure their message gets heard.
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Measure Your Worth So You Can Negotiate Your Worth
Negotiating the best possible salary or getting the best possible raise starts with understanding and measuring the value you bring to your organization.
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Uncovering Bias in Your Management Style
Detjen explains the four types of biases in management that can hold women back professionally.
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How to Delegate
Managers need to learn to delegate, otherwise they never have time to think strategically.
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Leaders Must Provide A Clear Direction
Leadership is figuring out what you believe, acting on those beliefs, and helping others achieve common goals.
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Leadership Lesson: You Must Ask the Right Questions to Adapt
Ask questions, listen to the answers, and adapt to the culture.
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Succession Planning
Companies complain that their biggest problem is lack of talent.
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How a Senior Leader Can Facilitate Change to Get Alignment
There are always ten things that are not going well that you can’t see. Ask five people to build the business from scratch.
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Effective Coaching
Coaching takes a lot of preparation; coaching should be a #1 priority.
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Coaching: What Gets You 90% There
In coaching more than 90 percent of the battle is confronting someone with something they need to improve.
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The Biggest Challenge for Executives: How to Receive and Get Coaching
As you ascend the corporate ladder people above you are less likely to be your coaches. To get coaching meet individually with four or five subordinates.
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The Three Tools A Senior Leader Must Use: Self-Disclosure, Inquiry and Listening
Three tools a CEO or senior leader can use are self-disclosure, inquiry, and listening.
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On Becoming A Great Leader: Ask the Right Questions
Leadership is not about having answers.
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Aligning Vision with Priorities
If you know where you’re going it’s a lot easier to get there. Leaders who are struggling don’t have a vision and 3-5 key priorities.
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How to Match Your Time with Your Key Priorities
Track how you spend your time for a week. It sounds easy but it’s not.
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Lead the People Beside You
Leading your peers starts with helping them, not climbing over them.
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Why Am I Working Here?
The most destructive thing in an enterprise occurs when people can’t connect the work they do to the success of the enterprise — its financial goals, productivity goals, safety goals, development goals, innovation goals, etc. Else what’s the point of working there?
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Know When to Introduce Change
When change is introduced at the right times in people's lives, they are more likely to accept it.
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Lead Up by Leading Yourself
Before you can lead up, you need to be in control of leading yourself.
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Achieving Smart Goals
Smart goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound—are dumb when “achievable” and “relevant” are overlooked. The individual must see the final result and feel it’s good for him or her.
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Techniques in Networking
Treat networking as the start of a relationship, not as a hunt for prospects. Help others and they will help you.
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The Five Levels of Relationships
The five levels of networking relationships are 1) identify; become aware of someone; 2) engage; start talking; 3) strengthen the relationship offline; 4) collaborate; help each other; and 5) inner circle; the relationship is now personal.
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The Four Key Ingredients
The ingredients that guarantee success in networking are 1) visibility; you have to be seen by the people who matter; 2) credibility; deliver on your promises; 3) social capital; help others and they will help you; and 4) personal branding; be known for what you do.
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Mentoring Matters
Dianne Ledingham talks about how mentors were important to her development. When she left a client meeting where they had not met their objectives, a mentor congratulated her on their progress and her future potential. Having such a person was critical.
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Positive Feedback: Create Moments of Inspiration
Moments of inspiration can be pivotal to people. Remark on their accomplishments and positive attributes. Balance those moments with constructive feedback. Positive feedback is four times more powerful.
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Job One, Two & Three of Developing Your People
Great coaching starts with clear communication to your mentee that you are there for them.
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Understanding Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to notice an emotional reaction in yourself, understand what’s causing it, and then ask for what you need or let it go.
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How Sales Strategies Have Evolved
Technology and the Internet allow product features and functions to be presented before you walk in the door.
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Working with Resistance
When people resist they complain. Listen to their complaints for the loss behind the anger and their fears of the future.
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Understanding Emotional Alignment
As a leader you set the emotional tone. Be aware of your own emotions, acknowledge how others feel, and look for ways to help them feel pride, caring, excitement, even humor.
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The Three Differentiators of a Top Sales Professional
1) Top sales professionals understand the decision-making process, listen to the needs of people with money, and apply their value proposition. They have fewer opportunities in their pipeline. 2) They fully leverage support resources. 3) They have a winning mindset.
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Winning Business: Your Intent Matters
Dianne Ledingham tells how they won a contract by convincing the client they were passionate about ensuring the client’s success. Their passion and commitment was the differentiator that won the contract.
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Driving a Sales Force to Full Potential
1) Know who the target customers are and the value proposition most relevant to them. 2) Have a culture of empowerment and accountability. 3) Ensure there is a disciplined sales process. Variability across sales people should be low. New customers are key.
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Increasing Sales Force Effectiveness and Productivity
1) Most important, be clear about target segments and offerings. 2) Match channels to targets: direct sales, telesales, online, broker, etc. 3) Optimize processes and tools, e.g., account plans and forecasts. 4) Select performance metrics, both processes and results.
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Sales Force Management: Developing your Sales Cadence
A sales cadence is a management process, often supported by a CRM tool. It includes territory management, account planning, weekly forecasting, pipeline reviews and tactical discussions, and organizational development in both skill and will.
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Accountability in Management
Managers are ultimately responsible for the performance and results of their units.
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The Leader in the Locker Room
The leader in the locker room is the person promoted to a management position who still thinks he or she must do all the work. Instead, managers must learn to select, coach, and develop the team. These are different skills. Then prepare for the next higher level.
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Coaching Your Team Members
Great managers don’t tell or teach. They coach.
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Achieving Goals in Modern Management
Today, effective leaders must also have political intelligence, the art of making things happen through people you don’t control.
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The Importance of Change
Jo Owen tells stories of tribes around the world—in the Mongolian steppes, the northern arctic, and East Africa—that were forced to change in fundamental ways. The message is simple: change or die.
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Implementation in Decision Making
Decision-making is fundamentally political.
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Take Charge of Your Professional Development
Rote box-checking on annual performance reviews confirms that you're able to do your job. But to improve professionally, you have to set development goals that enhance your skills over time.
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Persuasive Presentations
At the basic level, giving a presentation is simple, but to make it truly effective, you need to take a few extra steps.
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How to Say No to Networking Requests
Responding to a barrage of networking requests requires thoughtful consideration and intentionality.
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Dealing with Distractions
Distractions aren’t intentional, yet dealing with them requires deliberate action. Dorie Clark shares her tips for dealing with the distractions that waste your time.
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Turn Around a Bad First Impression
A bad first impression can be difficult to overcome, but it can be done if you take the right steps.
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Sustaining Productivity
Sustainable productivity involves more than just getting a bunch of work done.
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Networking at the Top
The higher you go up the professional ladder, the harder it is to connect with people you need to meet.
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Feedback You Should Ignore
When feedback is coming at you from all directions, how do you know what to listen to? Dorie Clark gives some advice on what you can ignore.
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Introverts at Work
Introverts are valuable employees, but they are often misunderstood.
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A Strong Online Presence
To build a strong online presence, focus on gaining expertise in a specific niche.
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How to Build a Diverse Network
Without diversity in your professional network, you risk becoming narrow-minded and missing opportunities.
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Overcoming Bad Decisions
Everyone makes bad decisions occasionally; what's important is to know how to move on.
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Pace, Place, and Space
Taking control of your time and schedule requires thinking through your pace, place, and space.
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Managing Anxiety at Work
Anxiety can be managed at work with a few crucial tips.
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Managing Social Energy
Heading to an extrovert-oriented event? Prepare ahead to manage your energy level.
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Networking for Introverts
You can do a lot of networking in just a little bit of time.
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Leapfrogging Your Career
Working at high intensity for short bursts can propel your career in spectacular ways.
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Your Best Schedule
When you have a work schedule that fits your needs, you’ll enjoy work more.
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Setting Your Vision
Your vision for life is a combination of short-term and long-term goals.
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How to Get What You Want
Whether you’re selling a product or the idea of a pay raise, Aarons-Mele gives you tips to make sure you get what you want.
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Setting Boundaries for Accessibility
Smartphone technology is new enough that there are no set guidelines around accessibility.
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Make an Impact in Your First 60 Days
Dan Cable shares three pieces of advice for setting yourself up for success in a new job.
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Customize the Work to Make the Work More Meaningful
Today's employees want and expect more autonomy and purpose in their work. Job customization makes this possible.
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Learn to Play to Your Strengths
Lots of people will tell you to play to your strengths, but Dan Cable will tell you how to actually do it.
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Why Does Trying New Things Feel Uncomfortable?
Trying new things can make you feel uncomfortable, but you can learn to love that feeling.
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Onboarding Approaches
As soon as you hire someone, you start thinking about how to get them situated and working as quickly as possible. Dan Cable explores three methods that have varying levels of success.
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Making Change Stick
Changes often don't stick because of the dissonance between logic and emotion, which compete for dominance.
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The Power of the Introverted Leader
Many leaders in business and politics are introverted. They have accepted a leadership role because they are passionate about their vision.
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Alone then Together: Building More Creative Meetings
Forty years of research on brainstorming confirms that creative ideas are best developed in two cycles. Encourage participants to spend quiet time alone before sharing their thoughts, then repeat — time alone followed by group brainstorming.
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Enabling Success: Empowering People and Teams
True success is not about individual accomplishments. Instead, as Andy Mulholland shares, success is about team achievements and helping those around you do well.
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Balancing Operations and Financials
Company success comes with a blend of skills--and understanding the balance of those skills is critical to long-term success, explains Andy Mulholland.
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Successful Managers Know How to Communicate
Successful managers share a common characteristic: excellent communication skills. Andy Mulholland explains the importance of these skills, and how they have changed over the years.
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Adversity: Teamwork Delivers Success
Strong teamwork can see a group through adversity. Dan Labbad recounts a story of succeeding when the odds were against him and his team.
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Coaching and Mentoring are the Key to Leadership Development
Dan Labbad explains the difference between coaching and mentoring, and he offers tips for how to develop all levels of employees to their fullest potential.
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The Case for Open Innovation
Open innovation adds academia, industry, and innovation marketplaces to innovate better, faster, and more cost effectively.
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Open Innovation: The Power of Diversity
Diversity is the power of open innovation.
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Leading Through Critical Thinking
Leaders today need better critical thinking and problem solving skills—a focus on what questions to ask and how to approach the answers to those questions.
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Streamline Decision Making
Decision making, or the lack thereof, is a chief source of stress and complexity in the workplace.
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Focus and Take Control
Having focus is the kind of skill that makes everything else simpler.
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Tame the Email Beast
When email takes over your day, these six tips for taming the email beast get you back to work.
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Get Your Time Back
With a few simple tips, you can reduce the amount of time you spend on the phone or in meetings and start taking back your time.
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Ban the Hierarchy: Moving from 'I' to 'We'
Banning the hierarchy means there are no charts with up and down arrows.
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Simplify to Get Rid of Clutter
When you begin to simplify, don't try to tackle everything at once.
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Why You Should Care About Simplification
Companies that embrace simplicity have more satisfied customers and gain an edge over the competition.
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Change Is a Group Opportunity: Ask, Don't Tell
To change something in the organization, don’t go to management with a slide presentation. The change must belong to the people.
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Get Rid of Clutter
Using the example of Southwest Airlines, Lisa Bodell illustrates how getting rid of clutter can help you focus on strategy.
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Managing for Diversity
Be the face of the people you serve.
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Recognizing Gender Bias
To overcome traditional workplace norms, you need to understand and recognize the many types of gender bias.
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Managing Gender Bias
Gender biases are both overt and hidden within organizations, and small changes can go a long way toward achieving gender neutrality.
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Women vs. Women
Biases against women by women can have myriad causes, but awareness is the key to changing behaviors.
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Own It!
Elite performers take responsibility for every outcome in their lives. When things go wrong they never point outward.
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Four Steps to Get Past Your Fears
First, embrace the fear; don’t be afraid of it. Second, “dis-identify” with the fear; the fear is not you. Third, identify and come to peace with the worst-case scenario. For skiers, for example, it’s death. Fourth, run a reality check; ask how likely that scenario is to happen.
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What Leaders Can Learn from Athletes
Unlike most managers, athletes prepare mentally, emotionally, and technically. Mental preparation includes visualizing what to do in different situations.
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Prepare Like an Athlete
The preparation puts the athlete in the right states of mind and body. You can use the same techniques to prepare for meetings and sales calls.
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Leaders Energize with Emotional Intelligence
Certain people are energizers. Others are energy vampires.
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How to Control Stress
You can attenuate stress if you prepare for it ahead of time. When stress does hit, pay attention to your reaction.
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The Dark Side of Leadership
Leadership has a dark side, a "leadership shadow" that often creates an unknown, lurking fear.
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Women in Leadership
Women in leadership, whether on the board or as CEOs, make businesses and the world better.
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CEO = Chief Execution Officer
CEO's must be able to execute, particularly when it comes to making tough decisions and maintaining their authenticity during tough times.
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Develop Emotional Intelligence
Developing emotional intelligence is a matter of building stronger pathways in your brain through practicing emotionally intelligent behaviors.
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The Neuroscience of Leadership Resilience
Neuroscience teaches us to keep our resilience topped off so that we can overcome both the effects of our own stress and the effects our stress has on others.
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Switch Off After Work
To be the best version of yourself when you get home, take time to switch off before you get there.
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Get Simplified
To simplify, you have to change your mindset and put simplicity at the forefront of everything you do.
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Keep Your Messages Clear and Concise
Comedy serves as a useful example of simplicity in communication.
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The Importance of Communication
To get the best out of your team, you have to communicate. And as Ian Watt describes, leaders can never communicate too much.
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How to Listen
When someone is speaking to you, respect and concentrate on the speaker. It is rare when we cannot learn something from others.
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Gaining Engagement through Autonomy
People don’t engage through management or incentives; they engage through self direction.
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Whose Purpose is it Anyway?
Organizations that perform at a high level stand for something and contribute to the world. Profits without purpose lowers motivation.
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Increasing Engagement in Your Organization
Engagement is the connection employees have with the organization and each other.
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The Five Attributes of Emotional Intelligence
Intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision are not enough for today's leaders. Neither are IQ and technical skills.
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How to Shift the Dynamic
When dealing with a difficult person—someone who impedes action—get beyond blame, stagnation, and resistance, to action.
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Dealing with Conflict: Move the Conversation Forward
When conversations get stuck, it’s often because of an issue no one wants to discuss. Acknowledge the issue. State the facts. This will help move the conversation forward.
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Attitude, Communication and Performance in Swift-Starting Teams
High performing teams tend to have balanced, stable, reciprocal patterns of communication.
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How to Increase Productivity in Virtual Teams
Research shows that it’s important for virtual teams to have initial face-to-face contact. That builds “transactive memory systems.”
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Team Routines Are a Double-Edged Sword
Routines help teams to be efficient, but most teams work in dynamic environments. Teams need to abandon their routines when things aren’t normal.
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Praise and Criticize Publicly
Pat Lencioni talks about the importance of praising and criticizing team members publicly.
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Four Types of Effective Meetings
Pat Lencioni describes four types of effective meetings, each for different purposes.
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Humility vs. Publicity Paradox
Pat Lencioni describes the balance between humility and publicity in leadership.
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Holding People Accountable
People don't want to hold people accountable because they don't want them to feel bad. But by not holding people accountable, you're protecting yourself, not them.
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Aligning Decisions
Laree Kiely discusses the importance of aligning decisions with the overall organizational strategy.
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Focus on the Mission
Marshall Goldsmith describes the value of abstract thinking and recognizing the mission, not only the task.
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To Help Others, Start with Yourself
Marshall Goldsmith explains the importance of modeling key behaviors.
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The Other Boat
Marshall Goldsmith uses a parable to dispel misconceptions.
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Becoming a More Effective Delegator
Marshall Goldsmith describes techniques for effective delegating.
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Six-Question Approach to Coaching
The six-question approach to coaching: Where are we going? Where are you going? What do you think you are doing well? If you were your coach what would you suggest for you? How can I help? What suggestions do you have for me?
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Providing Positive Recognition
Marshall Goldsmith describes the importance of providing positive recognition - what works, what doesn't.
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Avoiding Destructive Comments
Marshall Goldsmith describes the importance of avoiding destructive comments.
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Gender Differences in Leadership Feedback
Marshall Goldsmith describes considerations in providing feedback between genders.
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Influence: The Most Powerful Persuasion Techniques
David Taylor suggests using the persuasive techniques of reciprocity, two true statements, and incomplete communications.
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Emotional Intelligence
Don't trust logic. Instead, trust your own gut feelings about an individual or situation. You will rarely be wrong.
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Inspiring Others: The Power of True Leadership
If you can get the best out of other people by simply being who you are, you are a true leader.
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Building Rapport and Trusted Relationships
Pay attention to the other person talking. When they stop, ask a question. Offer to help them achieve their goal.
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Total Persistence: No Matter What the Odds
The single characteristic of successful people is total and absolute persistence.
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How to Engage Your People to Win
Engage people by aligning their actions, building their sense of well being, and making sure managers apply these recommendations.
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What Conversations Do I Choose?
Ask, what do I win if I "win" an argument? Is it worth it?
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Principle 1: Interrogate Reality
Before making any important decision, interrogate reality.
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Principle 4: Tackle Your Toughest Challenge Today
Confrontation is tough but can be clarifying and result in change.
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Principle 2: Come Out From Behind Ourselves and Into the Conversation
If you don't show up for the real conversation, you will miss the conversations that are essential to your success.
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Principle 3: Be Here Prepared to Be Nowhere Else
Be here in this conversation, prepared to be nowhere else.
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The Theory of Constraints - The Inherent Simplicity
Manage complex systems by dissecting them into subsystems and identifying elements that govern the entire system.
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Principle 7: Let Silence Do the Heavy Lifting
Silence can be used in personal relations of all types. Ask, then listen.
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Principle 6: Take Responsibility for Your Emotional Wake
There are no trivial comments. Something you said that you can't remember may have emotional consequences.
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Tough Conversations
Every leader has to know how to steer a misfiring team back on track. Stephen Dando shares his insights into handling difficult situations.
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How to Innovate Right Now
Reward behaviors that foster innovative, like risk taking, collaboration, and inquisitiveness. Companies that reward outcomes, like a new product launch or a successful proposal, find that their employees stop taking risks, collaborating, and being inquisitive.
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Innovation: Paper Versus Reality
Crazy ideas on paper get shot down, but sometimes are winners. Tamera gives examples, especially Tough Mudder, which was shot down as crazy by Harvard professors. Today, millions compete in Tough Mudder. Give “crazy” ideas a chance to breathe life.
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Throw Ideas Away
Put a wastebasket on a table and hand out index cards. Ask participants to write ideas on the index cards, and then put the cards in the wastebasket. Keep going until the index cards are gone. Then sort the cards. The first ideas will be obvious, then they get innovative.
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People Engagement Versus Business Engagement
Engagement in conversation is different from engagement in the business. Employees who are engaged in their work know what to do, operate autonomously, and can make their own decisions. Interpersonal engagement may not translate to work engagement.
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How to Tell Your Story
To better understand your own value to the organization and how to convey that value to other people, ask friends to describe you in three words, write down experiences that were important to you, and relate your past to the future you desire.
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Networking Mistakes
1) Pay attention to the pecking order; be careful when making requests to meet people more powerful than you. 2) Give before asking to receive; offer value up front. 3) State your value proposition explicitly; what’s in it for the person you want to meet?
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The Likability Conundrum
The more women are liked the less competent they are viewed. To counter that perception, 1) take leadership roles in one or two organizations, 2) create content that demonstrates your competence, and 3) recruit a wingman and talk each other up.
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Don't Just Inform
When you give a presentation, don’t just inform. Information can be provided in other ways. Instead, motivate your audience to take action, using an emotional connection. Politicians motivate you to vote for them through anger. Present to motivate, to impress, to entertain.
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It's Not What You Say
What you say is not as important as how you say it — how you use your voice, your face, your eyes, and your body. For example, lower your voice, slow down, and speak more quietly to bring impact. Smile, raise your voice, and speed up to make people feel good.
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You Are the Presentation
The presentation isn’t a set of slides or a document. It’s you. The audience isn’t coming for the media. They’re coming for you. Powerpoint slides are backdrop; don’t turn your back to the audience and ask for slide one. You are the show. Bring your passion. Bring your best.
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Send 'Em Out Singing
In a musical, the last song is catchy, with great lyrics, that sends the audience out singing. Do the same. Send your audience out with a thought or idea they can’t get out of their head. Karen demonstrates how and how not to end a presentation.
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Connect with Data
Reading numbers on a slide is boring. Tell the story the data represent, instead. People remember stories better than numbers. Karen gives the example of a restaurant manager who would not be able to eat in his own restaurant if the price of hamburgers went up.
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Tough Audience Tips
When the audience is angry, to make yourself and the audience feel better and keep the room under control keep breathing deeply, respond in a quiet, low voice, and use “yes-and” — YES I hear you AND that must make you feel… Tell me some more...
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Don't Tell a Joke
Humor is tough to pull off unless you’re really good at jokes. It takes timing, you need to know your audience will think it’s funny, and you must be careful not to offend someone. If your joke falls flat you will need to improvise. Use humor in low-risk situations.
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Create Your Own Opportunities
Most people don’t try to achieve the highest levels because they assume they can’t get there. Learn new things by volunteering with professional associations, ask to shadow senior executives, and tell others what your goals and ambitions are.
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The Two Most Important Questions in Life
Are you proud of your professional and personal choices?
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Customer Engagement and Growth
Customers who are fully engaged recommend the product or service to others, who also engage.
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Change: Deal With It
Change isn't new. Stop making a big deal about change.
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The Four Conversation Styles
When we speak, we use a style of communication that is assertive, aggressive, passive, or passive-aggressive.
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The Different Perspective on Work-Life Balance
Balance isn't about time; it's about the quality of the relationships. It's about attention.
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The Pitfalls of Personal Goal Setting
Pursuing goals without regard for anything else sets blinders that close off opportunities.
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The Anatomy of Decisions
Chris Blake describes three dangers when making frequent, everyday decisions.
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Poker and the Art of Management
The logic of poker is the logic of business. Husband your resources but put everything behind real opportunities.
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The Role of Intuition and Experience in Decision Making
Trust people whose judgment is based on many decisions made in familiar environments with fast feedback.
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Great Mentors Ask Great Questions
A great mentor asks so many questions you're forced to think about your life in a different way.
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Customer Insights that Redefine Markets
Once you have selected a market, determine what the customers want in that market.
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The Person Who Sweeps the Floor Chooses the Broom
Instead of procedures, set goals. Then let people "choose their own broom."
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The Positive Effect Of Letting People Go
Performance problems don't go away on their own. John Roberts explains why taking decisive action to terminate employees – including managers – can produce positive side effects.
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How To Let People Go
Terminating an individual, notes John Roberts, does not have to be an emotional situation if a logical process is followed. That process includes a written appraisal policy, regular evaluation sessions, and verbal and written documentation of shortcomings as well as agreed-upon tactics for improvement.
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Ethics
Integrity is vital in business. Lord Kalms shows how the only rule your company should never break is upholding honesty and ethical behavior.
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Time Management: The Root Cause of Procrastination
The temptations of the present overwhelm the good intention of the future.
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Why People are Predictably Irrational
Humans have evolved to be irrational. We think we are rational but we respond emotionally to stock market swings.
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The Most Powerful Forces that Shape Business Decision-Making
Often we have an intuition, follow that intuition, and discover it is wrong. We need to test our intuitions.
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Ethics: The Context of Our Character
People cheat to a level they are comfortable — the fudge factor. Knowing the fudge factor can reduce cheating in the workplace.
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Effective Leadership: A Process of Continuous Self-Improvement
Marty Evans evaluates herself monthly with seven questions.
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Leadership Imperative: Keep Hope Alive!
The function of a leader is to keep hope alive.
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Effective Risk Management
First, identify the risk. See if you can eliminate it. If you can’t eliminate it, try to contain it. If you can’t contain it, keep an eye on it. If it still goes wrong, have a Plan B. Also, change the culture to reward eliminating risks before they become real. He calls that “Prelimination.”
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How to Become More Resilient
Replace negative voices in your head with positive voices. Say positive things to others; that boosts your energy. Be physical; swing your arms. Being slightly out of breath puts blood in your brain. Tell jokes. Choose the space, light and temperature you work in.
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Leading Effectively in a Virtual Environment
First, be aware of how you come across. What’s your virtual personality? Second, choose media that make it easy to work collaboratively. Third, make sure everyone understands the purpose and principles, and what success looks like. Have them explain it back to you.
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What Matters Most to Make Projects Work
Conduct periodic “health checks” that score projects for 1) review processes that keep things on track; 2) planning, coordination, and risk assessment; 3) stakeholder engagement to ensure the desired outcomes; and 4) the leader’s skills and style.
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Diversity In Teams
"Leader builder" Robin Ryde discusses the benefits of diversity and shares strategies for getting the best out of different teams and differing people.
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Satisfying Customers
Putting customer needs at the heart of your business is key. BAA's former CEO suggests ways to motivate staff by improving your customer feedback.
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Starting an ERG
The success of employee resource groups (ERGs) depends on motivation, the ability to make a business case, and engaging the group’s members.
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What's in a Name?
Organizations must be thoughtful when creating resource groups for employees because their origins, names, and purposes differ.
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Nemawashi
Adopt nemawashi, a Japanese practice of preplanning and alignment to alleviate the frustration of being expected to perform on a project that has little or no formulation on how to accomplish it.
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Interviewing with Confidence
Having confidence during an interview demonstrates not only your competence, but also that you are the best person for the job.
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Microaggressions
Microaggressions occur when a dominate demographic uses biases and stereotyping to demean or belittle a marginal group on an intentional or inadvertent basis.
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The Hidden Job Market
The secret of the hidden job market lies within jobs that are not yet available. Here’s how to be first in line when the job you want opens up.
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Finding Career Happiness
When you identify what you like to do and the skills you want to use, you can focus your energy on finding happiness in your career.
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Onboarding Teams Improve Retention
Retention of a new employee can be more problematic than the recruiting and hiring process. Maintain workplace diversity and improve retention rates by creating an onboarding team.
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Unconscious Inclusion
With unconscious inclusion, we only get better: as individuals, teams, and organizations, and as a global society.
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More than Microaggressions
Microagressions are grouped into three subcategories: micro-assaults, micro-insults and micro-invalidations.
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Make Networking Work for You
Following six simple action steps can make networking easier and help you to achieve your goals.
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Set the Mood for Your Team
Leaders set the mood and atmosphere that either helps or hinders team members in achieving their goals.
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Championing
Everyone benefits from a positive, contented and creative workspace. Use time-tested communication elements to create a championing experience in your meetings.
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Meeting Moments
Seize the moments that matter most. Learn to recognize and use them to conduct meetings that stand out.
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Read the Room
To engage your audience, you must be able to read the room.
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Priming for Meetings
It’s prime time! Elena Asterillos explains how priming builds top-notch, problem-solving teams.
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Meeting Logistics
Looks matter, changing participants’ approach toward meetings. A well-organized and well-supplied space improve engagement levels.
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Make Time for Self-Development
People who take time for self-development see improvements in their personal relations and job performance. Take half an hour each day to read, talk, or otherwise be inspired. Treat these activities as daily rituals.
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Opportunities for New Leaders
Demand for leaders is outpacing supply. Seize that opportunity.
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Your Personal Vision Statement
Helen Keller said it’s terrible to be able to see and not have a vision. A vision statement is the intersection of your strengths, what is meaningful to you, and what gives you sustained happiness. Benham Tabrizi’s vision is to transform a hundred million people.
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Change through Rapid Transformation
To lead change in your organization, create cross-functional teams to work on the pieces and engage in rapid transformation: 1) create a sense of urgency, 2) diagnose the root causes, 3) envision the future, and 4) write a detailed implementation plan.
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Setting Clear & Achievable Goals
Roger Parry shares the secret of setting easily understood goals that will challenge your people without disheartening them.
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Persevere And Achieve The Unexpected
Amelia Fawcett shows how you can get a team to accomplish extraordinary things by encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and sticking with it.
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Emotional Intelligence Can Be Learned
We respond to events emotionally before we respond rationally. Unlike IQ, which is fixed, EQ can be learned. Changing your EQ changes your brain. Only 36 percent of us can identify our emotions in the moment, but we can rewire our brains through practice.
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Emotional Intelligence Defined
Emotional intelligence is made up of four skills. Self-awareness and self-management are personal skills. Social awareness and relationship management are social skills. The two awareness skills — self-awareness and social awareness — are the hardest to learn.
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How Self Aware Are You?
Leaders with accurate self-perception are the top performers. But to increase your self-awareness you first need to be tested. Anonymous tests are best, but 360 evaluations or even self versus others provides good feedback. You can also bring in an outside party.
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Top Performers Have High EQ Scores
Emotional intelligence (EQ) accounts for 60 to 80 percent of a leader’s job performance, because understanding emotion improves decision-making, team effectiveness, and communication. Ninety percent of top performers are high in EQ.
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The Highest and Lowest EQ Scores by Job Title
Emotional intelligence (EQ) scores increase with higher job titles, peaks with middle managers, and goes down from there, bottoming out with CEOs. This is because higher performers pay more attention to the bottom line than they do to people.
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Take a Step Back
Although she was in line to be CMO at Yahoo, Jennifer Dulski took a demotion to get a better job fit as general manager in a business she knew nothing about.
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The Basics of Building Trust
Building trust in relationships is particularly difficult across cultures, but it is critical for global businesses.
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Don't Sit On Bad News In Project Management
Bad news doesn't improve over time. Shell Canada's CEO Clive Mather shares insights that will help you respond effectively when problems arise.
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Beware Of Optimistic Forecasts
People are natural optimists, and this will show in their forecasting. David Michels presents tips for treating forecasts with more realism.
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Be Clear What The Aim Is
Sir Gerry Robinson offers advice on making sure you and everyone in your company knows what you're trying to achieve and what their part in it is.
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Changing While the Plane Is In Flight
How do leaders get the space to experiment with change while they keep the plane flying? That’s about recognizing things the leader does that have the most effect — the pieces that should stay on the plate, versus the pieces that can be removed or delegated.
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To Learn Your Talents Invite Future Feedback
To understand your talents better, when people congratulate you on something you thought was easy, thank them and ask, “What was it that you liked? And what’s the one thing you would change the next time?”
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Executives and Self Awareness
We are not trained to see ourselves as others see us, but cultivating that skill rewires your brain and leads to improved performance.
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Relationship Management: Don't Win the Battle to Lose the War
Relationship management involves finding common ground. Over time relationships can sour making it even more difficult to establish common ground. Emotional management is key, you're not looking to win the battle to ultimately lose the war.
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Characteristics of High EQ Leaders
Leaders with high emotional intelligence have a broad perspective, unlike leaders who just grind it out. High EQ leaders don’t accept negative people, negative self-talk, or dwell on past failures. Believing you can succeed improves performance even if you don’t.
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Lean Into Your Discomfort
We don’t want to see our shortcomings. But EQ hinges on self-awareness. To improve your EQ you have to look at the things you can’t tolerate. Those are the behaviors you need to change. You can’t increase self-awareness without it.
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Increasing Your Team EQ
Each team has its own level of emotional intelligence. To increase a team’s EQ, don’t work with individuals; look at the group norms instead — behaviors it tolerates, whether it embraces or resists other groups, its awareness and management of emotions, etc.
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Sense Making In Strategic Planning
To make sense in a strategic plan: 1) get outside points of view, 2) allow space for the conversations to take place, 3) state your beliefs in the plan and the strategy based on those beliefs, then ask, 4) Do we still believe that? What happens if we’re wrong?
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Risk Taking Is Disruptive
There is a disconnect between a desire to innovate and the innovation process. You can’t scale down when you take risks; you need capacity and capability. Leaders should model risk taking and reward risk takers. Leaders should know how they show up in the world.
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When You Have a Difficult Team Member
When there is a difficult team member the leader usually blames the person. Don’t jump to conclusions. Dig deep for the barrier that is in the way of change for that person. Is it fear? Capability? Seek to understand. It’s your job. You may need to go slow in order to go fast.
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Leading a Multigenerational Team
If you are leading a multigenerational team, don’t think about the multigenerational aspects. If company values, goals, and strategies are clear you don’t need to accommodate different generations. Focus on leadership development and management development.
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The Impact Of Strategic Storytelling
When conveying an important message, deliver the message via a story. Jay Conger provides tips for constructing a story that provides maximum recall of the intended message.
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Creating The Appropriate Work/Life Balance
Alliant Energy's Chairman discusses the importance of life outside work and how encouraging this creates a more productive environment within your company.
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Don't Deliver Bad News Badly
When delivering bad news, never sugar-coat the message. Paul Anderson shares examples of how people misinterpret messages that aren't delivered in a straightforward manner.
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Adapt Your Leadership Style For Each Individual
Leaders are only as successful as their teams want them to be. David Brandon shows you how to prosper by treating every team member as an individual.
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If You're Not Getting Better, You're Getting Worse
David Brandon warns against complacency and presents ideas and attitudes to help you inoculate your staff and company against it.
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Utilize Creative People
Companies don’t need to hire more creative people; they need to support the ones they already have.
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Fixation and Imitation
Reusing other people’s examples results in imitation, not innovation.
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Remote Teams
The digital age is transforming the way you work. Use these helpful tips to determine which team approach best suits the needs of the team and the organization.
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How to Be Liked in the Workplace
Possessing natural charisma is great but most people have to put forth extra effort in the likability department. These six tips offer a successful plan to improve your likability.
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Common Mistakes of Nontechnical Stakeholders
Build a genuine relationship with engineering teams by understanding three common errors nontechnical stakeholders are guilty of when interacting with agile software teams.
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Create an Agile Culture
The iterative process of the agile platform is no longer unique to software teams. Transform your team by using these agile characteristics.
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Devil's Advocate in Innovation
You can use the position of devil’s advocate to propel advances in innovation.
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How Predictions Kill Innovation
It’s impossible to accurately predict which ideas will turn into blockbusters.
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Using Distance to Unfocus
Creativity is boosted by periods of “unfocus,” which can be achieved through social, temporal, and physical distance.
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Nonlinear Thinking Enhances Creativity
A linear mindset can stand in the way of the creative process.
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Be Honest About Obstacles
Learning about struggles and success is more encouraging than just learning about success alone.
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Hire for Integrity
Integrity should be the most important value you vet when hiring.
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Recognize Your Reason to Believe
To accomplish what you never thought possible, you have to find your reason to believe.
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Survey Your Habits
Are bad habits holding you back? You can ACT to reprogram them in three easy steps.
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Treat Other People's Money As If It Were Your Own
Acquiring, spending, and leveraging corporate dollars is a measure of success but can also lead to unnecessary risk-taking. Ray Anderson reminds leaders that outsiders' funds should be protected, respected, and invested like they were our own.
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Connect to Build Trust
Building a team requires trust, and trust is possible only when people genuinely connect with each other.
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The Four A's of Achieve
Actually achieving a plan as outlined can be a challenge, but by practicing the "four As of achieve," your team can reach its destination on time.
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The Three R's of Respect
Creating an environment of contribution requires mutual respect. Apply the three Rs of respect to create a powerful team of contributors.
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The Three E's of Empowerment
Whether in response to a hardship or as part of an organizational philosophy, empowering employees builds ownership and makes them unstoppable.
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Seek Expert Advice
When faced with a challenge, the first question you should always ask is, "Who can help me?" Get SET with strategic, emergency, and tactical experts.
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Team Up
A group of individuals assigned to work together does not a team make. Here's what you need to build a cohesive, functioning team.
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Build Your Team with CARE
Building teams takes great CARE, and teams that care are unstoppable.
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The Three Actions of Empowerment
Empowerment helps everyone—leaders, individuals, and teams. Learn what it takes to help others to grow and succeed.
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Delegate Responsibility In Order To Move With Speed
Robert Herbold shares how to effectively delegate responsibility in order to achieve aggressive goals and become a market leader, a lesson he learned at Microsoft.
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Creating Financial Acumen Within Your Company
Every individual in a company is charged with making money for that company. Blythe McGarvie shows how she trained her staff in financial acuity.
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See The World From Other People's Perspective
Jeffrey Pfeffer encourages leaders to see the world from the perspectives of others, enabling these leaders to build stronger relationships and have greater influence among those people with whom they work and interact.
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Better User Interfaces and Experiences
Despite the efforts put into them, user interfaces often fall short of their intended purposes.
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Diversity of Thought
Encouraging diversity of thought is easier when you know the right words to use and which bad habits to eliminate.
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Best Practices for Rebels at Work
Are you a rebel at work? If so, practice Carmen Medina's top five dos and don'ts for sharing your ideas without sabotaging your career.
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Presenting Ideas at Meetings
Presenting a new idea? Here are four things you can do—or not do—to get others to say yes.
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Leading People Through Change
Amy Butte, former CFO of the New York Stock Exchange, shares how she worked with Finance employees to get their buy-in, which was key to making tremendous technological, organizational, and procedural changes possible.
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Exercise to Execute
Exercise is like a magic pill that can make you perform better and feel better. Are you ready to stop sitting and start doing?
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Understand Your Why
The ability to persevere is the difference between those who succeed and those who don't. Find out how to push through your darkest moments.
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Plan in 3D
The perfect plan is impossible. That's why you should be planning in 3D.
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Creating More Problems Than Solving
Companies that are constantly experimenting are also constantly presenting solutions for their customers.
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Strategy Is a Verb
Aristotle's ancient virtues can be used as a modern strategic guide to business.
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The Foundation of Research
The basic foundation of research is having an "other focus" that gives you someone else's perspective.
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Solving Problems
In rushing to develop a solution, it is easy to miss the real problems.
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The Angst of Negotiation
Negotiation is often seen as a negative situation, but a good negotiator knows how to make it more positive.
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Negotiation Prep
The majority of negotiation actually occurs before you ever get to the table.
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The Realistic Expectations of a Negotiation
With so much information available, it's easy to learn quite a lot about the party you're negotiating with.
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Zone of Possible Agreement
Paul Levy explains the ZOPA acronym.
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Job Negotiation for Women
Women are at an automatic disadvantage when it comes to salary negotiations, but a little preparation can make a big difference.
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Women and Negotiation
Debriefing after a negotiation helps both parties learn from the experience.
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Negotiating Across Cultures
Some factors in a negotiation change by culture, but others are common underlying principles in any situation.
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The Art of Negotiation
Negotiation has basic truths that underlie every situation, but each one also has distinct nuances that the negotiator needs to pay attention to.
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Negotiation: Trading on Differences
One of the best tools in a negotiator's pocket is the ability to trade on differences.
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When is the Negotiation Over?
How do you know when a negotiation is really over? Paul Levy shares how to close out a deal.
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Common Mistakes When Negotiating Your Job
A bad start to negotiating your salary can have a career-long impact, so it's important to get off on the right foot.
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Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement
Paul Levy explains what factors determine your best alternative to a negotiated agreement.
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Setting Expectations Is A Key Skill
Aart de Geus discusses the delicate balance between setting expectations high enough but not too high. The key is in listening to what the customer needs, meeting or exceeding reasonable expectations, and being clear about goals that cannot be actualized.
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Leadership Lessons
Smart leaders know how to coach through mistakes.
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Shifting Mentality
Business schools often fail to teach leaders how to create learning organizations, which is a critical skill for success.
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Your Business Is The Training & Development Of Your People
Put your people first. ServiceMaster Chairman Emeritus William Pollard explains why it's critical for businesses to make the training and development of its people a top priority.
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The Challenges & Opportunities For Women In Management
Gender presents both opportunities and challenges in the workplace. Dina Dublon speaks to ways in which companies can break down gender barriers.
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Protect Your Personal Brand
Treat your social media profile the same way you’d treat your credit information. Protect the value you’ve invested in your brand.
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Undermining Your Personal Brand
Some professionals damage their personal brands without even being aware of it. Are you?
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Social Media and Your Personal Brand
Social media is crucial to building and communicating your brand.
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Professional Reputations
Discover how to establish and protect your number one asset: your professional reputation.
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Networking and Your Personal Brand
Networking to build your brand varies in significant ways from traditional marketing strategies.
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Time Management and Your Personal Brand
How you spend your time is direct reflection of your priorities.
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Define the Purpose of Your Personal Brand
Developing your personal brand depends on having a strong plan. These three steps lead you to identify and developing your purpose.
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The Value Proposition of Your Personal Brand
Creating a value proposition is integral to your personal brand. Design your value statement as if you are marketing a new product.
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Make Meetings Optional
Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson share stories about how Best Buy made a dramatic cultural change that cleaned up its calendar.
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You Can't Talk Your Way Out Of What You Behave Your Way In To
Because the message a leader's behavior sends amplifies throughout the organization, Gill Rider cautions leaders to make sure their behavior is consistent with what they're saying.
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Focus on Talent for High Performance
If you want a high-performance business, focus on your talent.
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Taking a Break
Taking time off is crucial for being a healthy human being.
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Live Event: The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
Culture is not something you are—it’s something you do. Where does great culture come from? How do you build and sustain it in your group, or strengthen a culture that needs fixing? In this session, Coyle unearths helpful stories of failure that illustrate what not to do, troubleshoots common pitfalls, and shares advice about reforming a toxic culture.
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Defining Progress
A vision without action is a dream. Doing is action; action is progress. Make sure your innovation projects don’t succumb to dream status.
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The Seven Responsibilities of an Innovation Leader
Seven identifiable responsibilities set you on the path to accomplishing the foremost responsibility of your organization: progress.
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Inspire Innovation Progress
Grow your innovation toolkit by adding these tips to inspire creative progress.
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Innovation Agenda
Creating an innovation agenda is just the tool you need to quickly clarify the often complex decision of where to start and how to get started on a project.
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Create and Support Teams
Innovation teams get their strength from the diversity, dedication, and energy of their members.
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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. In this session, Cal Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world.
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Stick To The Facts & Stand Your Ground
Retaliation is not the way to manage conflict. To resolve differences, Neville Isdell cautions people to keep their emotions in check and stick to the facts.
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What's The Worst That Can Happen?
A little perseverance goes a long way. Jeffrey Hayzlett recounts one his first experiences as a salesperson in this story of how to pick up and move on in the face of adversity.
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Customers Give You Feedback Everyday
Sometimes the basics are easy to overlook. In this example, William Lamar shares his experience at McDonald's and how listening to customer feedback resulted in a better cup of coffee.
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Learn Not To Fear Feedback
Nobody's an expert at coaching and mentoring. Paula Barbary Shannon explains why providing supportive feedback is something you have to practice and do every day.
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Define The Purpose Of Your Leadership
True and lasting leadership derives from intrinsic motivations. William George shares a touching story about how never to lose one's sense of purpose.
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Watch Your Competitors And Challenge Your Strategy
If you can't invite your competitors to share their strategies with you, do the next best thing. Philip Kotler shares the story of how IBM invited Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy - or a reasonable look alike anyway - to discuss how Sun is going to "bury" IBM.
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Integrated Leadership
Is it possible to have both a successful business and personal life? According to William George it is, but there are trade-offs to be made.
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Question Your Customers To Establish What They Need
Charles Brewer shares why the old adage "Put yourself in their shoes" is imperative in a successful sales culture. In this lesson, he explains how to ask the deep questions that will reveal key points to strengthen client relationships.
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Balancing A Need For Achievement With Your Personal Life
Clayton Christensen is a noted professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, but he also knows the value of balancing a need for achievement with healthy personal relationships. In this lesson he shares how he started his life on a path that would lead to a successful "career" in marriage and parenting.
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Out Work Your Competition
As Jerry Rice explains, determination and a tough work ethic are what allow you to out-perform the competition.
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Diversity Is Good Business
A company's employees ought to reflect the markets and the people the company serves, as well as the people where the company is located. Sir David Bell describes how his company does that in London, and the results of reflecting the diversity of the city.
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Getting Senior Management To Extend The Boundaries Of Accountability
Adrian Hodges explains how a change of tactics can help accomplish goals when engaging senior management on the issue of corporate responsibility.
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The Machine That Changed The World
One book gave John Neill the words to explain his ideas. By using "The Machine That Changed the World," he found a way to communicate lean thinking to employees at all levels.
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Strategies For Persuasion
Heather Loisel shares her tips for using persuasion to successfully gain the cooperation of others.
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Business Ethics Is About A Bunch Of Small Decisions
Like a stone thrown into a pond, the effects of our actions may reach farther than we realize. Heather Loisel recounts an example of a small action with extensive consequences, illustrating how business ethics involves many minute decisions that build on one another.
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Engage, Empower And Excite Your People
Impossible! This is the red flag that challenges people, and according to William Johnson, people love to be challenged to achieve what they think others can't achieve.
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Adapt To Your Customer's Buying Process
Ultimately, a business succeeds or fails based on its ability to deliver the goods and services that its customers require. Colleen Honan recounts a pivotal moment when adaptability to changing needs became the key to retaining a valued client.
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The Experiential Organization
New trends are shaping the future of work.
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Nail the Where and the Why
With the right essentials and vision, leaders can inspire their teams to accomplish tasks they never dreamed possible.
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Workplaces Are Changing
Workplaces are changing in various ways—some obvious, some subtle.
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What Qualities Are Today's Employees Looking For?
Employees want more than just a paycheck from their employers these days.
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Nail the How
To do its job, your team needs you to set ground rules for how that job is to be accomplished.
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Who Does What by When
Letting your team know who is responsible for what and by when gives your team confidence and the ability to collaborate on the vision.
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Engagement vs. Experience
Boosting employee engagement is mostly comprised of short-term benefits; experience addresses the core practices at a company.
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Win the War on Talent
If you want to recruit and retain great talent, you have to have great employee experiences.
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Employee Experience Environments
Technology, physical space, and culture are the three environments that shape experiences for employees.
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What Employees Care About Most
To create exceptional employee experiences, organizations must meet three critical criteria.
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Seek Out and Design
Employees who want to see change need to be part of the change.
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Sticky Floors
Sticky floors are the self-limiting beliefs that prevent individuals, especially women, from reaching their potential. Here’s the way to get unstuck.
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How to Deal with Managers Who Pile on the Work
Too many projects? Too few priorities? Is your manager the cause of your overload? These four steps allow you to tame any beast of a manager who continuously heaps work onto your plate.
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If You Don’t Disrupt Yourself, the Market Will
In an unpredictable, rapidly changing marketplace, you have to get out of your comfort zone. Will you choose disruption or yield to destruction?
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The Ultimate Skills List
What skills do you need to be successful in the next 20 years? Bill Jensen shares his ultimate list of the skills that are critical to creating value.
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Making the Complex Simple
Facing a future of increased noise, change, and chaos, executives can simplify the complexities of business by mapping out their personal legacy.
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Defining Personal Success
Defining your own version of success puts you in an immensely powerful position to shape your future. So... what are you waiting for?
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How to Simplify
In a chaotic world, the ability to simplify is a valuable superpower. Bill Jensen shares five steps to becoming Mr. or Ms. Simplicity.
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The 3-2-1 Rule for an Awesome Day
Turn each and every day into an awesome day with Bill Jensen’s easy-to-implement 3-2-1 rule.
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Greatness: How to Be Your Best
The road to greatness begins with “just not sucking.” To be your best, you need to be present, listen for understanding, and make more purple.
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How to Get Out of Time-Wasting Meetings
With an average of 62 meetings per month, half of which is estimated to be wasted time, learning how to how to decline meeting requests is essential to productivity.
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Overcome Your Blind Spots
Don’t get blindsided! Use these practices to identify potential blind spots so you can put a strategy in place to deal with unexpected events.
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Personal Branding Strategies for Women
To attract the professional opportunities and sponsorships that lead to promotions, women need to develop a strong personal brand.
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Three Strategies to Maximize Your Time
Although it’s impossible to have more than 24 hours in a day, strategically choosing how to use the hours you do have can make it seem like you have more time.
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Mastering Body Language
If you want others to see you as a leader, your body language needs to match the words coming out of your mouth. Follow these strategies to clearly convey your ideas and build relationships.
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Planning Your Career
Don’t leave your career to chance. By strategically focusing some of your time and efforts now, you can take control of your professional future.
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How to Be Seen As More Creative
Having a reputation for creativity can ignite your career, but sometimes your competency can overshadow your creativity. These strategies help you showcase your skill as a creative contributor.
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How to Think Like an Entrepreneur
Whoever you are, whatever you do, and wherever you work, following three key principles will help you to become an entrepreneurial thinker.
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Getting Annoying Tasks Done Quickly
Everyone has a lot of little tasks to do every day, but not everyone completes those tasks efficiently. Use these strategies to tackle painful tasks and get back to doing what matters.
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Reduce Stress in Your Office
By introducing a few subtle practices that reduce stress for others, leaders are able to lessen the overall level of stress in the office, including their own stress level.
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Which Conferences Are Worth Your Time?
Professional development can be pricy, so it’s worth the effort to figure out which conferences you should invest in.
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Cultivate Multiple Mentors
As it becomes increasingly difficult to find a mentor who has all the right qualities and enough available time, individuals are creating a mentor board of directors.
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Effective Goal Setting
How do you put a priority on the most important things you need to do when you have so many different things to do? Dorie Clark shares three essential strategies for setting goals.
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Get Your Talents Noticed
In a world where everyone is being pulled in different directions, your talents can easily go unnoticed—unless you’re using these three techniques to get recognized.
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Admit That You’re a Micromanager and Kick the Habit
Micromanaging might feel good, but letting go yields stronger, smarter employees and better results.
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Three Tips to Stop Feeling So Overworked and Overwhelmed
Being overworked and constantly stressed out doesn’t have to be your fate.
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Want to Be Happier at Work and in Life? Ditch the Balance Metaphor
Juggling, segmenting, blending, eclipsing, or balancing: Which kind of work–life relationship is best for you?
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Creating a Positive Emotional Footprint to Maximize Your Impact
People’s emotions spread throughout the workplace, and it takes deliberate effort to spread the positivity that builds up organizations.
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How to Capture the Attention of Your Audience
Four simple changes can turn a lackluster presentation into one that exudes the confidence and trust your audience needs to see before they will believe in you.
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How to Work for Someone You Don't Believe In
It can be quite the challenge to work for a boss you don’t believe in. These tips help you to make the best of the situation and, at the same time, develop your own leadership skills.
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Willpower as a Tool for Productivity
The more willpower you use, the less you have, until eventually you run out. Learn the strategies to keep your well full so that you can maximize your productivity.
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Self-Awareness as a Tool for Productivity
Tired of productivity tips that never seem to work? There’s a reason. Productivity starts with self-awareness and figuring out what works for you, not what works for everyone else.
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Feedback Swing: The Key to Giving Good Feedback
When giving feedback, leaders need to consider swing—the tendency of a person’s mood to swing positively or negatively in response to feedback. Otherwise, even the best feedback can be useless.
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Productivity Tip: Time Chunking
When your current approach to scheduling keeps you from getting your work done, the practice of time chunking increases your productivity.
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Feedback Fatigue: Too Much of a Good Thing
Feedback is essential for growth and development, but too much feedback can stifle engagement and performance. Learn to prevent feedback fatigue.
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Making Powerful Requests
If you’re one of the many people who find it difficult to ask for help, a shift in how you think about help can make it easier.
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Stop Mental Exhaustion in Its Tracks
Ignoring the signs that you’re suffering from mental exhaustion can do serious damage to your job and your health, but you can stop it before you spiral out of control.
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How to Say No
Although most people say “yes” when asked for help, there are valid reasons for saying “no”—and in some cases, declining a request actually means more than accepting it.
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Behaviors of Effective Team Leaders
Team leaders that build high-performing teams are both candid and receptive. They tell others what they need to hear, and they want to know the truth about themselves.
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Coaching Skills Fundamentals
Coaching is about developing individuals to the point where they can think on their own, and the two essential practices that make this possible are asking questions and listening.
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How to Increase Trust
Building trust requires that you have a high ranking in each of the four elements of trust.
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Four Types of Leadership Conversations
Leaders wear many different hats—including manager, coach, and leader—and just like their goals and duties change to match the various roles they play, so too should the conversations they have.
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Stop Overthinking
People have as many as 70,000 thoughts per day, many of them negative. Gisele Shelley shares a simple but life-changing model for taking control of your thoughts.
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The Value Of Setting A Long-Term Strategy
When implementing a long-term strategy, connecting the overall vision with day-to-day operations is essential. Anders Dahlvig explains how setting such a strategy can provide for a comprehensive plan while creating a sense of stability.
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Globalization Leads To Collaboration
Globalizing operations is a growth opportunity that many leaders will undertake. But William Fung reminds leaders that the challenges of this endeavor should never be tackled alone.
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Stress and Sleep
Establish a bedtime routine. Go to bed at the same time. Keep the room dark; even the light from the alarm clock can be disturbing. Know that waking up every 90 minutes is normal. Medications don’t provide the right kind of sleep. Sleep clinics can offer suggestions.
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Signs of Stress
Early signs of stress include tightness in the neck and shoulders, and difficulty breathing. Later signs include sleeplessness and upset stomach. If stress progresses further it can lead to various illnesses.
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Stress: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Stress can motivate and energize us, but it can also produce depression, Crohn’s disease, gastrointestinal problems, heart attacks, and strokes; 80-90 percent of all illnesses have a basis in stress. Stress can also worsen the symptoms of people who are already sick.
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Difficult People: Peacocks and Snakes
A peacock is a know-it-all who looks for recognition by putting other people down. Salespeople and lawyers can be peacocks. A snake manipulates people looking for power. Give them what they want — recognition or power — so they don’t have to steal it.
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Work-Life Satisfaction, not Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance doesn’t mean spending the same time on each. Prefer work-life satisfaction, instead. Make decisions based on things that make you happy. Her father was busy working when she was growing up, but later learned the joy of being a grandfather.
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The Benefits of Stress
We need stress. Stress motivates and energizes us, and helps us be better at problem solving. Our muscles are stronger. Athletes want a certain amount of stress. Without stress there is no motivation to change and progress.
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Handling Unexpected Stress
Stress snowballs. If you start to feel stress, act quickly. Deep breathing convinces your body it’s not being stressed. Drinking cool water hydrates you and allows the blood to flow, so you can think more clearly. Standing and stretching helps get rid of tension.
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Take Micro Breaks
You can’t work for long periods with high productivity. You need breaks. They don’t need to be long. Stand up. Go for a walk. Get a glass of water. Micro breaks keep productivity high. If you have a difficult problem, step away to let the subconscious solve it.
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Handle Stress with SOS
The first S is Situation. How can you eliminate or reduce the things that are causing stress? The O asks if you are sleeping, eating, exercising well, and taking a break from stress, all in a healthy rhythm. The last S is Support. Who can you talk to?
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Leverage Your Resources
Companies like IMB and Google should 1) use the talent in their boardrooms, e.g., as mentors; 2) leverage digital everything, especially social media; and 3) leverage their own people. Employees want to do a better job. They only need to know how.
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Coaching and Mentoring Can Be Taught
It’s not obvious how to mentor or coach. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania offers each incoming MBA candidate a personal coach, who is hired and trained as a leadership coach. Companies are encouraged to think along similar lines.
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A Leader's Checklist: Vision and Appreciation
Pilots, surgeons, and firefighters use checklists to guide their work. So should leaders. Michael Useem has a 15-item checklist for leaders, starting with a vision and strategy. However, the item leaders miss most often is appreciation for the work the employees do.
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How CEOs Lead Their Companies in India
Major companies in India such as Tata invest heavily in their people. They also invest heavily in their communities and their country, by building roads, hospitals, and schools. Michael Useem thinks U.S. companies should do the same.
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How to Build Resilience and Adaptability
First, get out of your office and meet the troops. Second, be decisive. Decide, then adjust based on what happens; no decision is the worst decision. Third, be clear about you want to accomplish. Then don’t micromanage. You don’t have the time and they won’t like it.
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Types of Stressful Events
The four categories of stress are 1) things that are anticipated, such as marriage; 2) cumulative things, such as conflicts between co-workers; 3) unexpected things, such as an accident; and 4) personality, which colors the way we deal with the other three areas.
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Managing a Difficult Boss
When you know what the boss needs, your approach becomes more obvious. Some just want a summary. Others want your analysis and decision with the question, “What do you think?” Don’t just say, “No.” Negotiate. Offer options such as, “I can get it done by 4:00.”
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Enabling your Team to be More Externally Focused
More effective teams will focus internally as well as externally, to learn expectations, align their work vertically with the hierarchy, and coordinate their work with other teams and groups.
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What Makes an Effective Team?
To Deborah Ancona, effective teams are more than clear goals, clear roles, good internal processes, etc. which are more internally focused activities. It's also comprised of external activity--what team members do across their boundaries within the team.
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How to Find Your Blind Spots
First you must be open to feedback; that requires a safe environment. After that, techniques include 360 feedback, with outsiders; feedback from multiple sources; and feedback from trusted friends. You also need to reject a fixed mindset in favor of a growth mindset.
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Relating: Building a Network
Deborah Ancona discusses the power of networking within organizations to build a network. Google and W.L. Gore are examples of organizations with a focus on networking.
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Relating: Balancing Inquiry and Advocacy
Inquiry asks us to take the other person's perspective; advocacy requires you state your position to have a basis for dialogue. This allows us to work through conflict and leave with some sort of resolution.
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Motivating with Peer Competition
Motivation doesn’t always come from the carrot and stick, but from peer competition.
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The Importance of Self Understanding and Awareness
If we detach ourselves and try to see our own motives, we can see things in different ways.
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Distance Leadership: Leaders, Technology, Motivations and Management
In transnational, multicultural relations, the more frequent the communications the better.
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Inventing the Future
Nigel Barlow explains how we can create our future.
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Fanatical About Talent
Nigel Barlow describes ways to develop the talent you already have.
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Rethinking How to Open Your Mind
Stop saying "Yes, but." Start saying "Why not?" and "What if?" instead.
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Creating Legendary Customer Experiences
Nigel Barlow offers suggestions for creating legendary customer experiences.
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The Creative Leader Avoiding Job Blindness
Nigel Barlow explains how to remain a curious, creative beginner.
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Breaking Discussion Strongholds
When an individual with status continually dominates the discussion, the strength to break their stronghold is found in numbers.
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Break Down Big Goals
If you want to achieve a big goal, break it down into smaller goals first.
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Defuse Heated Discussions
To prevent a tense situation, build a consensus at the beginning of a process.
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Strategic Thinking in Tactical Times
Joe DiVanna had a diverse group of 30 people write a 45,000-word book on strategy in 24 hours.
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Building Confidence in Yourself
Confidence in yourself is the foundation from which all of your actions take place. By building that confidence, you stand stronger as a person and as a leader.
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Discovering Your Theme for Change
To make change easier, look for the one big theme that intersects between what other people want for you and what you want for yourself.
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Where You Should Put Your Time
Change is not about trying to fit more into an already overloaded schedule. It’s about putting energy into the right things and eliminating the things that don’t make a difference.
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Five Steps to Accountability
To ensure accountability, be clear: about expectations, capabilities, measurements, feedback, and consequences.
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Leading Change at All Levels
The traditional change model is top-down. This restricts the range of ideas. Distributed-leadership organizations encourage ideas from people at all levels. The emphasis is on agility, innovation, and speed — sensing and seizing opportunities quickly.
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Driving Strategic Change Through Successful Project Management
Execute your strategy in a series of projects while it's being developed.
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Cautionary Tales for the New World Manager
Plan in reverse; decide where you want to be, then plan backwards to see how to get there.
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Risk Management
Don't ask for risks. Ask instead for people's fears.
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The Confidence Factor
To increase confidence, perform an action that's just beyond your comfort zone every day.
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How to Get Promoted
Be your own public relations agent, and prepare for promotions by networking with the people who may help you.
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How to Make Learning Sticky
Share the training with others at every stage and tailor the training to individual needs, desires, and learning style.
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Profitable Strategies and Plans
Patricia Wheatly Burt explains her six-point strategic plan.
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Customer Satisfaction, Who Cares?
Give customers an experience that makes them say "Wow!"
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Becoming an Employer of Choice
Characteristics of the work environment, and the leaders and managers, characterize an employer of choice.
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Look After Yourself to Look After Others
Airlines tell us to put on our own oxygen mask before helping others. The same applies to managers.
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What is the Global Manager?
The global manager must be able to build relationships across cultures while remaining able to make the tough decisions.
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Transparency and Openness Foster Collaboration
People innately want to contribute, but it’s the leaders who model transparency and openness that actually get their teams to share their thinking and ideas.
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Healthy Risk-Taking
Taking the right kinds of risks contributes to an inspiring company culture that drives innovation. Discover what you need to build a healthy risk-taking framework.
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To Motivate, Clarify Expectations for Performance and Promotion
While compensation can serve as a motivator, leaders should never underestimate the significance of recognition and setting clear expectations for advancement.
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What Purpose-Driven Organizations Have in Common
In purpose-driven organizations, everyone knows why the company exists, and this purpose is reflected in everything they do.
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Writing for Business
Don’t let your business writing join the ranks of bland and jargon-laden mediocrity when a few smart tips can lift it out of obscurity.
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Raising Performance and Collaboration in Virtual Teams
Virtual teams are more likely to be successful if they have a great task, and can meet face-to-face or through video technology from time to time.
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The Habit of Cooperation
Organizations and people who are energized are great at cooperation and conversation.
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Cash is King
Les Green offers several suggestions for managing your cash, to avoid going out of business while waiting for payments.
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Hot Spots Bring Energy and Innovation to Organizations
Hot spots of energy and innovation are built from cooperation, networking, and an igniting purpose.
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Effectively Managing Across Boundaries
Spend time with people who are different from you. This will expose you to ideas that can lead to innovations.
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Negotiate to Win
Aim for a win-win, don't give in on price, and try some stage management occasionally.
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Managing Change in a Global World
Michael Jarrett describes five activities that allow an organization to survive in times of change.
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Be Graceful in Defeat
When you lose, remember to keep your cool. Kevin Oakes shares two stories about why being graceful in defeat can make you a winner in the long run.
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Humility
Rick Warren reminds us that humility is not self-deprecation, but rather understanding our strengths and weaknesses, and knowing how to reach out to enrich others and yourself.
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Integrity
Rick advises bringing our economic self, our material self, our intellectual self – in effect, our whole self, to our work and life.
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Putting Work and Life into Perspective
According to Rick Warren, you need to balance your output with your input. If you have more output then input, you'll be stressed.
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Myths of Customer Service
“The customer is always right” is a myth. But the customer is always the customer. What customers want most is to be listened to. “No news is good news” is also a myth. Make sure that you get feedback from customers at every phase of delivery.
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Three Rules of Sales
Market continuously, not just when sales fall off. Three rules of sales are 1) people only buy to lessen a pain; 2) they only buy when they are ready to buy; you can only educate them until that time; and 3) if you can’t get found when they’re looking, you’ll never get chosen.
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The Cringe Factor Identifies People to Fire
Be slow to hire and quick to fire. Everyone in the organization knows who is not performing. Fire an employee or vendor if you cringe at writing them a paycheck, or if you would not be sorry if they were run over by a bus.
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The Importance of Diversity for Creative Energy
Dr. Purg talks about the importance of creating a diverse workforce collaborative group including age, ethnicity, religion, professional background, for energy, creativity, and ideas that benefit the company as a whole.
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Discussions to Make Sense of Opportunity
Pitfalls when assessing new opportunities include premature convergence, lack of dissent, and premature bias to action.
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Take Back Control with Electronic-Free Zones
Your phone isn't the one out of control; you are. Take charge of your phone to take control of your life.
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Don’t Multitask. Singletask!
Despite its perceived worth as a business skill, multitasking is detrimental to the brain and to productivity. Singletasking, however, increases focus and efficiency.
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Managing According to the Platinum Rule
When it comes to managing, trade in the golden rule for the platinum rule.
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Managing for People Who Hate Managing
The one rule of good management is to be true to who you are. If you are a thinker, lead with your head; if you are a feeler, lead with your heart.
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Networking: Making a Good Impression
All of life can be considered a networking event if you have the right perspective. Three simple tips help you make the most of unstructured and structured events.
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Bring on the Battles to Resolve Conflict
In a genius partnership, conflict that is approached correctly can be healthy and productive.
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The Triple Bottom Line
Fred Keller explains that the thought process is based on ‘there is more than just financial gain’ and all can have a comprehensive ‘win’ through social and environmental benefit.
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Take the Other Person's Perspective
Draw a capital E on your forehead with the forefinger of your dominant hand. If the E faces inward, you are less likely to take the other person’s perspective, and thus be less influential. When assigning tasks, remove obstacles and consider what’s in it for the employee.
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Keep the Customer in the Room
When Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has a meeting there is always an empty chair in the room, representing the customer. If the meeting is about operations, what would the customer think? Pricing? Marketing? Take the customer’s perspective in all cases.
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Handling Rejection: The Three P's
We’re all in sales, whether it’s selling an idea or a product or service, and we all get rejected.
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An Alternative to Persuasion
To persuade people we usually try to change their minds. Another way is to change their options.
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Learning at the Speed of Trust: Organizational Trust
Like a pit crew in competitive racing, the answer to organizational trust lies within well-defined roles, sequences, teamwork, trust, and a clear leader.
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Use Social Cartography to Map Influence
To learn who has influence in a meeting, label a circle for each person, an X for every time that person speaks, and an arrow to the person being addressed. The person addressed the most is likely the person with the most influence, not the person who talks the most.
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Learning at the Speed of Trust: Relationship Trust
Trust is like a trust account. By behaving in ways that build trust, you make deposits into the trust account. By behaving in ways that diminish trust, you make withdrawals.
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The Power of Purpose to Persuade
A hospital tried three different signs to see which sign would persuade hospital personnel to wash their hands more. “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases” was more effective than “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases” or a control sign.
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Learning at the Speed of Trust: Self Trust
Self trust is about you and your credibility. The four cores of credibility are your integrity, your intent, your capabilities, and your results.
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Self-Motivation through Interrogative Self Talk
When we are trying to motivate ourselves, we typically use positive self-talk. “I can do this!” A better approach is to use interrogative self-talk.
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The Business Case for Sustainability
Fred Keller talks about building a business that is both successful and shows that it cares about people.
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The Ethics of Interdependence
Dr. Maciariello talks of the Japanese notion of interdependence. It is what people are responsible for and how they perform it in relation to all of the other staff and departments within the company regardless of their physical location.
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Listening Is the Art of Selling
People don’t buy what you’re selling; they buy what they want. Listen for what they want, then explain how your product or service meets that need exactly. Don’t throw in features they’re not interested in. That’s only confusing.
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Millennials Want to Know Why
Millennials want to do good work, but they need to know why. Otherwise they shut down. Explain why their job matters to the team and the company, and why others can’t do their job if Millennials don’t do theirs. Don’t just give them a task. Explain why the task matters.
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'Because I Said So' No Longer Works
Boomers and Gen Xers did what they were told, no questions. As managers, they don’t understand why Millennials won’t do the same. Millennials want to understand how their work relates to the work of others. Explaining how improves performance and saves time.
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What Millennials Want
Millennials want what the rest of us want: work that matters, a meaningful life, and knowing they make a difference in the world. They tell you that on day one. They don’t expect to wait. They want to start now.
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The Importance of Mentoring
Paula Kerger talks about the importance of being aware of all the people around you in the work place and making a conscious decision to mentor those climbing the ladder.
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Dealing with the Fire Hydrant of Life
We are all overwhelmed with the demands of everyday life. Most people want to push it all away. That doesn’t work. Embrace the fire hydrant. Most of the demands are unimportant, but some of them are. Prioritize based on important people and important tasks.
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Pay It Forward
When Doug Conant was fired from his job about 25 years ago, his outplacement counselor became his mentor and one of his best friends. The counselor showed up with a how-can-I-help mentality that was second to none. Doug tries to be that kind of person today.
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Talk Versus Behavior
You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. People watch whether you do what you say you are going to do. You have to behave yourself out of whatever you behaved your way into. You have to earn the trust of others.
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Seeing Negative Feedback as Caring
When you encounter negative feedback, it means someone cares enough about you to help you succeed. Change your mindset to show that you care, too.
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How to Succeed with Strategy
Many organizations fail to execute on strategy because of flawed implementation. Here are four tips for succeeding with strategy.
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Leaders Listen to Customers
Leading an organization requires attention to the day-to-day minutia of the business and an understanding of the connection between the business and its employees and customers.
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Trust Inc.
The businesses of the future are built around trust, not transactions and managerial bureaucracy.
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Zero Email Backlog
Getting control over your email has less to do with how many emails you get and more about how you process the email that comes in.
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Diversity & Inclusion: When Are We Done?
Diversity is never done; it cannot be abandoned.
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Implementing Diversity & Inclusion: The Sweet Spot
Diversity and inclusion happens best when you can do it in the sweet spot.
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Diversity & Inclusion is Hard
The business world understands why diversity is necessary, but it can still be difficult to implement successfully.
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Embedding Diversity & Inclusion in Daily Operations
To be effective and efficient, a company needs to use its talent pool to the greatest extent possible.
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Implementing Diversity & Inclusion: Leaders and Believers
Leaders are accountable for the implementation of diversity, but the action happens at the organizational level.
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How to Give and Receive Upward Feedback
At meetings, present your ideas in a neutral way, as by asking if they are any good, and how they can be improved. You can also appoint others as topic leader, facilitator, and devil’s advocate. This will shake up the hierarchy and encourage more candor.
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How to Raise a Values Question Without Putting Your Career in Jeopardy
People facing a values issue may think the leader doesn't care. Most leaders do.
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Should I Compromise? Weighing Healthy and Unhealthy Compromise
When judging when to compromise, recognize that you have a choice, count the costs, ask whether the gain is worthwhile, and weigh your options.
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Voice of the Stakeholder
David Bennell identifies potential stakeholders and the importance of identifying their voice in recognizing a sustainability initiative.
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The Best Business Advice
Never ask someone to do something you would not do.
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Passion and Productivity
Nothing motivates more than the belief that what you are doing truly matters - serves a greater good.
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The Myth of Multitasking
The time it takes to complete a task is increased by about 30 percent when you allow interruptions like phone calls and e-mails. The more you are fully focused on a task the more quickly and more thoroughly you complete that task.
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Conduct a Pre-Mortem
A pre-mortem pretends you have already failed, asks for all the reasons why, and eliminates the reasons so you don’t have to do a postmortem.
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How to Enchant Customers
Trustworthiness, likability, and quality enchant customers.
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Five Principles of Employee Engagement
Capture the heart, open communication, create partnerships, drive learning, and emancipate action.
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Public Speaking: Dynamic Openings
Wendy Warman describes seven types of opening statements.
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Public Speaking: Establishing the Main Ideas
Beliefs or concepts the audience must believe or understand will establish the main themes of your presentation.
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Emotional Intelligence
Tim Sanders identifies key characteristics of Emotional Intelligence.
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Cultivating Realistic Optimism
Positive emotions drive high performance but optimism isn’t enough. Tony Schwartz recommends that optimism be tempered with realism. Be optimistic about the future but realistic about what is happening now — realistic optimism.
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Giving the Most to Your People
How do we invest more in our people, so they can bring more of themselves to work? There are four components: physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy.
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Overcoming Immunity to Change
A commitment to change often competes with other commitments, with the result that nothing changes. To move forward, test the assumption that something bad will happen if you do change.
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Manage Energy not Time
Tony Schwartz talks about the importance of managing energy, not time.
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Innovation means Execution
Tim Sanders discusses how true innovation also means execution of the ideas.
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2. Reaching Out
Belle Halpern explains the importance of reaching out to others — listening for a personal, emotional connection, and listening for strengths and values.
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1. Getting Present
Belle Halpern describes the first element of The Ariel Group PRES model - Getting Present
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Public Speaking: Establish Your Objectives
Wendy Warman describes the importance of establishing your objectives at the beginning of your presentation.
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FeedForward
An exercise that's fun, fast, and helpful when you want to change a behavior.
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Empowerment Rules
Empowerment doesn't happen simply because leaders tell employees they're empowered. Leaders must mandate empowerment.
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When and Where Do You Do Your Best Thinking?
Where do you do your best thinking? Chances are, it isn't at work.
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Simplification as a Habit
Maintaining focus on essential, high-value tasks requires making simplification not an event but a habit.
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Ask Killer Questions
People go into meetings looking for answers without asking the right questions. Ask better questions to get better answers.
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Developing an Inclusive Environment
Developing an inclusive environment requires purposeful action and attitude.
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Do Differences Matter? Perhaps.
Roosevelt Thomas discusses how racial and social differences may matter.
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Are You Diversity-Challenged?
Roosevelt Thomas poses the question: Are you diversity-challenged?
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Why Strategic Diversity Management Now?
Roosevelt Thomas makes the case for why Strategic Diversity Management is an immediate issue.
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Flawed Assumptions of New Women Leaders
New women leaders often assume they have to do all, but reframing this flawed assumption prevents problems for them, their employees, and their organization.
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Delegate: Give the What and the Why
Effective delegation requires not only delegating to the best person for the work but also ensuring that person understands the importance of the work and your expectations.
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Performance Management Requires Clear Expectations
Management of poor performance starts with respect, honesty, and clear expectations.
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Delivering Results While Developing People
Meetings provide a forum not only for sharing information but also for developing talent.
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Managing Virtual Teams
Getting to know individuals better, following up on promises, and structuring conference calls are the necessities of managing virtual teams.
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Humility Is Key to Collaboration
Kelly Thompson explains why, if you want to be a good collaborator, you need to be humble.
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Dealstorming: Solving Problems Through Collaboration
Dealstorming is a collaborative process that brings together all the stakeholders involved in a problem or sale.
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How to Lead Your Team Through Disruptive Innovations
Overcoming disruptive innovation requires leaders to define reality, instill hope, and encourage exploration.
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Email Etiquette 2: Don't copy over someone's head
Don't copy over someone's head.
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Email Etiquette 1: Don't Use Email to Deliver Bad News
Don't use email to deliver bad news.
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Taking Your Team to the Next Level
Taking your team to the next level begins with viewing employees as a cohesive, integrated group.
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Redefining Diversity
Roosevelt Thomas redefines diversity in the workplace.
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Email Etiquette 10: Don't be cryptic. Use proper English
Don't be cryptic. Use proper grammar.
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Email Etiquette 7: Don't write War and Peace
Don't write "War and Peace."
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Close the Performance Gaps
Executives and managers who are responsible for coaching talent can employ the GAPS model to close performance gaps.
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Five Steps to Building Your Network
Everyone agrees that a good network is important, so Scott Eblin offers five tips to help you improve your networking skills.
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Get More Results: Pick Up Accountability and Let Go of Responsibility
Move from being the go-to person to being a leader of go-to teams by becoming accountable for results.
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Get Out of Organizational Gridlock by Building Trust
Organizational gridlock can destroy companies, trust and collaboration are the tools that alleviate congestion.
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The Impact of Change - The Human Side
Some key advice to managing the human side of change.
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Customers for Life
Brian Tracy explains that customer satisfaction is the true measure of success in business.
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Identifying Needs and Presenting Solutions
Brian Tracy explains how to identify needs and present solutions in the sales process.
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Overcoming Price Resistance
Brian Tracy explains how sales people can be their own worst enemy when the issue of price is raised by a customer.
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Selling Consultatively
Brian Tracy defines the difference between a consultant and a salesperson, and provides advice on how to go about selling in a consultative fashion.
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Communicating a Vision for Change
John Kotter explains how to avoid the pitfall of under-communication during a change effort.
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Team Building
Marshall Goldsmith describes a simple, fast, effective method for building teams.
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Peer-to-Peer Coaching
A system Marshall Goldsmith intends to use for the rest of his life.
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Negotiating Strategies and Tactics
Brian Tracy outlines two different kinds of negotiation - business and personal - and provides some useful advice for your approach to both.
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Creating Commitment to a Vision
"Roll down" the vision; ask people below where the gaps are between where we are and where we want to go. Hone the vision; refine it. Use the vision — with customers; in considering promotions; talk about it.
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Building Peak Performance Winning Teams
Brian Tracy describes the one trait that is highly determinant of one's success in business - the ability to build teams.
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The Formula for Strategic Planning
Brian Tracy explains how the ability to think and plan strategically in business is the hallmark of leadership.
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Effective Project Management
Brian Tracy provides a step-by-step overview of how to manage projects effectively.
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Women and Networking
Although networking is important, women either aren't doing it or they're doing it wrong.
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Talent Is the Whole Ballgame
No one is over qualified. They want the best. Meritocracy is okay. The Container Store doesn’t have a human resource department. Employees recruit other employees. No one leaves (they have single-digit turnover). Nepotism is fine – you know which of your family members would love working in this environment.
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Everything You Do Has a Wake
Your wake (like the wake of a boat) is much more powerful than you realize. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is all about wake. A business where everyone is mindful of their wake has an unassailable competitive advantage, and is a much more enjoyable place to work.
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Why Women Are Better Business Leaders
Only about 20 United States Senators and 24 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Women are often better communicators, better at nurturing teamwork, and have better emotional intelligence and intuition. The feminization of business is great for society, GDP, and for business.
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Diversity in Business
According to Sahar Hashemi, diversity isn’t about gender, race, or religion. Instead, it’s about the uniqueness that each person brings to his or her job.
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Be Your Own Customer
Want to maintain an advantage over your competition? Then find ways to connect better with your customers. Sahar Hashemi explains how to do this.
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Motivating Your Team
Jason Jennings describes motivation tactics that work.
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Art of Satisfying Customers
Jason Jennings provides some surprising research regarding customer behavior.
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Three Keys to Maximize Productivity
Identify what to stop doing, continue doing, and start doing.
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Build a Business Literate Workforce
To get employees more engaged: 1) operate the business transparently; everybody knows everything; 2) change the conversation from parent-child to adult-adult, 3) include everyone in business deliberations; and 4) focus on interdependencies in delivering products.
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Handle Resistance in Yourself and Others
Conversations occur on three levels: the content, the other person's emotional reaction to the content, and your emotional reaction to the content and the other person. Try to get your own emotions out of the way, then be a participant observer to levels one and two.
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Culture: Like a Garden, Creating a Vibrant Culture Requires Daily Practice
Culture is the behaviors that represent the values, the container that supports performance. Creating a culture is a daily gardening behavior: prepare the soil, plant the seeds of expected behaviors, weed, nourish, and tend to it every day.
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Change Management: Deal with Cynics
Cynics can slow down or stop change initiatives. To deal with cynics start a new conversation.
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Learning to Provide Amazingly Powerful and Balanced Feedback
Apply specific-negative (corrective) feedback only after you have given specific-positive feedback.
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Three Surprising Skills of Collaboration
Show your intention to collaborate. 1) Tell the truth with good will; share your views honestly. 2) Show understanding by taking the other person's side; this will require listening. 3) Own your own contribution to the problem.
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Being Business Smart With the Numbers: Knowing the Score
The keys to the financial kingdom are balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. The numbers reveal key processes.
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How to Shift the Dynamic in a Room
People may be avoiding a difficult question because they are polarized, speeding to avoid it, or stalling because no one wants to go first. If you don’t want to state the question yourself, try to get it on the table in neutral language, perhaps as a “third story.”
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Conclusions on Double Digit Growth
Michael Treacy summarizes what he has learned from his research and experience about growth.
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Reinventing Product Innovation
Michael Treacy explains how companies must reinvent the way they manage product innovation if they want to be successful.
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Building Teams in a Virtual or Matrixed World
To work effectively across cities, continents, or dotted lines, build cohesiveness and trust when we're together, pay attention on conference calls, and be realistic about what can be accomplished.
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Breaking Down Silos and Creating Alignment
Silos are barriers to cooperation across departments. To break the barriers, identify the single priority the organization needs to succeed over the next six months. Then rally the teams around that theme.
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Succeeding as a Team Leader
Successful team leaders demonstrate vulnerability, encourage conflict, love clarity, hold people accountable, and focus on results, not their ego or status.
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The Five Root Causes of Team Dysfunction
Team dysfunction starts with a lack of trust. The absence of trust leads to fear of conflict, which leads to lack of commitment, which leads to lack of accountability, which leads to lack of attention to results.
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#1 Most Effective Sales Strategy on the Planet
ABC — Always Be Closing — is an outdated concept. Switch it around. Always Be Opening. Invite clients to group activities that demonstrate your credibility, your trustworthiness, and the value of what you’re offering.
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Negotiating Change
Negotiating change is never easy. It’s stressful for managers who are in charge of the change and for employees who are feeling the brunt of that change, but there are ways to go about that change, says John Smith, that can bring about a successful result.
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Influence in Global Cross Functional Teams
Suggestions for improving performance in global teams.
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The Art of Finding and Developing Your Allies
The people with the most relationships are the people with the most influence.
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The Men's Wearhouse Example
Men’s Wearhouse customizes the work experience through broad and simple rules. The goal is defined but not the means.
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Shared Leadership
How to create shared responsibility teams.
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How to Influence People You Don't Control
Six magic words: "Everyone expects to be paid back." Assume everyone is an ally if you know what they value. Align their values with what you control.
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Influencing Up
See the boss as a partner.
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Ways People Lose Influence and Give Away Power
See every other person as a potential ally.
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Organizational DNA for Strategic Innovation
Strategic innovation requires organizational innovation or transformation in every respect — the organizational DNA.
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Overview of the 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators
The ten rules for strategic innovators derive from three basic ideas. The new business must 1) forget the old business, but 2) be connected to the old business, which 3) requires learning how to resolve the differences.
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Globalization and Technology
Why technology will be key in emerging markets like India and China.
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Creativity and Execution
Innovation is creativity multiplied by execution.
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Globalization and Emerging Trends
Why emerging markets like India and China are important.
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The Value of a Little Stress
Small doses of nuclear radiation result in stronger immune systems; stress in small amounts is beneficial. Similarly, provide learning situations that present small challenges to build skills over time.
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Knowing When to Think Critically
We all have the ability to think critically, but we need to know when to apply that skill.
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Creating High Performance Teams
High performing teams need a well defined, shared goal and feedback with respect to that goal. Teams also need people with the right skills, who are challenged at the right level to produce flow. Culturally diverse teams are especially critical to creative thinking.
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The Trust Game
Lisa Callahan describes a two-person game where the outcome can be win-win or win-lose depending on trust, a feeling associated with oxytocin in the brain. We can, however, be fooled by our brains; it is important to step back and be objective in situations of trust.
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Daily Journaling and Self Reflection
Spending five minutes on a diary at the end of a day helps workers to keep things in perspective and deal more effectively with problems. Diaries help the worker celebrate progress in work and personal growth, cultivate patience, and plan the future.
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Achieving Growth in Challenging Times: Focus on the Job of the Customer
If you segment only on products and customers you tend to end with one-size-fits-none products. If you understand the customer’s experiences, however, you can provide everything the customer wants and nothing the customer doesn’t need.
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Combine Operational Knowledge with Strategic Vision
Strategy is about deciding what goals you need to achieve, then bringing together resources and opportunities to create a coherent whole that provides competitive advantage.
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The Greatest Enemy of Execution
The greatest single enemy of execution is complexity.
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Gaps in Execution
Gaps occur between plans, actions, and outcomes.
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The Power of Clear Direction
When asked to choose between growing revenue and renewing the technology base if push came to shove, a CEO told the entire company, “When in doubt, technology comes first.” The example demonstrates the power of clear direction.
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Closing Gaps to Execution
First, decide what you really want, not just a wish list. Second, tell people what to achieve and why, with what resources, but not how. Then ask them explain it back, in twice the time you explained it. Third, give them space and support to adapt to the unexpected.
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Results Through Collaboration
Successful organizations collaborate virtually with different people. 1) Collaboration requires reciprocity—a habit of giving. 2) Know whom to link with; successful teams network with stakeholders, not each other. 3) Collaboration assumes a complex task.
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Organizational Transformation
Organizations that transform themselves 1) know their priorities through external and internal insight, 2) conduct experiments, such as the value of telecommuting, 3) figure out how to scale results quickly across the entire organization, then repeat the cycle.
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Building Your Network: Create Depth and Breadth
You need a posse—a half dozen people you know well and can call on for immediate help. The problem with the posse is, they’re all like you. You also need a big ideas crowd—people who are different from you. That requires that you to go outside your normal network.
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Intergenerational Cohesion
Companies may have employees from five generations, each with a different work style. The friction can be a source of innovation and conflict. Some companies write vignettes of each generation, so other generations can understand. Others use reverse mentoring.
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The Three Types of Networks We will All Need
In the future we will need three sorts of networks: a posse—a few people we can contact quickly to help us solve problems; a big ideas crowd—people who are different from us; and a regenerative community—people we love and who love us.
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Feed the Dog, Not the Wolf
A medicine man counseling a young man observed that a dog is trustworthy, loving, gentle, and kind, while a wolf is vicious, ruthless, and angry. Both are fighting inside you. Which one will you feed? Which will become stronger? Feed the dog, both in yourself and others.
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Invest in the Process, Not the Outcome
Actions are within your control but not their outcomes. Set goals; then forget them. Put all your energy into the activities needed to reach the goals. John Wooden, in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and coach, never talked about winning, only about effort.
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Build Networks Based on Your Values
Looking for people to help your own career cheapens both of you. When a person inspires you, record when and why. Offer to help that person in a way that is consistent with your values. Sincerity is key. This is more powerful than reaching out from self interest.
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Embrace Whatever Comes Along
We feel stress when the universe doesn’t behave the way we want. Accept whatever happens to you. Embrace it joyfully. That doesn’t mean you don’t do anything, only that you accept that you don’t have control. Actions are within your control, but outcomes are not.
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How to Be As Resilient As a Daruma Doll
A Daruma doll has no arms or legs and is weighted at the bottom. Knock it down, and it always springs back. To be like a Daruma doll invest in the process, not the outcome; and live in appreciation and gratitude of what is good in your life, not on what’s wrong.
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To Enable Creativity Care About What You’re Doing
We are inherently creative. That creativity only needs to be released. The quickest way is to care—deeply care—about what you’re doing.
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Disgruntled Workers Don’t Give Great Customer Service
Every company wants to deliver great customer service, but usually doesn’t. Great customer service has more to do with the employee than the customer. Your job as a manager is to identify obstacles and remove them. A great way to do that is to ask.
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Bullying by Expectations
If everyone in your group feels overwhelmed, go to the boss as a group, but if you are the only one feeling overwhelmed, that’s bullying.
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The Importance of Self-Awareness in Leaders
As leaders our whole person is present at every moment. Great leaders are aware of their strengths and weaknesses—when their strengths should be applied, and when they need to rely on others. Research shows that self-awareness is related to company performance.
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Converting Urgency into Significance
Kevin Cashman describes an experience that made him aware of the days left for him on Earth. As leaders, we should ask the same question: How many days do we have? Do we want to spend those days in speed or in significance? In performance or purpose?
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Purpose Should Drive Performance
Does purpose drive your performance, or the reverse? A client who was successful by any objective measure lacked a sense of purpose. Once his own purpose became clear, both his own performance and the performance of his organization improved.
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Purpose As a Business Imperative
People have a need for food, water, and purpose. The purpose of a business affects talent acquisition; people look for jobs where the work matters. Companies that don’t provide purpose lose top talent. People have left Google because the work didn’t matter to them.
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When You Don't Go There
When someone says, “Don’t go there,” it’s important to go there. Going there helps your business grow.
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Kill a Stupid Rule
Brainstorm, “What rule should we kill or change and why?” Some rules can’t be killed, but can be changed. Everyone puts a sticky note for a rule on a white board that plots implementation (easy/hard) by impact (low/high). Kill at least one rule on the spot.
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Kill the Company
Assemble a highly diverse group of employees and ask, “If you were the competitor, what would you do today to put us out of business?” Post the threats on sticky notes. Then ask how to counter these threats. Answers will help keep the company ahead in the future.
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Innovate with Open-Ended Questions
Instead of, “How can we improve our products and services,” ask, “How might we…,” “How should we…,” or “In what ways can we…” Think of questions ahead of time. For example, “If you were a competitor, what two things would you do to put us out of business?”
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Setting Metrics for Innovation Programs
Metrics help calibrate your efforts and provide a clear path for remedy. Lisa Bodell gives examples of input, development, and output metrics. Metrics signal that innovations are welcome. Too many metrics, however, set handcuffs instead of guardrails.
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Forced Connections
Use the attributes of an unrelated object when you’re running out of ideas. For example, Lisa Bodell uses a bag of popcorn to apply “light,” “fun,” and “natural” of the popcorn to help design a table, then a magic marker for ideas to help design a new shower.
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Conversations Are About Relationships
We used to think about conversations as information. Rather, it’s about building relationships. We form impressions of people within the first 0.07 seconds, before we say anything. View conversations as gardens where we nurture and grow relationships.
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No Need to Respond
The average workers spend a third of their time writing and responding to email. If you’re just passing along info, enter NNTR in the subject line: No Need to Respond. People will know it’s information, not a conversation. NNTR has cut time on email by 20 percent.
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Wildcards
Ideas are rarely implemented according to plan. Use wildcards to help your team adjust to unexpected changes. Give them ten minutes to plan something, but pull a wildcard after seven: no money, no time, a market shift, etc. New constraints encourage innovation.
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Matching People to Job Requirements
They use four-hour interviews to match people with specific job goals in an objective manner. For example, they were told to get a technical expert to lead a division, but an assessment revealed that the technical expert lacked the leadership skills already in place.
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Emotions Are More Important than Facts
Tom talks about a negotiation during a six-week strike. He was lead negotiator, in his twenties, with a bodyguard. He lost twenty pounds. Looking back, he thinks the facts in the negotiation don’t matter that much. It’s how you manage the emotions at the table.
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Build Towering Strengths
They review people against 18 leadership “soft skills.” When people go off track it’s almost always these soft skills — micromanagers, solo players, and the like. When giving feedback, emphasize the person’s strengths. Help them build strengths into towering strengths.
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How to Attract Talent
Incentives for attracting new people vary widely — early out Fridays, special benefits, development opportunities, compensation opportunities, etc. These change, but what never changes is, great leaders attract and retain great people. Develop your leaders.
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You Must Believe in Your Product
If you don’t believe your product solves a problem you won’t engage; you won’t persist. Belief in your product is absolutely essential.
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Allow your People to Take Risks
It's important to let your people take risks, even when you're not sure they're right.
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Changing a Culture: You Can't Do It By Yourself
Culture change is everyone's job. Keys are good executive leadership and an emphasis on small strategic wins.
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Advice to New Managers Moving Up in the Organization
Do your own job well, but also understand what other people around you do.
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Prospecting Versus Selling
Prospecting is often viewed as the start of a sale. No. The purpose of sales is to sell a product or service. The purpose of prospecting is to start a lasting relationship.
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The Business Case for a Workforce of One
The business case consists of three components: 1) the potential for increased business, 2) the potential for increased workforce productivity and higher retention, and 3) the costs to implement the new people practices.
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The Second Mindfulness Capacity: Inquiry
Inquiry stimulates a genuine interest in what is taking place in and around you. By pausing to reflect, you gain insights that lead to greater efficiency and productivity.
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The First Mindfulness Capacity: Allowing
Mind time practices are meditations developed to teach three key mindfulness capacities. Allowing, the first capacity, prepares you to go to a place of choices and learning.
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Mindfulness Practice with AIM
“Mind time” can alter the shape and structure of the brain. Ten minutes can make a difference in your ability to focus, control emotions, empathize, and adapt your behavior.
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What Is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the ability to deliberately change an unconscious reaction to a purposeful observation. Improving your mindful capacity increases leadership effectiveness.
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The Third Mindfulness Capacity: Meta-awareness
Meta-awareness practice is a conscious act of tuning into everything that’s happening to and around you by concentrating your energy and focus on the present. Without awareness, change cannot occur.
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Connecting the Dots of Innovation
The Competing Values Framework describes how to unite an organization to create four types of innovations.
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Social Networks for Customers
Joie de Vivre hotels has a social network for its customers that encourages exchanges for travel advice, etc., and provides e-mail addresses of every manager and an electronic matchmaker for hotels and local events. They also hold meetings and quarterly events.
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Supervisor and Subordinate Roles
Supervisor or subordinate? Most likely you wear both hats, but are you clear on what your responsibilities consist of for each role?
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Being Authentic
How do you know if you are authentic or fake? Discover how identifying and conforming to attributes that apply to your personality lead you to being true to yourself.
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The Leader of the Future
The leader of the future needs to think globally, possess cross-cultural awareness, be technologically savvy, build alliances and partnerships, and share leadership—ask, listen, and learn from others.
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Goal Setting
When setting a goal, ask how you will know when you have achieved the goal.
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Knowing Your Values
For Steve McDermott, his most important value in business is fun.
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Mass Customization and Commercial Applications
If every customer is different, how do you customize? Big box retailers like Sears are in trouble. Now it’s Wal-Mart at the low end, high-end luxury retailers, and niche chain retailers. Chip Conley describes how Joie de Vivre, his boutique hotel chain, fills a niche.
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Maslow's Hierarchy Applied to Investors
Maslow’s hierarchy for investors is the transactional investor, who wants the ROI when the relationship ends; the successful investor, who is interested in long-term relationships; and the legacy investor, who wants a transformative effect on something beyond themselves.
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The New Road to the Top
The program describes changes in demographics of executives in the Fortune 100 from 1980 to 2001.
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Powerful Presentations
When you make a presentation, 55 percent of your message is nonverbal. The body language should match the message.
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Job Hopping and Career Advancement
Insiders became CEO faster than outsiders.
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The Four Minute Rule
The four minute rule says you have only four minutes to make a good impression.
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Transforming your Communication
Forty percent of people make sense of the world visually, 40 percent kinesthetically, 20 percent through sound.
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Leading a Team Through Change
When leading a change: 1) don’t get too far ahead; 2) give people a sense of purpose; make it seem clear and simple, even when it’s complicated; 3) be open to feedback; 4) celebrate the past as you move ahead; and 5) be genuinely excited about what you do.
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How to Prepare for a Crisis
Don’t let crisis management be the task that paralyzes you with indecision. This three-step, proactive process can prepare you for whatever comes your way.
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Crisis Leadership: Assume the Boom
The best crisis leaders understand not only what a true crisis is, but also how to prepare for it. Get ready to “assume the boom.”
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Create Relationships with Teammates
Why you would want to create relationships with those you work with? Because of the many benefits you derive from building a rapport with them.
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Stay Close to Your Core Values
One of the principal reasons for Southwest's success is, they know who they are.
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Developing Trust
Paul Stebbins tells a personal story of trust when he was 16 years old.
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Developing a Values Culture
The learning organization helps drive the values culture. All new hires undergo six modules built around six core values. Basic business activities are related to each value. For example, everyone fills out a time report because that reflects the value of integrity.
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Tailoring Training Through Technology
The Accenture learning management system knows who you are, your current level of proficiency, what you do, where your career is headed, what skills the business needs you to have, and what assets are available. It then tailors training to your individual situation.
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Why Teach Values?
Accenture doesn’t have time to develop all of the skills that all their people may need in all situations. When someone is in a situation where they lack all the needed skills, they apply Accenture’s core values.
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Winning the War on Talent
The top thing employees want from a job is work-life balance.
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Innovative Teams Do Have An 'I'
Innovative teams require conflict, because conflict provokes innovation.
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Let Adversity Fuel Innovation
Steve Lundin provides two examples of how you can use down time to innovate.
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Rapid Prototyping to Drive More Successful Innovation
Mistakes are bound to happen. Better to learn from them right away.
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Creating an Innovation-Friendly Environment
To create an environment that's friendly to innovation, decrease the clutter and noise.
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Motivation
To motivate people, connect with their passions outside of work.
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How Diversity Drives a Workforce of One
The new generation grew up on computers and technology; they already customize everything, and bring those expectations into the workforce. The workforce is also multigenerational and global.
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How to Embed Change
To avoid “initiativitis,” a.k.a. churn, provide visible and committed leadership, a clear sense of direction, and needed resources. Most important, someone must measure outcomes and create an infrastructure that ensures that the change endures.
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How to Get Honest Feedback at the C Level
CEOs should recruit a couple of confidants in the company, who tell them what’s really going on. Also, they should ask an open-ended question every time they meet someone. Over time, this demonstrates that they’re open to receiving news, both good and bad.
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Prioritize and Collaborate to Execute Strategy
The advice sounds obvious, but is typically ignored. If you start something new, stop something else. Keep initiatives to the top two or three. If we don’t collaborate when we reach the C Suite it’s because we view it as a competition; I won; you lost.
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Disruption Is the Only Path to Growth
A business model — value proposition, resources, processes, and profit formula — is designed not to change. The only way to lead in both the original market and a disruptive market is to establish an independent business.
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To Innovate, Ask What the Customer is Doing
When you’re trying to innovate, ask what the customer is trying to accomplish.
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How to Succeed As a Global Company
The key is a network of country managers, selected by the CEO, who act as a team. Managers manage their country and build value across countries and to the center. The center builds value to the countries. Incentives encourage two-way communication.
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Advice for a Job Interview: Do What Your Mother Said
Interviewers hire based on impressions made in the first few seconds, without asking if someone can do the job. Play the game. Dress nicely, be polite, smile a lot, look them in the eye, and give them a firm handshake.
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Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs can succeed if their organization is structured to meet the need they hope to satisfy, and that need is recognized as a real need. MBA programs can help entrepreneurs get started, sometimes with seed money.
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Before Expanding to a Foreign Country
When expanding into a foreign country decisions include whether to 1) send your own people or teach your values to people already there, 2) standardize or modify your products, and 3) standardize or modify your performance appraisal system.
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Proctor & Gamble: A Major Transformation
Proctor & Gamble simplified an inefficient matrix organization to one that placed equal emphasis on maximizing profits, increasing sales, and reducing costs. The new organization succeeded because it encouraged people in different areas to work with each other.
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Building A Team Of Talent
Leaders can't help but admire the "shining stars" in an organization. Joseph Eckroth cautions that, while these individuals are important, it's truly the collective talent of a team and how they work together that gives an organization its strength.
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Just Keep Going
To push past obstacles, says Stacey Peralta, you must keep going no matter what.
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Open Communication Is Key To Engaging Your People
Good communication is one of the simplest and most effective tools a leader has at his disposal. Robert Milliner reminds leaders that encouraging an open dialogue with employees brings harmony to an organization and provides an edge over competitors.
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Making Business Ethics Part Of Your DNA
As a prime directive of her job, Phillipa Foster Back gets up close and personal with the concept of business ethics.
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The Importance Of Listening
When you truly listen, what you hear may surprise you. Phillipa Foster Back recounts an important lesson from her early career that taught her the value of active listening.
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Improving Customer Interaction & Satisfaction
Because consumers are becoming so much more technologically savvy, says Robert Fort, customer interaction and satisfaction is easier to track and analyze.
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Negotiating: Both Sides Need to Feel Pain and Pleasure
Negotiation involves both fairness and respect. Both sides need to feel the pain and pleasure after a negotiation and walk away satisfied, but not bullied into making the deal.
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Look At Customer Needs To Set Strategy
Mark Greiner puts forth an alternative to the traditionally analytically driven method of devising strategy. Instead, he promotes forming strategy based on real customers using real products.
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The Benefits Of Coaching
Jason Zeman relates a personal story about how continuous coaching can encourage people to achieve their goals even when they don't believe in themselves.
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Design Thinking and the Problem of Fixation
In the ideation stage of design thinking, it's easy to get trapped into a single idea—a problem known as fixation. Mike Roberto presents techniques to overcome this problem.
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The Secrets of Teams that Deliver
Breakthrough teams have a personal commitment to excellence: they are superior goal setters, good communicators, have high levels of trust, hold themselves accountable, and celebrate achievements.
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Users Workarounds Reveal True Behaviors
People often say one thing and do another, so design thinkers engage users in the show-me technique to ensure users' actions match what they're saying.
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Selecting the Best Idea
Selecting the best idea seems like the right thing to do, but it can cause problems down the road. Find out how to choose the right ideas to take forward.
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Fair and Just Decision Making
Implementing decisions efficiently and effectively means building buy-in and commitment from team members.
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Why Do Leaders Make Flawed Decisions?
Why do leaders make flawed decisions? Group think. Learn how to overcome it and make better decisions.
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Facilitating Chaos In Teams
Most people try to steer clear of chaos. Myles Downey tells leaders how to make chaos work for their teams.
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Tap Into Your Unconscious Brain
Your unconscious brain — your prefrontal cortex — will help you achieve a goal if you define both the goal and where you are with respect to that goal. For example, if you want to get a promotion in six months, ask yourself frequently how you are progressing.
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Instinct, Debate & Data Make The Best Decisions
To make wise decisions, you need to consider several factors. Gavin Patterson describes those factors and helps leaders see how to incorporate them in their decision-making process.
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Performance Reviews That Feel Good
Research has demonstrated that employees are more motivated to improve their performance if they are compared with their past own performance instead of with other employees. Both the reviewer and the employee feel good about these reviews.
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Agility Requires Assessments
To be more agile in a fast changing environment, as a person or as a company, stop from time to time to assess where you are with respect to your goals. The sooner you know where you are, the sooner you can make changes.
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Promotion Focus Versus Prevention Focus
Are you a promotion person or a prevention person? Promotion people are creative and comfortable with risk, but poor planners. Prevention people are dependable and analytical, but risk averse — “defensive pessimists.” Embrace your strengths.
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Mindsets and Gender
Little girls are told, “You’re so smart; you’re so good,” which promotes a fixed mindset — “If I don’t succeed at a task quickly, I’m not good at it.” Little boys are told to work harder, which leads to a growth mindset. A fixed mindset an be a problem for women leaders.
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Inspiration As The Catalyst For Goals
The energy that comes from inspiration is far better than the energy that comes from obligation and duty. Myles Downey talks about how to use inspiration to set goals.
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Allowing Employees to Express Themselves
Employees were given permission to be themselves—to grow and develop and exercise their passion, to care about each other and the planet—in addition to performing their job.
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The Art Of Listening
A leader's ability to listen to staff and create an environment where staff know their ideas and solutions are desired can lead to improved productivity, work performance, and enjoyment, explains Myles Downey.
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Clarity Of Intent
If you want to have a successful meeting, Myles Downey says, then be clear on your intent going in.
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Live Event: The Experiential Organization: Designing Employee Experiences So People Want to Show Up to Work
This Live Event was initially webcasted on November 15, 2018.
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Live Event: The One Firm Firm
This Live Event was originally broadcast on Wednesday, September 12, 2018.
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Engage Your Customers To Grow Your Business
It's important to know the difference between talking with your customers and talking at them. Dan Wittner highlights how engaging customers grows a business.
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Use Customer Feedback To Set Priorities
Communicating with customers helps an organization set and prioritize goals, as Brian Malloy illustrates in this lesson about developing a customer-centric organization.
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Everybody Affects Customer Satisfaction
Tammy McLeod shares how a survey by an outside company served as a wake-up call for expanding the view of customer service.
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Use A Crisis To Build Community
Sometimes a negative experience can draw people together. Tammy McLeod reveals how you can use a crisis situation to unite a community and improve customer satisfaction.
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Give Customer Strategy A Simple Framework
Simplify the message of value that your company offers to clients. Barbara D. Stinnett suggests how to convey complex solutions in an easy to understand, customer-centric fashion.
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Achieve Goals with If-Then Plans
Goals like lose weight and exercise more are too vague. Increase your chances of achieving goals by pairing specific conditions with specific actions. If it’s 3:00 I will walk up and down three flights of stairs — exactly what to do, and when and where to do it.
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Setting The Tone For Customer Advocacy
Customer advocacy cannot be the responsibility of the CCO alone. As Jeb Dasteel shares, every person in an organization must believe and participate in customer service to create a successful culture of wooing clients.
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Let Customers Know You Are Listening
Jeb Dasteel explains why responding to customers, even with disappointing news, is preferable to withholding communication and may even be beneficial.
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Balancing A Career & Family
Achieving a satisfying work-life balance is often difficult, but it can be done. After years of work-related travel and moves, Eva Majercsik reveals how to manage family and a career.
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Overhauling Talent Management To Meet Market Demand
As needs change in the marketplace, talent and learning functions have to adapt. Eva Majercsik describes how she helped overhaul talent management at her organization.
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Communicating Using Mindfulness
Being mindful, instead of multitasking, makes for everyday communication that improves performance.
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Improving The Quality Of Your Contribution
Only speaking up when you know you have the right or popular answer may be safe, but it isn't the best contribution you can make, as Don Vanthournout shares from his own experience.
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The Importance Of Balancing Strategy & Operations
Every team needs a good balance of experience and abilities in order to be successful in the long term. Don Vanthournout highlights how strategy and operations work together.
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Authentic Flexbility
Global leadership is not about being authentic or being flexible; it is about being both.
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The Advantages of Cultural Diversity
Differences in how cultures see things, as alone or interconnected, brings the advantages of diversity to innovation and risk assessment.
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Cultural Differences: Speaking Up in Meetings
When managing a global team, you need to take control rather then let things happen naturally.
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Cultural Differences: Good Leadership
The definition of good leadership varies across cultures. To get results, leaders of global teams need to stay informed and be flexible.
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Confrontation On Global Teams
Different cultures express themselves differently, so leaders of culturally diverse teams need to depersonalize debates.
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Leveraging Networks To Change The Competitive Landscape
As Andrew Ray bluntly puts it, "A competitor is not always a competitor." Here he shows how investing in networks can change the competitive landscape.
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How Individuals Can Contribute To Growth
Andrew Ray brings company growth down to an individual level and highlights how each person can contribute to overall progress.
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Culture Map: Overview
Meyer explains the basis of her culture map and how it can be used to bridge cultural differences.
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Yes or No Questions
Because the answers yes and no can mean different things across different borders, it's good practice to ask open-ended questions.
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Cultural Differences: When a Country Gives Mixed Signals
Being able to recognize when a country changes position on similar behavioral scales makes it possible to understand subtle cultural differences and get the results you desire.
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Cultural Differences: The Trusting Scale
Doing business with individuals from other countries requires an understanding of whether they trust with their head or their heart.
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Delivering Financial Data Promptly
Believing the impossible is possible, Ulf Lilja shares how Sony Ericsson implemented a one-day close.
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Crafting A Successful Change Initiative
Company-wide change initiatives are rarely easy to undertake—but they can be highly effective. Andy Halford talks about how to initiate change that promotes growth and health.
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Breaking Down Silos
Create opportunities for individuals from disparate groups to communicate their ideas, interests and concerns in a safe environment.
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How to Increase Accountability
To increase your accountability, ask the opinion of someone you respect and admire. This will increase your chances of acting on the advice given.
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How to Stand Out from the Competition
Focus on being excellent at one thing to differentiate yourself, or product or service, to stand out from the competition.
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Getting Access to the C Suite
Bring your own ideas and relationships to the table beyond the product and service you are trying to sell.
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Just Listen! How to Connect and Get Through to Anyone
In order to build stronger relationships and gain more powerful connections, focus on listening and understanding.
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The Power of Feedback
Keith argues that most people are quite afraid of honest feedback, but the best thing you can do with those you trust is to ask for their most honest feedback.
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Creating Instant Intimacy
Keith Ferrazzi describes how to accelerate strong relationships by focusing on something about that person which engages you such that you genuinely care.
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Moving To Dynamic Problem Solving
The quicker pace of technological changes means that training and problem solving have to advance more quickly as well. Chris King discusses how the US Army stays on top of moving targets.
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Effective Leaders Are Self-Aware
Everyone has habits or quirks of which they aren't aware. Bob Cancalosi illustrates an experience that helped him realize the value and necessity of being self-aware if you want to be a strong leader.
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Mindfulness Is a Powerful Tool
To manage stress and improve performance, mindfulness is a mighty tool.
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Manage Distractions with Mindfulness
Have trouble paying attention? Take a mindful pause to reset your brain and get back on task more quickly and more effectively.
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Eating Habits Impact Performance
Bad eating habits can negatively impact performance at work, but with mindfulness you can turn bad habits into good ones.
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Leaders Are Made
Leaders are made, not born, and fortunately, most people are capable of becoming good leaders by following six practical steps.
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Influence Comes from Trust
Influence comes from trust. Trust comes from vulnerability, e.g., “I don’t know; what do you think?” People who are asked are more engaged. Sue Powell tells of a boss who asked everyone for his or her opinion, but were told to act as if the final decision were theirs.
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The Threat of Diversity
Research demonstrates the value of a diverse workplace. However, we are programmed at a primal level to prefer to be with people like us. Leaders must be aware that people who are not like us can contribute a lot. Spending time socially can help reduce the threat.
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How to Build Trust
At the start of a team meeting, ask everyone for their proudest moment that week and why. What is one new thing they’ve learned this week about themselves? What are two things that shaped you to be the leader you are today? How will that show up in this team?
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Face-to-Face Versus Virtual Management
Leaders who switch from face-to-face meetings to virtual meetings can’t see the behaviors that indicate people are disengaged, such as the sound of someone typing on their laptop. Leaders should discuss with their team the rules that apply during meetings.
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Customer Focus in Formula One Racing
Everyone in the company who has touch points with customers is an ambassador for the brand, including truck drivers and people who work in finance or R&D. An employee told a major customer some stories about the company, not knowing who he was talking to.
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Embracing Change in Formula One Racing
Every member of a Formula One team, at every level, in every job, is constantly looking for change, both in their competition and in technology —automotive engineering, aerospace engineering and ICT (information and communications technology).
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Team Talk: Communicating Top to Bottom
To ensure messages would be delivered throughout, a CEO briefed the 400 top managers every month. Those managers briefed managers the next layer down within five days, and so on, layer by layer, each within five days. The process took five weeks.
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Great Leaders Listen
Some CEO’s hold small group breakfasts, where everyone in the company is invited to talk about what it’s like to work there, and what changes are needed. There’s a difference between hearing and listening. Real listening comes from a place of curiosity.
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When a Team Member Isn't Contributing
When a team member isn’t performing, start with questions. Don’t judge their outside with your inside — don’t judge their behavior with your assumptions. Be curious about what motivates them, how they want to contribute. Ask questions.
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High Performers Need More Feedback
High performers are paid more than low performers. They should also receive more non-monetary rewards, especially feedback, because they are motivated more by challenges, by a purpose, and by working with A-players than by money.
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'People Team' Coaches
The Motley Fool found that successful companies like Google collect many types of data on its employees. Similarly, the Motley Fool also collects many types of data on its employees that a large and growing HR “People Team” uses for coaching.
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Conscious Leaders
Conscious leaders know who their stakeholders are, and are willing to go to places they had not imagined. For example, you need a healthy relationship with your suppliers. Ask how you can engage stakeholders to help you get to a better place. Tom Gardner gives examples.
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Five Steps to Building Your Network
To build your network, 1) make it relevant for others by 2) stating your goal or need, 3) making a clear request, and 4) offering to help the other person. This 5) builds and sustains trust over time.
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Practice Perspective Transference
The leader has access to conversations and information that members of the team don’t have. The leader’s perspective is valuable only if it is shared with the team.
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Close the Performance Gaps
GAPS is a coaching model that helps employees understand where they are and where they need to be.
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Go On A Listening Tour
To establish good relations not just with the team members but also throughout the organization, go on a listening tour.
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Dream Out Loud
Energy is created when you say your dream out loud. For example, saying that she was going to run the Boston Marathon helped her start training. Saying it out loud also helps other people to help you. These people are often one to three degrees of separation away.
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Fear Means That It Matters
Whenever Whitney Johnson feels fearful about doing something new, she knows she cares. We’re happiest when we’re unstuck—when we’re in the messiness—when we’re doing something that matters for ourselves, our family, and our community.
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Defining Yourself Can Hold You Back
Whitney Johnson wanted to be a jazz musician but didn’t try; she thought she wasn’t good enough. Writing, on the other hand, came naturally. To become an expert, approach things as a beginner, with a desire to figure things out. For her, interviewing is an example.
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Why We Need Women in the Workplace
We need women in the workplace for gender diversity, to gain parity with men, to maintain GDP growth at 3 percent, because women at the top improves the bottom line, consumers are woman while producers are men, and because millennials demand flexible life styles.
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Work-Life Balance: The Story of Celina
Celina was the primary breadwinner and wanted the best for her two small kids, but lived in New Jersey and worked in the financial district of Manhattan. Liz O’Donnell describes some of the conflicts Celina faced in trying to balance work demands with family.
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Women Can Lead At Any Level
Women are not opting out of the workforce; in this economy they have to work. Women are saying, I can lead from the middle; I can lead from a cube. They don’t they have to climb the corporate ladder in an up-or-out manner.
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Advice to Hiring Managers
Hiring managers need to understand that outside experience benefits the workplace. For example, when companies innovate they use the same talent and processes and expect a different result. Why not bring in people with different experiences and career patterns?
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Fallen Eagles: What We Need to Let Go Of
Examples of “fallen eagles” include the idea that an elite group defines practices that others follow.
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The Need for Emotional and Social Intelligence in Global Leaders
Emotional and social intelligence is becoming important for leaders of teams that represent different cultures and different languages.
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The Need for a Common Language in Multinational Companies
Multinationals need a talent acquisition strategy that takes into account the lack of English skills.
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The Global English Strategy in the Global War for Talent
To recruit the best people around the globe you need to present your value proposition consistently, which means you need to partner with people in country, communicate the value proposition to the labor market, and integrate what is necessary for success into an interview and assessment process.
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Tools for Developing Emotional and Social Intelligence
The higher the social and emotional intelligence, the better equipped the leader is to get work done through people, especially as the leader rises though management levels.
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Interviewing for Talent
Interview for seven minutes, then ask yourself if this person can do the job, or is simply someone you like or a convenient hire.
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Avoiding Self-Delusional Planning Assumptions
The self-delusions in strategic planning are: 1) recasting a big challenge as a small one; 2) assuming customers will buy our products and services; and 3) using placeholders to disguise absence, e.g., we will find ten customers in such-and-such market area.
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Why Simple is Better
Common-sense explanations that are easily understood are better than charts, graphs, statistics, and regression equations.
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Globalization: Geography is No Longer Relevant
People in different places are not that different. Labor costs are stabilizing. From a business standpoint cultural differences are irrelevant. Globalization is more about technology; Manilla is as accessible as Phoenix. Think of the planet as one country.
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The Power of Emergence and Weak Ties
Most of us have strong ties with a small number of co-workers. Weak ties know different things and different people. Try them first.
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Blue Ocean Strategy: Learn from your Non Customers
Current customers only want more for less. Ask non customers instead.
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Tips on Developing a Blue Ocean Strategy
What factors should be eliminated or created to attract those customers and lower costs?
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Overview: Blue Ocean Strategy
Blue Ocean is a strategy to move from the red ocean of bloody competition to uncontested market space.
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Use Meetings as an Engagement Opportunity
Have a clear purpose for the meeting, the right people in the room, and clear decision rules.
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Working In Virtual Teams
Allan Cohen discusses ways to work on virtual teams.
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Getting Access to Powerful People
Start with a bold direct approach. Allan Cohen gives two examples.
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Building Your Network
Networks are made up of reciprocal relationships. People with the most relationships are the most influential.
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Focus on the Positive: Let Go of Fixing Problems and Embrace Opportunities
When mistakes are made, cut your losses, focus on the positive, and move on.
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Goal Attainment: Getting to Performance
Everyone should agree on a goal at the beginning of the year, track individual performance toward that goal every week or so during the year, and conduct fact-based discussions at the end of the year about why or why not the goal was met.
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Stay Close to your People: Provide Direction, Speak Less and Listen More
Jay Wright has learned from one of the best in the business--his own father-in-law--to speak less, listen more, and value his coworkers.
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Global Perspective: Adapt Your Leadership Approach to Culture
When Sandro was sent to Poland as a general manager he gave a speech about his vision for the business. Everyone nodded. The next day everyone went on strike because he had told them what to do without asking what they wanted to do.
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Introducing Stress in Call Center Training
Training is always helpful, but it’s so much more meaningful and effective, explains Rich Herbst, when you introduce stress in a variety of ways.
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The Use of Simulations in Call Center Training
Preparation is a key to success in any industry. And simulated training, says Rich Herbst, is invaluable in helping new employees prepare to interact with customers.
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Cultural Differences in Call Centers
Good customer service training is not a “one size fits all” proposition. Instead, as Rich Herbst shares, you need to fashion your training based on the personalities and characteristics of the people you are training.
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Building Confidence in New Call Center Employees
The cost of training customer service representatives can be high, because the industry has high attrition rates. Rich Herbst explains how to lower those attrition rates by building confidence in those being trained.
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Reducing Stress in Call Centers
It’s not easy bringing new customer service associates along and helping them to feel comfortable and competent in their job. But Rich Herbst knows an effective way of reducing the stress new associates feel and helping them be successful.
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Measuring the Effectiveness of Call Centers
We all know it’s important to measure the effectiveness of our employees and systems. Rich Herbst explains a revolution in the way call center effectiveness is measured--a revolution brought on, in part, by the advent of social media.
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Leading Change
Leaders who want to effect change need to understand the psychology surrounding it, says Anne Riches. Here she describes that psychology and gives tips for leading change.
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The Role of the Amygdala: The Almond Effect
We often have a “fight or flight” response to change and other unsettling issues in the workplace. Anne Riches explains where this response comes from and how it impacts people in their workplace.
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Planning for Change
When you are planning for change, Anne Riches explains, you need to plan for resistance. A certain element is likely to resist, but you need to maintain your focus on leading the majority who are willing to go forward with the change.
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When We Get Our Best Ideas
We’d ideally love to have great, innovative ideas at our beck and call. But it doesn’t work that way. Anne Riches tells us why, and she offers strategies for recharging your brain.
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On Becoming a New Manager
Being elevated into a management position is great, but it can also be challenging and a bit scary. Anne Riches explains some of the keys to making a successful transition into management.
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Choosing a Successor
Gerard Ee knows that choosing a successor is about more than just finding the person with the right skill set, but involves searching for someone with a matching vision and passion.
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The Creativity Killers: How Control and Restriction Can Lead to Destruction
A company can build a culture of creative thinking, but there is a counterculture that fights against that creativity, Gaia Grant says. Here, she identifies and details the seven key killers that can destroy creativity.
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Identifying Obstacles to Creative Thinking
Creative thinking is an integral skill that directly impacts a company’s health and future. But while it is in ever increasing demand, it seems to becoming more elusive. Gaia Grant explains why creativity has dropped off in recent years.
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Nurturing Your Own Creative Thinking
If you really want to be a creative thinker, you need to approach your day systematically and guard your time so that you can focus on projects and issues, shares Gaia Grant. Here, she talks about how to take control of your time.
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Creative Solutions Require Determination, Not Luck
Creative people who come up with solutions and are highly successful are often both admired and perceived as lucky. Not so, says Gaia Grant. The primary ingredient to creative thinking is perseverance.
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Anyone Can Learn to Think Creatively: Taking the Creative Leap of Faith
At times we feel we are stuck, that there are no solutions to the problem we face, that we can do nothing about it. But no problem is insurmountable. Gaia Grant explains how we all can learn to move toward creative solutions.
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How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives
The quote, from Annie Dillard, is a reminder to be mindful about how we spend our days. Step back from time to time. Are you productive? Are you around people you like and admire, at home and work? Are you serving people in ways that only you can?
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Time Management and Productivity
As Allison was interviewing for the job of coaching a new CEO, he was invited to participate in a vendor selection meeting and asked Allison if he should attend. She said he had people for that. He needed to step back and consider the highest and best use of his time.
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Setting Goals in Four Dimensions
Write down your priorities for the short, medium, and long terms in four major categories: your career, your relationships and family, your role in the community, and as caretaker of your mind, body, and spirit. Review and rebalance the priorities periodically.
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How to Increase Engagement
About 70 percent of American workers are not engaged. To increase engagement create an attractive work environment, connect workers with the purpose, and try to make the work fun. Allison describes a competition to encourage hand washing in a hospital.
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A 'Joy Meter' of Employee Engagement
Allison Rimm constructed a “Joy Meter” to measure the ratio of joy to hassle an employee might feel when asked to take on a new assignment. Her example is being asked to serve on the audit committee, and some considerations that influence the level of her joy.
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The Illusion of Scarcity Part 1: Scarcity vs. Abundance
Scarcity thinking is a disease that will ruin any group. Tim will help you get over the disease by the end of this series.
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Engaging and Reenergizing your Team: Investing in Psychological Capital
To truly engage employees, you must tap into their emotional side in addition to their intellect.
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The 7 Habits embody the essence of a balanced, integrated, powerful person and creating a complimentary team based on mutual respect. They are a complete framework of sequential principles.
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Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Stephen Covey advises us to create blueprints to guide our lives, as individuals, families, and organizations.
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Habit 1: Be Proactive
Stephen Covey points out that we choose how we respond to life's circumstances.
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Habit 3: Put First Things First
To put first things first we must learn to say no to other things that may be urgent but not important.
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Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
First understand the problem at a deep level before offering advice.
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Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Win/win means agreements are mutually beneficial and mutually satisfying.
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Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
The Seventh Habit is about taking the time to regularly "sharpen the saw"; to renew physically, social/emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
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Habit 6: Synergize
Synergy refers to an effect that is greater than the sum of its parts; creating cohesiveness, energy and momentum.
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The High Cost of Low Trust
Trust is the basis for positive relationships. In business low trust environments are filled with political games, interpersonal conflict, interdepartmental rivalries, and hidden agendas.
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The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness
The 8th Habit is about achieving greatness; finding your voice and inspiring others to find theirs.
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To Innovate Celebrate Failure
To get your team to think innovatively, says Sujaya Banerjee, you must first remove the fear of making mistakes.
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Decision Tools: Value x Effort
To make good decisions, use a simple framework in the decision-making process. Ian Metcalfe shares how easily a two-by-two grid can be used to achieve effective, immediate solutions.
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Meaningful Work Is Motivating
All employers want their employees to find meaning in their work. Ian Metcalfe uncovers how to find that meaning, and the role leaders play in helping employees find it.
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How to Become an Essentialist
Essentialists live by priorities. Priority setting is not something on a to-do list; it’s the work of life. It’s not just that setting priorities matters; it’s “This is who I am.” Only failure and leadership can simplify your life. Choose to simplify by setting and living by priorities.
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From Creativity to Innovation: Discover, Dream, Design, Decide, Do
Creativity, Ian Metcalfe explains, is part of the innovative process. In this lesson, Metcalfe details five mindsets that make up a collaborative model of innovation.
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Applying Essentialism to a Team
Ask the team, what is the most important thing we should be working on now? The head of a highly successful high school rugby team uses the acronym WIN: What’s Important Now? Focus on doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons.
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Do the Hard Things First
An investor in Silicon Valley said the most important advice he ever received was, at the end of each day, to prioritize the top six activities for the next day. Then spend up to two hours on the highest priority activity when he first arrived in the morning.
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Using Positive Psychology to Communicate
How you say something is just as important as what you say, says Sue Langley. She notes the type of communication that is most productive and that most positively impacts a person--even if that communication is negative.
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Playing to Unrealized Strengths
Knowing your employees’ strengths is, of course, critical. But, as Sue Langley points out, your employees have realized strengths, unrealized strengths, and learned behaviors--and the understanding of these can play a vital role in how teams and companies perform.
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The Four Decision Styles
A decision style may be directive, democratic, participative, or consensus. A style may need to change with increased competition, a new CEO, or a merger, but organizations need a predominant style to provide clarity.
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How to Coach and Mentor
A successful mentoring program can set attrition rates below industry standards. Sujaya Banerjee shares how her organization’s mentoring program works and why it’s successful.
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Coaching & Mentoring: Find the Guru
There is a strong business case for investing in coaching and mentoring programs. Sujaya Banerjee shares the lessons she’s learned from her organization’s “Find the Guru Within” program.
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How Alan Mulally Builds Trust and Transparency: The Rainbow Story
Marcia Blenko shares a story she termed "The Rainbow Story."
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Making your Meetings More Productive
1) Every agenda item should be a decision or input to a decision. 2) Clarify individual decision-making roles. 3) Distribute materials in advance; no Powerpoint presentations. 4) Decide who will take the next step by what date.
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Need Role Clarity in Decision Making? Use the RAPID Tool
D is the Decision maker. R is the person who Recommends the decision. I is for people who provide Inputs. A is for people who must Agree. P is the person who Performs or executes. Make sure you have only one D, R, and P.
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The Anatomy of Making an Effective Decision: What, Who, How, and When
What decision is it? How is it framed? It there more than one decision? Who plays what role in the decision? How is the decision made? Who does what to whom when? When should the decision be made?
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The Four Components of Decision Effectiveness
The components are quality (making good decisions), speed (deciding faster than the competition), yield (executing as intended), and effort (not too little or too much).
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Identity: How Do We Know Who We Are?
Our identity includes memories of our past, what others say about us, and the programs others have given us. We can also create a new identity.
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To Help Others Develop, Start with Yourself
To help others get better, let them watch you get better.
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Team Building Without Time Wasting
Marshall Goldsmith describes a seven-step process.
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Successful Mentor Relationships
Consider younger as well as older mentors, and different mentors for different skills. The mentor should be someone who will look out for you, not just someone more experienced.
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Career Transition
Promotions and transfers often require new skills. Understand what the new position requires. Show your commitment; ask others for their opinion, take classes, or find a mentor.
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Reevaluating Goals
Goals are important. It’s also important to know when to give them up.
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How Are You Perceived?
If you don't have access to an executive coach, 1) conduct a 360 on yourself; ask others who know you (don’t be defensive); 2) Google yourself; and 3) conduct your own focus room; assemble people you trust; ask them what your strengths and weaknesses are.
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Systems for Innovating: Google and Whirlpool
Google allows employees to do anything they wish during 20 percent of their time. Google also has systems for floating ideas up the hierarchy. Whirlpool uses “innovation rooms” to generate new ideas, with systems to translate ideas into action and estimate their value.
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Intentionomics: The Economics of Intention
Intentionomics gets at the reason you do what you do--and it has an impact at both micro and macro levels, explains David Penglase.
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From Passion to Goals, Clarity to Certainty
With doubt comes uncertainty. Keith Abraham explains how to get over this hump so that you can achieve those things about which you are most passionate.
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Identify Your Personal Goals
Don’t let life pass you by. Keith Abraham shares why it’s important to stop every now and again and recharge your personal battery.
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Creating Momentum
Activity cures inactivity. Keith Abraham shows why people don’t need to be motivated; they just need to create momentum.
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Advice From a 95-Year-Old Man
Most people have three fears: fear of failure, fear of success, and fear of change. Keith Abraham shows what it takes to overcomes these fears and, surprisingly, it’s not all that difficult.
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The High Cost of Low Ethics
Unethical behavior affects 1) prestige; a lost reputation can alienate customers, shareholders, and prospective employees; 2) productivity, especially of highly skilled workers; and 3) profitability, through employee fraud, litigation, and high absenteeism.
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The Myth of Multitasking
You can have a conversation with the person in front of you and the person in the Blackberry, but not at the same time. That’s impossible.
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Without Vision, Companies Will Perish
Companies without a purpose will perish. Merv Hillier shares how to take an organization from “good to great,” all by starting with a purpose.
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Recruiting and Developing Front Line Leaders
Recruiting and developing leaders is critical to the life of a company. Mike Jossi shares a successful approach to this process.
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Advice for New Managers
New managers face a huge task in leading their team and overcoming myriad challenges. Mike Jossi shares what has worked well for him over the years in his management positions.
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Autonomy Creates Power
Raju Bhatia says, “That control is the best which controls the least.” He believes that an autonomous organization is one that gives individual workers the freedom to express themselves and to perform in an outstanding manner.
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Do-It-Yourself Leadership Development
In these challenging economic times, the concept of do-it-yourself leadership development as proposed by Andrew Simon’s company is a highly appropriate solution for the task of training an organization’s future managers.
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Listening at Three Levels
Leaders need to listen to what people say, ask questions to learn what it means, but then rise above to understand what’s really going on—the content, the concept, and the context.
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Adaptive Leadership: Letting Go
Being the hero can be addictive. As Lisa Vos, shares, however, as a leader it’s much better to let go of the need for everyone to be dependent on you and instead adopt an adaptive style of leadership.
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Building a Great Team: Start with Cohesion and Trust
Teams that have cohesion and trust can solve almost any task.
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Managing Relationships As You Move Up in an Organization
Relationships become difficult when you rise in an organization faster than your friends. Don’t pretend you’re better. Reach down.
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What Every Leader Must Possess: Empathy and Perspective
Empathic people make the best decisions. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know, and seek advice.
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Empowering Decision-Making
To decentralize decisions to people closest to the problem requires that they have information from above that provides context.
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Learning the Hard Way Can Be the Best Way
We can all learn from our failures--but there are also times, says Don Taylor, when we can wisely sidestep potential failure by knowing our own strengths and weaknesses and doing our homework before a presentation or event.
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I Hate it Here!
No manager likes to deal with poor performance. But there are ways to do it, says Robert Mosher, that shows the company values the employee and is looking for the best outcome for that employee.
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Honesty Even When it's Difficult
Being honest and candid isn’t always easy. But, as Robert Mosher relates, it is of vital importance to a leader.
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Hiring as a Burden
Hiring people is, of course, a highly important role--one that impacts many lives and the health of the company. Robert Mosher describes his own hiring experience and how it affected how he goes about the process of hiring people now.
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Feedback in Person Only
E-mail is a tool that’s fine for sharing information. But as William Mitchell cautions, it’s a poor choice for giving feedback to employees.
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Articulate Your Intention
It’s important to be able to articulate your intention, says David Penglase. It lets people know exactly what you are focused on doing, and why, and it helps develop a rapport with people.
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Ask Yourself Every Hour, 'What Did I Do?'
Do you really know how you spend your day? David Penglase suggests tracking your time for one day--with the intent of being more intentional and creating good habits.
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Practical Prodding: Intention Reminders
We all need a bit of practical prodding--some sort of reminder of our intention, to keep us on track--explains David Penglase.
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What Teams Need to Work On To Be Great
The most important team ingredient is a shared sense that the team is up to something together—that team members are committed not only to the success of the team, but also to the success of each other.
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Teamwork: Build Individual Confidence First
Great leaders spend all of their time building confidence in others.
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Solidifying Your Team: Shift Accountability
Simon Sinek suggests that using “I intend” could have positive consequences for a company.
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Authenticity: Representing Yourself as You Truly Are
Representing yourself as you truly are engenders trust quickly.
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Strategic Planning: Respond Intelligently to Happy Accidents
We’re told it’s better to be proactive than reactive, but the world is not predictable.
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Organizational Authenticity: The Alignment of Say, Do and Believe
Authenticity means that we actually believe what we say and do.
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How to Influence and Lead Change
A leader only needs followers. Focus on your team.
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The Golden Circle: The Three Essential Elements of Organizational Success
Three concentric circles are WHAT we do, HOW we do it, and WHY, with WHY in the center, and HOW on the outside.
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Hire for Values and Beliefs
Hire people who believe what you believe.
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Organizational Purpose: Start with Why
Many organizations know what they do and how they do it, but not why—their purpose, why they exist.
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Managing Positive and Negative Stress
Max McKeown describes a stress clock, with negative stress on one side and positive stress on the other.
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Strategic Thinking: The Difference Between a Leader and a Manager
Leaders see the big picture, how things are connected to the future, and how to get out of the box. Managers concentrate on the here and now.
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Three Approaches to Strategy Development
You can do what your competitors understand, or do what they do, but to establish a competitive advantage do what your competitors don’t understand and can’t do.
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Why Developing Leaders At All Levels Is Important
To deal with today’s global, complex, fast-moving times we need leaders at all levels, empowered to come up with new answers to new situations.
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Two Magic Ingredients for Engaging People
Change communication from one-way—telling people what to do—to two-way engagement. Second, to engage people they must feel valued and included.
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Lead Like Improvisers: Declare Your Point of View
Great improvisers declare their point of view in the first 3-5 seconds of a scene. Great leaders do the same.
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The Role of Managers in Strategy Formation
People at different levels need to think in terms of different time horizons.
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Strategic Flexibility
Separate the people who make strategic commitments from the people who manage strategic uncertainty.
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Overview of Competitive Strategy
Extreme strategies, such as best or cheapest, can be successful or complete failures.
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Lead Like Improvisers: The Importance of Diversity
Great leaders understand that the more diverse the point of view, the better the product.
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Disruptive Innovation & Growth
The greatest growth opportunities lie with customers no one else wants, and markets that don't yet exist.
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The Role of Senior Executives in Leading Growth
Senior executives should define how new business units should be different from their competition.
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Beating Your Most Powerful Competitors
Go after the customers they don't want, in the markets they are avoiding.
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Physical Signals in Conversations
Judith Glaser demonstrates physical positions and gestures we make in response to others, what those acts signal about what’re we’re thinking, and what is happening in our brains.
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Healthy Conversations
In a level #1 healthy conversation we exchange information non-judgmentally, just trying to connect. Level #2 is a positional conversation; one of us is advocating a position. Level #3 is a transformational conversation, where we are willing to be influenced by each other.
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Managing Fear in Yourself and Others
Fear triggers cortisol, which works for 26 hours. Interrupt the pattern. Reframe the moment. Label it. Ask what the fright means for you. Refocus. Redirect. If you see others frightened, be present for them. Explain what’s going on and what it means for them.
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Three Levels of Listening
We go inside ourselves every 12-18 seconds while listening to others. That’s noise-in-the-attic listening. Face-value listening is where we think we’re telling each other facts but we’re not. Positional listening is listening for our position in a group discussion.
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What is Engagement?
Engagement is not loyalty or happiness or commitment. Engagement is a connection between a company and its employees.
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Keys to Performance Management
Performance management starts by setting goals that are connected clearly to the organization’s key priorities.
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Responding to People with Power
If the other person is imposing on our space we may assert our own power in our posture or voice, mimic the person’s power gestures, or manipulate the flow of power by invading the other person’s space.
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Practice Conversational Intelligence in LAPS
L = Listen to connect without judging. A = Ask questions for which we don’t have answers, such as, “What if?” P = Priming. For example, send questions before attending the meeting. S = Sustaining conversational agility skills, such as reframing a conversation.
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The Relationship between the Organization and the Manager on Engagement
The best manager in the world can’t make his or her team feel engaged if the organization doesn’t offer good career development, doesn’t have a learning culture, and doesn’t recognize good effort.
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Employee Engagement: The Top Organizational Drivers
In the United States, the top three drivers of engagement are senior management interest in employee well being, opportunities for employees to grow and develop, and corporate values.
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What Customers Value
You might think you have a great product or service, but what really matters is what your customers think. Caroline Tan explains the importance of learning and understanding what customers value, and solving their problems in ways that make your product or service stand out.
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Recall Success for Confidence
Mr. Coughlin shares some tips for sales professionals to build their self-confidence. He explains what self-confidence is in the business sense.
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Start with Creating Value Exchanges
Everything in life is a value exchange.
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Focus on the Right Data to Understand Customer Interest
There’s plenty of data, but the truth is there is only a small amount of information that is valuable to a marketer in driving a customer to a better purchase.
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Leading Tools in Customer-Focused Marketing
Amazon is the benchmark for customer-focused marketing. Nothing is extraneous. It’s all simplicity.
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Do the Impossible: Innovation Begins with Belief
Noah Blumenthal shares a story of a delayed flight and a flight attendant that turned something thought of as impossible into a possibility with some creative thinking.
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Love the Crisis: Your Greatest Opportunity to Shine
Noah Blumenthal tells a story of a semi-professional cyclist who lost his leg in a car accident and how he embraced and learned to love his crisis and how it encouraged him to get back to cycling faster than doctors thought possible.
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Smash the Silos: Use Assumptions to Your Advantage
Noah Blumenthal shares a story about finding and sticking to your mantra.
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Never Be a Victim: Rise to Every Challenge
Noah Blumenthal discusses three behaviors (or stories) that one must practice that helps one make better decisions.
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Never Take a Customer for Granted
You can never take any customer for granted. As Campbell Jones shares, anytime you do so, you’re putting your business at risk.
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Attracting and Retaining Talent
Most organizations find it a challenge to attract and retain high-caliber talent. In this lesson, Campbell Jones shares Manheim’s highly successful strategy for recruitment and retainment.
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Handling Sales Objections
When a client objects to your solution it usually comes down to a fear of change. Does the pain of the present outweigh the unknown of the future? Do not launch into a solution. Instead, help the client study the problem and get past their fear of change.
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Stages of Change in Sales
Clients go through six stages when they make a decision to change: satisfied, acknowledge, fix/don’t fix, investigate, select, reconsider.
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Improv Tips for Better Presentations
Dynamic, engaging presentations start with dynamic and engaging presenters. Apply these three tips from improv to build the audience connections that set you apart from the crowd.
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Using Improv to Improve Collaboration
Improvisation as an art form is inherently collaborative, and leaders who integrate the key tenets of improv into their teams achieve greater success.
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How to Influence Strategy
The energy, attitude, and language leaders bring to the table influences strategy, from the idea phase all the way through execution. Make sure you’re pulling people instead of pushing them away.
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Manipulating Status
By leveling the status of all individuals at a meeting, senior-ranking individuals no longer have the power their position affords. As a result, all individuals’ talent, participation, and engagement increases.
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Emotional Intelligence Makes the Difference in Candidates
When sorting out the best candidate for a position, it often comes down to emotional intelligence, says Rob James. Here, he describes how he ascertains whether a candidate has a strong emotional intelligence.
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Leaders Drive Change
Risk-taking is challenging by nature, because of the consequences it can bring. Rob James explains how to motivate employees to take risks and how to effectively manage those risks so that, even if failure occurs, employees won’t shy away from the next risk.
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Leaders Need to Be Authentic
Leadership styles can vary from person to person, but there are certain qualities that leaders need to possess to be effective, as Rob James explains.
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The Six Questions to Organizational Clarity
A leadership team must create organization clarity by answering six critical questions: why do we exist beyond making money, what are our basic values, what business are we in, how will we succeed, what is our priority right now, and who must do what for this to occur.
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The Best Leaders Communicate Vulnerability
A leader must be comfortable being vulnerable. Vulnerable leaders admit their mistakes and weaknesses, and apologize when necessary.
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Executives Must Understand Their #1 Team
As a leader you are on a leadership team, as well as the leader of your own team.
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Optimizing Team Performance
Team performance comes from a small focused group that has a clear and compelling purpose, complementary skills, a common work approach, and mutual accountability. Real teams have a shifting leader role.
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Excelling at Team Leadership
When the team members have skills that apply at different stages in the task, a shifting leadership team may emerge, where it’s hard to see which member is the formal team leader.
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What the Best Motivators Do
The best motivators get the workers to feel pride in the work they have to do.
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The New and Coming Re-Generation
Teenagers grew up in the recession. They know that we live in a world of finite water, energy, and money.
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Advice to Generation Y
Gen Y’s won’t like the workplace. They’ll find others bureaucratic and non-communicative. But we need them.
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Leading a Virtual Collaborative Team
Collaboration is based on trust. Invest time for team members to get to know each other virtually or, better, in person.
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Managing Generation Y
Gen Y’s are people in their 20’s. They learned computer technologies as kids.
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Managing Generation X
Gen Xers are people in their 30’s and 40’s. They make good leaders because they tend to think about options; they keep doors open.
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Developing High Levels of Engagement
Employees who are excited to come to work are well matched to the culture of the organization.
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Meaning Is the New Money
Money is less of a motivator these days. A more powerful motivator is the meaning behind the work.
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Cognitive Dissonance: Justifying Our Decisions
Once we make a decision, we tend to elevate the correctness and appropriateness of that decision because if we question it, we often personalize that into, “Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.” To be most effective and make the smartest decisions, we need to separate our sense of who we are from our decisions, says Jill Klein.
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Managing Overconfidence in Your Manager
Few people like to tell their boss that he might be wrong, especially if the boss is overconfident about his ideas. But there’s a way to do that, as Jill Klein explains, that will likely result in him accepting the ideas that run contrary to his.
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Being In Your Element
To say that someone is in his or her element means they’re doing something for which they are really suited.
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Diversity and Creativity Drive a Culture of Innovation
People typically rate themselves differently for creativity and intelligence. Sir Ken Robinson, however, thinks creativity and intelligence are closely related.
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How Leaders Foster Innovation
Organizations need a strategy for innovation—a process for developing new ideas on a regular basis.
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Customer Focus: Define Who They Are
Your first customer is you. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing you will fail. Your second customer is your employees. They are the bridge between you and the end user.
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Pursue Your Passion
College is not for everybody. Sir Ken Robinson tells the story of a man who only wanted to be a fireman. His high school teacher discouraged him but that’s all he wanted. Later, as a fireman he saved that teacher’s life.
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The Two Most Important Things When Giving a Presentation
Do not use a speech as an information dump. We can only remember only about four things.
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Four Steps to a Charismatic Presentation
Nick Morgan details the four steps to a charismatic presentation. 1. Be open. 2. Be connected. 3. Be passionate. 4. Listen.
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Involve Your Audience
Do not hide behind the lectern. You can’t connect with your audience well from there. Get them involved. Ask questions, ask for a show of hands, ask them to tell their stories about whatever it is you are talking about.
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Change in Global Structures Represent Opportunity
About one billion people who were below the subsistence level are coming into the economy. That will establish new markets, which will require new business models, new value chains, new distribution systems, and new products.
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Creativity is a Collaborative Activity
Creativity in organizations is driven more by teams than by individuals.
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Performance Management: Be Clear on the Goals
Traditional performance management spends a little time defining goals at the beginning of the year, and a great deal of time at the end of the year evaluating performance. That’s too late. Reverse the effort.
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Feedback That Can Have the Biggest Impact
Feedback is like good health. You can never have enough of it. Frequent feedback sessions during the year has a bigger impact than a formal evaluation at the end of the year.
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Great Coaching: Don't Give the Answer
Coaching is helping persons come to answers on their own or with assistance. The process the individual goes through is important, not what you give them.
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Managing People: It Isn't About You
Managing is not about getting people to do what you want. It’s about making people winners and accomplishing your goals in the process.
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Hire for Potential
Hire 50 percent for potential, 25 percent for fit with the culture and values of the organization, and 25 percent for ability to do the job today. Most people contribute in a role different from the one they were hired for.
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Managing Performance: Three Areas of Focus
Jason Jeffay details three areas of focus for managing performance.
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Mindsets to Bring to Conflicts
Bring a mindset of “resolutionary” thinking to conflicts: abundance—everyone gets what they need; creative solutions; openness and full disclosure; personal responsibility for the situation; and teaching and learning instead of combat.
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A Good Interpersonal-Skills Toolbox
Caring about others as individuals trumps everything. Other interpersonal skills include using “I” messages, knowing how you want the person to feel and do, using nonverbal communications and, very important, listening.
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Elements of Good Agreements
Elements of a good agreement are intention and vision—where you are going; personal responsibilities, individual actions, metrics defining success, how we will resolve conflicts, renegotiating for continuous alignment, and disclosing concerns and fears.
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Conflict Resolution and Negotiation
Conflicts are resolved through negotiation. Negotiation is not a game to be won or lost. The best negotiators put all their cards on the table and try to learn what the other side wants. Both sides then work collaboratively to figure a way to give the other side what it wants.
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Good Communication Is the Lifeblood of Any Organization
Just as blood provides energy to the body, good communication provides energy to the organization. In a survey of the best places to work, good communication identified the most effective organizations. Relations at Herman Miller are based on covenants.
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The Laws of Agreement
The laws of agreement are: we collaborate through effective agreements; we can be more effective if we agree about what we’re doing together, what our vision is, and how we’re going to get there; and we resolve new conflicts through new agreements.
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Emotional Intelligence
Many organizations are hiring more for emotional intelligence than for technical skills. Critical elements of emotional intelligence are self knowledge, self awareness, self regulation, self motivation, empathy, and interpersonal skills.
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The Critical Skill of Listening
Listening is an active skill, not a passive activity. Effective listeners are curious. Ask good questions. Repeat back what you think they said. Notice the body language. Feel their emotion. Spend a day listening. Do unto others as they would do unto themselves.
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The Most Powerful Form of Negotiation is Reciprocity
The most powerful form of ongoing negotiations is to give the other side what it wants, and to help them understand what you want and how they can give it to you. It’s not about hiding the ball or being macho; it’s about sharing and open communication.
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Playing Communication Games
Senders convey negative feedback through games like It’s-My-Duty. The Sandwich game sandwiches negative feedback between positive comments. The Detective game asks do-you-remember questions. Receivers play the Wounded Animal and Ally Builder games.
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On-the-Level Communication
On-the-level communication is purposeful, direct, respectful, and carries shared responsibility. Givers and receivers both need reflective skills—observing, listening, and empathizing—and expressive skills—questioning, describing, and concluding.
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Being A Customer-Driven Organization
A customer-driven organization understands not only what a customer is trying to do, but also the full perspective of the customer’s process, including why.
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Deep Customer Understanding
To understand customer needs, consider all the stakeholders.
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Effective Leaders Use Power Well
Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see.”
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Communication is a Two-Way Process
Communication is as much about listening and repeating what you hear as it is about telling.
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Understand the Boundaries Above You and Lead Accordingly
Leaders at every level know they should not take risks if their boss won’t support them.
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Engagement is More than Motivation
Engagement includes more than motivation, a sense of personal affiliation, pride in your work, purpose in your work, and belonging to something worthy.
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Organizational Growth: Look Beyond your Four Walls
To be competitive, companies need to look beyond their own four walls.
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“Yes, and...” Versus “Yes, but...”
Is there a difference between “Yes, and...” and “Yes, but...”? Yes, and it’s the difference between inclusivity and exclusivity.
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Managing Former Peers
Individuals who are promoted into a role over their former peers have specific challenges to address.
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Leadership Presence
Because leaders are people, too, they can react in the moment, briefly forgetting their professional role. These tips make it easier to maintain and sustain leadership presence.
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Office Politics
Office politics are unavoidable, but you can learn to make the most of the system with these essential tips.
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The Role of a New Manager
As a manager, your job is to give your team what it needs to succeed. Alisa Cohn explains where to put your focus.
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Dealing with Gossip
Gossip is an unfortunate fact of life, but it is simple enough to address in an adult manner.
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Overcome Imposter Syndrome
Am I good enough? Do people know I’m a fraud? Questions like these plague individuals who suffer from imposter syndrome, but there are ways to overcome self-doubt.
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Achieve Your Goals
Are you among the 8 percent of people who actually achieve their goals? If not, this action plan will help you to accomplish what you desire.
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Be More Charismatic
Alisa Cohn says that charismatic people are like magnets, pulling people and opportunities toward them. Fortunately, anyone can learn to improve their charisma.
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Operational Excellence in Meetings
Operational excellence focuses on excellence no matter where it takes place. You can even use it to improve the quality of meetings.
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Think Before You Plan
Planning by itself is not strategy; leaders need to spend time thinking to build a successful scheme.
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Jumping Uncertainty Gaps
The success or failure of jumping uncertainty gaps depends on how far you jump. Max McKeown shares examples from the Lego Group as a lesson in risk-taking.
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Becoming More Strategic
To become a better strategist, start asking why things are the way they are.
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Engaging Others to Join You on the Journey
To engage others to join you on a journey, you have to avoid three traps.
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How to Communicate a Vision
Communicating a vision doesn’t mean talking to the masses; it means energizing and engaging people in the future.
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Mentors Are All Around Us
Glen Senk’s first mentor was his riding instructor, when he was ten years old. She said it doesn’t matter what you decide, just make a decision. He still teaches and uses that advice 50 years later. Glen Senk also gives other examples.
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Decision Making for Tentative Decision Makers
To make better, more rationale decisions, provide a clear guide that enables people to push aside the thoughts and feelings that often get in the way.
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Hire Collaboratively
Ask six or eight colleagues to rank candidates on vision, leadership, skill set, business acumen, cultural fit, and other criteria. Tell interviewers to probe, observe body language, ask unexpected questions, and put candidates in unexpected situations.
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Lead Like an Innovator
The ability to lead like an innovator comes from a mindset that focuses on discovering the unknown and a persistence to see through things that have never been done.
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From Tactics to Strategy
First, make sure you have great reporting. You need a dashboard and exceptions. Others need to look at everything; you don’t. Then worry less about efficiency and more about effectiveness — less about what and more about why. Force-rank your priorities.
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EQ and Leadership
Everything in business is gray; good leaders see all sides; they have high EQ. For example, a great negotiation is one where everyone wins. Try to see things from the perspective of employees, customers, and shareholders. We’re all in it together. Try to work it out.
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Decisions That Make the World Better
To positively impact our organizations, our communities, and the world itself, we must lead and make decisions as humanitarians.
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How to Be a Trusting Person
There is no trust without risk. If you practice trusting others at your own risk, they will return the favor. Say, “At the risk of,” and fill in the blank with what you’re afraid of. For example, “At the risk of appearing a little ignorant here, I’m not sure I understand.”
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How to Increase Your Trustworthiness
Trust equals credibility, reliability, and intimacy, all divided by self-orientation. To increase your trustworthiness build on intimacy, the most important factor. For example, comment on other people’s feelings, e.g., “It looks like you’re a little upset. I’d be upset, too.”
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To Influence Others Listen More
To influence others, listen to them. It’s a form of respect. They will reciprocate with respect by listening to you. Salespeople say, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” It’s true. Encourage others to say more.
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How to Build a Trust-Based Organization
Ask four groups to list five behaviors demonstrating the absence of the four virtues, one virtue per group: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation. Repeat with the four values: other-orientation, collaboration, long-term focus, and transparency.
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Virtues and Values
Virtues are credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation, i.e., individual trustworthiness. Values encourage trust in the organization: focus on others, collaboration, focus on relationships, and transparency. Work on one virtue and value each day.
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Making Collaboration Work
The key to effective collaboration is getting individuals to think together about the what, not the how.
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Aligning Groups
Working faster isn’t enough to keep up with the speed of disruption. Agility and a common way of working are also key.
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Dealing with Uncertainty
Uncertainty can put anyone on edge. Eddie Obeng shares three techniques for dealing with all the things you can’t control.
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Remember ASKART before Assigning People
If you know a person’s Attitudes, Skills, and Knowledge (ASK), you know what Activities, Roles, and Tasks (ART) you can assign to that person where he or she can succeed.
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Tying Role Clarity to Internal Customer Service
When two people or groups are in a customer-provider relationship, such as a boss and subordinate or two groups in different silos, let each person or group tell the other what they want and what they don’t want. The exercise improves internal customer service.
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Sharing Ideas
One of the best ways to communicate ideas is by creating simple drawings—you don’t even need to be an artist.
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Celebrate Small Wins
Celebrations are an acknowledgment of progress and a means to re-energize for the next step of the journey.
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Choosing What Not to Do
For those times when you have too much to do, Murli Thirumale shares advice on how to choose what not to do.
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Ask for Feedback
The person most responsible for your success is you, so do not leave it up to your boss to give feedback.
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Improve Decision Making Through Debate
A little debate can go a long way toward improving your decision-making processes.
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Native Genius Increases Team Performance
To increase team performance, make the most of each person's native genius.
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How to Delegate Tasks and Empower Others
Do you really understand how to empower your team? Liz Wiseman explains how to relinquish control and let others take over.
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What Motivating and Inspiring Leaders Do Differently
The best leaders create simultaneous conditions of safety and stretch.
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Unlocking a Team Member's Potential
If you want to unlock all of an employee's potential, you have to ask the right questions.
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Handling a Team Player Who Won’t Play Along
The key to dealing with difficult people is to build a bigger relationship with them.
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Symptoms of Managing Less
Leading more—and managing less—means knowing when to stop being in operator/manager mode so that you can move back into leader mode.
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Simplification for Managers
A complex business can run successfully on systemization, but not bureaucratization.
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Building A Team Through Trust
Peter Leahy believes that teamwork is built on a common commitment towards a particular aim.
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Become a Better Leader by Using Meta-Skills
Leadership skills are like tools in a carpenter's toolbox; you need the right tools to do the job.
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Working Backwards From a Win
To capture a win, plan backwards from your goal.
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Difference Beyond Diversity
Diversity in the workplace is about much more than just checking off compliance boxes.
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Two Leadership Components: Strength and Tenacity
We need to lead from our strengths—the strengths we have, not the ones we teach or the ones we emulate in others. Mother Teresa led from compassion, love, discipline, and equal regard for people. She was also tenacious; she never gave up.
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Frameworks for Decision Making
Develop decision frameworks aligned with your values and know what your bottom line is.
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Retail is Entertainment
Retail is about entertainment; customers come in because they want to feel good. First, have the right product in the right store; inner city Detroit is different from Dallas. Then hire associates from the community, support them, and provide compelling stories.
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Coaching and Mentoring for Career Development
Career development, says Martyn Redgrave, hinges on four issues: intellect, energy, ambition, and choices. Here he details how people can use each issue to further their careers.
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The Five E's of Leadership
There are many ways to consider the critical aspects of leadership. Martyn Redgrave likes to look at leaders in terms of their ability to carry out the “Five E’s.”
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Live Event: Working Better Than Before: Understanding Habits to Manage Yourself, and Others, Better
This Live Event was originally broadcast on Tuesday, September 20, 2016.
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Three Communication Building Blocks
Leadership works through the currencies of communication and relationships. To build your communication currency, develop a clear message so your audience knows where you want them to go, target the message to the audience, and deliver it with veritas.
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When Employees Don't Meet Expectations
“Redirecting feedback” is painful, but part of a leader’s job and best for both parties. Signal that the situation is serious. Describe the effect of their performance on the organization. Ask for their perspective. Agree on the current reality and how to resolve it.
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Delegating As Development
Ask your colleagues if they would like to do some of the things you’re doing. For every project you pick up, ask if you really need to it, or whether someone at the next level could benefit from the opportunity. Think of delegation as a development process.
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Ditch 'Sticky Fingers' to Stretch Your Talent
Some managers insist on doing most of the work themselves, because they like doing it or don’t trust their team or can do it faster themselves. Managers who do too much may lose high-potential talent on their team. Develop your people. Take some risks. Let go.
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The Hunt for Pink Elephants
A pink elephant is an issue that blocks team progress. Examples include members who don’t get along privately, reluctance to challenge a leader because they are emotionally attached to an idea, and failure to confront a member who acts up negatively with bad behaviors in public. On high performance team, pink elephants are named and addressed. Clarify the issue, prioritize it, and take action.
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The Three Stakeholder Groups and the Role they Play in Your Career
Interactional stakeholders are your peer group; your career depends on them. Observational stakeholders are the local work community. Reputational stakeholders know you only through their communication with others. Build relationships will all three types of stakeholders.
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Keys to Effective Delegation
Delegate results, not methods or tasks. Explain the context and what the outcome should be, but not how to get there. Agree on resources and a general approach. Then ask how they feel about it. Agree on how and how often you will be informed of progress.
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Good Coaches Ask Questions
Good coaches don’t give advice. They ask questions. First frame the discussion. What are the goals? Then ask questions to understand the situation, what success would look like, what action they decide to take, and how you can help resolve the topic.
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Ask for Feedback
Leaders who ask for feedback are seen as more effective — stronger and more competent, not weaker. One manager would buttonhole an employee and say, “Tell me something you think I don’t know and don’t want to hear.” Clearly not fishing for a compliment.
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Leveraging Subordinates' Strengths
Look first for the employee’s strengths. Then match what she does really well with what the organization needs. Leverage her strengths to the point where her weaknesses are irrelevant. Similarly, managers should work to make their own B+ strengths into A’s.
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Advice for Leaders: Shift Your Mindset
Women fail to advance to leadership positions because they have limiting mindsets. To change a mindset, be self aware without judgment. Remember a time when you had a desired mindset, then shift, for example from being a victim to being in charge.
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Successful Women Leaders Build on Their Strengths
Although she was living an affluent life, Joanna felt invisible and empty. When she interviewed successful women leaders, she discovered she had their skills, and only needed to acknowledge her fears, find her purpose, build on her strengths, and connect with others.
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How to Identify and Apply Strengths
Ask team members to identify characteristics they value most in themselves. Those are their strengths. Recognize and deepen those strengths. For example, in a “check-in,” team members announce their strengths and how they will apply them to the issue at hand.
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Identifying Strengths in Yourself and Others
What activities drew you as a child, as a young adult, and last year? What patterns do you see? Ask your team what they see when you are at your best. See the strengths of team members and work to deepen them. Ask what’s right before asking what’s wrong.
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Giving Feedback
Men don’t like feedback; it makes them feel bad. Women don’t like feedback because it says they’re not perfect. But those who feel safe like feedback. It helps them learn and grow. Start feedback by talking about the person’s strengths, and how they can grow stronger.
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Shifting a Mindset: Example #1
Joanna Barsh gives the example of a meeting that is going nowhere. You can intervene, but what to do? One mindset is, I’m the leader; I will decide. Another is to ask each person what they think the group should do and why. You can ratify their view or decide yourself.
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Don't Be Frustrated; Be Curious
When the group is not going where you want it to go, don’t get frustrated. Be curious. Ask why. Sometimes you need to tell people what to do, but most of the time you will be more effective asking questions and learning. The group has more experience than you do.
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How to Earn Respect: Everyone Else's, and Your Own
Don't respond to baiting. You'll earn everyone's respect, including your own.
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Communication 101, 102, 103, and 104
Talk with people, not above, at, or to them.
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Stay Ahead of Disruptive Innovation
To stay ahead of disruptive innovation, know everything about your core and find other people to know everything else.
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Getting Out of an Innovation Rut
The best way to escape an innovation rut is to bring in others to pull you out of it.
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Supplier Innovation Days
Reaching out to your suppliers for innovation can yield important successes.
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Innovation Programs at Crown
Dan Abramowicz candidly shares his thoughts about the successes and failures of some of Crown's innovation culture initiatives.
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The Top Three Things New Managers Should Do to Stimulate Innovation
Unless people are given explicit instructions to be innovative, they'll probably play it safe and go with the status quo.
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Rotations Stimulate Innovation
Rotations can stimulate innovation in intangible but dramatic ways.
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The Other 95 Percent of Innovation
With incremental innovation, organizations make everything they do better.
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The Fuzzy Front End
Taking high risks during the early concept phase—the fuzzy front end—can yield high rewards in the end.
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The Role of Power and Influence in Organizations
Sources of personal power in an organization include expertise, a network of relationships, and interpersonal skills.
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The Role of Creativity and Diversity in Leadership
Diverse groups are better at solving problems than homogeneous groups.
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Customer Communities for Customer-Driven Innovation
Develop communities of customers to provide feedback, offer suggestions, and promote you to others.
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Eliminating Bad Profits (the enemy of growth)
“Bad profits” are profits that are inconsistent with the golden rule.
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Getting Past Satisfaction to Loyalty
“Satisfaction” surveys of customers are a failure. Enterprise Rental offers a better model.
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Corporate Ethics: The Golden Rule of Growth
Living by the Golden Rule drives profitable growth.
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Driving Growth with Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The program explains how to compute a Net Promoter Score and why it is important.
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Building and Leading Effective Teams
Team leaders need to manage both the team and the context surrounding the team.
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Leadership Tips for New Managers
Linda Hill offers several suggestions for new managers.
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Evidence-Based Sales Leadership
Only 3% of the U.S. population have the motivation and influence to be successful in sales.
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Why is Change Difficult?
Change requires persistence and small steps.
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Live Event: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior
This Live Event was originally broadcast on April 24, 2018.
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Marcus Aurelius on Change
Embrace change. Change brings opportunity. The question is, Who can be the most nimble in exploiting the change, and be the winner?
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The Importance of Trust and Teamwork
Members of a team must rely on, trust, and help each other.
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Advice for New Managers
New managers should understand that they don’t have all the answers on day one, and that’s okay.
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The Next Level: Pick Up Regular Renewal of Energy, Let Go of Running Flat Out
Leaders need to alternate between the dance floor and the balcony. Scott Eblin offers a Goals Planning System to help them do so.
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The Next Level: Pick Up Confidence and Let Go of Doubt
Effective leaders are confident. They lead with confidence.
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The Next Level: Pick Up Accountability for Many Results, Let Go of Responsibility for Few Results
Scott Eblin explains the difference between accountability and responsibility.
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Dealing with Unconscious Bias
Recognition and acceptance of bias is the first and most important of six simple strategies used to address unconscious bias.
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Unconscious Bias
Unconscious bias--the human danger detector that identifies friend or foe--can be beneficial when we are aware of it but perilous when we are unaware.
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How Inclusive Leaders Create Workplace Diversity
Diversity is more than a social justice issue when it takes place in a business environment.
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Dealing with Fear of Change
In a change effort, 20 percent will be ambassadors, 50 percent will be backseat sitters, and 30 will be percent detractors. Use the ambassadors to engage the 50 percent in going forward. Ignore the detractors; they’re a waste of time.
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Seventy Percent of Our Thoughts Focus on Fears
To determine your relation to your fears, name your fears on the perimeter of a wheel. The distance from the center shows where you are relative to each fear. This exercise helped a manager understand his relation to managers vs. peers. Then write “I want” statements.
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Breaking Our Unconscious Focus on Fear
We learn to be fearful from our parents and later from unpleasant encounters. We tend to believe we’re not worthy. When we’re fearful the brain releases cortisol, the stress hormone. When we’re curious the brain releases serotonin, which allows us to be creative.
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Women: Use Your Diversity to Your Advantage
Diverse businesses almost always outperform homogenous businesses, and women can take advantage of that.
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Be Curious
Seventy percent of our thoughts focus on fear. This creates neural networks that contain “rust.” To leave a small town, there are only a few roads, but a major city has many. To create a dense neural network, be curious. Try new things. Focus on the positive.
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Building Trust and Credibility
Leaders build trust and credibility by making their values come alive for others.
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Back Pocket Leaders
To be the kind of leader that others want to follow, leaders need three stories in their back pocket.
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Presence—Actors Have It, Leaders Need It
Leadership isn't about acting, but leaders who can take cues about their presence will captures people's attention and perform better.
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Women in Leadership: Adapt Your Style to Avoid Pigeonholing
To avoid being pigeonholed, women in leadership need to vary their leadership styles.
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How to Manage Your Time and Energy
Managing your personal energy can help you be a more productive worker.
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How Do Your Intentions and Impact Match Up?
Sometimes there is a gap between what we intend to convey and the impact that we end up having, so clarifying your intentions is essential.
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Have Difficult Conversations Early and Often
Managers should have difficult conversations as soon as possible and as often as possible.
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Gender Bias
Despite having a number of close relationships with people of the opposite sex, gender bias still exists in nearly every society.
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Check Your Biases
Making decisions too quickly makes you vulnerable to biases that ultimately create more problems. To make better decisions, you need to slow down.
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Talent Management: Tools to Identify Bias
Effective talent management necessitates an awareness of personal bias, and it's easier to create support tools than you might think.
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Cultural Communication
Because people from different cultures have different values and customs, it’s important to know how to communicate properly.
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Personality and Bias
Bias toward personality type has many influences, but you can overcome this bias by figuring out who is and who is not "your type."
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Put Bias in Neutral
Using a clutch metaphor, Howard Ross describes how to shift personal biases into the neutral position.
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Acknowledge Unconscious Bias to Make Better Decisions
Developing an awareness of previously unconscious biases improves your ability to make good decisions.
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Two Myths about Creativity
Labels block creativity. The biggest blocker, however, is fear. We let fear talk us out of reaching our creative potential. We may have a great idea in a meeting but hold back from fear.
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Using REPS to Measure Learning
REPS stands for 4 qualities present in people during “high velocity” learning.
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The G Factor: Grit and Growth
The G Factor—Grit and Growth—predicts future performance better than current performance.
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Creativity is Learned
We may understand the need for creativity, but not see ourselves as creative.
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Facilitate Creativity Using Role Storming
Role storming is brain storming in character. Assign people roles. This is fun and removes the fear.
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Creating Change from the Bottom Up by Relaxing Constraints
To expand your business, you need to relax constraints. Mark Kramer shares examples of how companies that moved to a less traditional business model opened a new world of opportunities.
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Two Ideas for Inviting Diversity
1) Before you get on the airplane for your next flight, pick out five magazines you have never read. Try to connect them with a current problem. 2) The next time you have a team meeting, ask members to bring a different point of view from the dominant perspective.
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Diversity as a Driver of Innovation
Florence was the center of the Renaissance because the Medici brought together people from diverse backgrounds to create new ideas. Increase diversity in your team; build bridges with people different from yourself. Frans gives an example involving termites.
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The Power of Diversity
Diversity drives innovation, which provides a competitive advantage. Volvo asked a team of women to design a car. Women don’t like to open the hood; when they do, it’s usually to add washer fluid. The solution was to add washer fluid on the side, as we do gasoline.
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How to Increase Your Value
To increase your opportunities for advancement learn everything you can about how your organization functions—not just your job, but how your job fits into the grand scheme.
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Give Meaning to Work
Giving meaning to work is more than telling people what to do and how to do it.
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In the Online World, Focus on What Matters
Peter Thonis learned how to identify and concentrate on important information in college. He applies those skills today in business.
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The Importance of Diversity of Thought
The reason diversity in ethnicity, language, age, gender, experience and other factors are important to an organization is that they bring with them diversity of thought, which brings diversity in questions and solutions.
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Create Cultures of Inclusion
Creating cultures of inclusion means creating an equal playing ground where anyone can bring ideas to the table and where their unique perspectives will be valued.
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Problem-Solving with the Power of Play
Turning problem-solving into a game taps into the power of play to engage others in brainstorming.
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Problem-Solving with Curiosity 2.0
The business world is demanding answers faster than ever, and curiosity is what leads to great solutions.
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Working Towards Custodial Pride
Stages in moving a relationship go from initial interaction and repeat confidence (1 & 2) to sustainment and capitalization (4 & 5). The third stage is custodial pride.
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Strategic Relationships
We have personal relationships with people we choose, functional relationships with those we tolerate, and strategic relationships with people who invest in our personal and professional growth.
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Making a Relationship Currency Deposit
Relationship currency deposits are investments you make in your most valuable relationships.
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The Real Organizational Chart
Think of ROI as Return on Influence.
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The Bowtie and the Shoestring
Bowtie relations with a client have a single point of contact—a single point of failure. Shoestring contacts eliminate the single point of failure, build levels of relationships that illuminate different pieces of the puzzle, and help move relationships from creation to capitalization.
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Problem-Solving Using Informal Networks
Posing problems to informal networks generates valuable support for problem-solving.
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Millennials: Curiosity, Courage, and Community
Changing the topic of what conversation from what we think Millennials want to how we can work across generations is how we get to the best solutions.
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Using Calculated Risks to Define Your Value
Defining your value requires having the courage to take calculated risks based not only on your own strengths but also the strengths of others.
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Globalization and Profitability Part 1
More organizations are finding it more profitable to sell their goods and services overseas.
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Accelerated Relationship Development
Jeff Kaplan suggests three things to accelerating relationships: research their life, not just their professional career, have confidence that you have a meaningful contribution, and finally ask them about an important event in their lives.
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Check the Checker: Don't Make Assumptions
In business, you can never assume. When you assume, problems can arise.
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Focus on What Fulfills You
It’s important to find what fulfills you, because when you’re fulfilled, you’re successful.
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Problem Solving: Keep Asking Why
To solve and prevent problems, it’s important to ask why and keeping asking why.
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Your Values Are Your Actions
According to Antonio Carrillo, your set of values are your guiding light.
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External Focus: It's Your Customers and Not Your Competition
It’s important to reach out to your customer, listen to their needs in both good and bad times.
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Getting People Out of Your Office Quickly
Laura Stack provides you with eight tips to get people out of your office quickly.
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How to Say No Without Saying No: Refusing Requests with Tact and Grace
Laura Stack discusses ten ways to say no without saying no.
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Promoting Inclusion and Creating a Peer Buddy System
People who have friends at work are more likely to stay with a company than those without.
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Best Practices for Interviews
There are numerous unnoticed biases that can influence a hiring decision, both in the resume and the interview.
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Job Descriptions and Diverse Recruiting
Outdated and overly complicated job descriptions could be hurting your talent recruitment.
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Employee Resource Groups
Employee resource groups exist to help workers feel welcomed and supported in their professional lives.
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Career Conversations To Keep Your Best Employees
If you want to keep your best employees, find out how to do it in a "stay interview."
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The Differences Between Mentoring and Coaching
Mentoring and coaching are often used as interchangeable terms, but they aren't quite the same thing.
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Leveraging Technology and Globalization for Green IT
David Moschella describes how leveraging 2.0 web technologies, social media, and videoconferencing can alleviate the impact of business travel.
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Keeping Employees Motivated When Promotions Are Not Available
Do you know how to keep your employees motivated even when career advancement is stagnant? Alan Berson has some ideas to keep employees engaged.
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Curiosity Is the A Priori Requirement for Leadership
Curiosity is the number one requirement of great leaders today.
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Successfully Managing Up
Asking your boss some key questions can help you manage up more successfully.
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Managing for Market Share or Profit
The pursuit of market share over profit can be deeply entrenched.
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Common Mistakes New Leaders Make
New leaders tend to make the same mistakes, but they can be easily avoided if you know what to watch for.
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Use Outlines to Improve Communication
The best communications have a strong framework consisting of an outline, supporting points, and a conclusion.
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Participate in Meetings
Even if you do loads of work, if you aren't contributing during meetings then you're probably being overlooked.
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S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Changing a long-held habit can be difficult, but applying the S.M.A.R.T. method gives you an edge.
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Managing Teams Means Managing Emotions and Expectations
Setting the right expectations enables leaders to manage the emotions that stop teams from moving forward.
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Long Work Hours
Long work hours are the norm, with fewer people doing more, but you can do something about it.
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Every Interaction Leaves a Mark
In every social interaction you leave a mark, and you need to make the most of those impressions.
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Giving Constructive Feedback
Giving constructive feedback that others hear and act on calls for a nonthreatening, observation-based approach.
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Positive Feedback in Four Steps
You can give positive feedback, a critical component of high-performing workplaces, by following four straightforward steps.
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The ROI of Creating a People-Centric Leadership Model
Based on Stern Stewart economic value added (EVA) analysis, their annual shareholder value has grown 15 percent-plus since 1988. When you give people an inspiring vision, responsible freedom, and celebration along the way you get exception results.
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Enabling Potential: Going from Ordinary to Extraordinary Performance
When Bob Chapman found employees excited about filling out brackets for an NCAA basketball tournament but not about going to work, he changed work into a game. That changed the culture, made work fun, and resulted in high performance.
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The 3 Ps of Leadership: People, Purpose, and Performance
The leadership model starts with meaningful work for the people entrusted to you. Then, to inspire the people you must give them a purpose. Finally, you’ve got to perform — create value for all stakeholders. You need all three: people, purpose, and performance
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Inspiration is Foundational to Leadership
Inspiration is allowing people to be validated for their worth. Inspiration is sharing a vision of what we do, why we do it, where we’re going, and how their role fits that value proposition, no matter what they do. Inspiration is telling people that what they do matters.
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Selling with Stories
Items sell for more if they have a good story.
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Understand Your Competitive Advantage: The Singer Story
Singer trained 60,000 people world wide to sell sewing machines, but didn’t see that their advantage was their sales force, not their machines; they could have sold other household goods. By contrast, IBM transitioned from punched cards to information solutions.
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Hire Managers for Intelligence and Fit
Hire bright people who fit your company culture. Look for them in business schools, because business schools accept only bright people.
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Strategy 101: Focus on Assumptions
A strategy includes a vision, the environment, assumptions and beliefs, a strategy, and a plan to execute that strategy. Focus on the assumptions and beliefs.
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Leadership Is About Behavior
We judge ourselves by our intentions but we judge others by their behavior. Others judge us by our behavior, not our intentions.
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The Theory of Constraints - Resistance to Change
This video is an introduction to Goldratt's latest development, and presents an example of the cause and effect logic on how to successfully overcome resistance to change.
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Great Management is About the Relationship
According to Curt Coffman, great managers do three things. They start with the right people in the right job, then the right focus, and the right relationship.
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Focusing on What Works
Jurgen Wolff presents two companies, Apple and Pixar that, in his opinion, have really been successful at focusing on what works.
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The New Time Management
Jurgen Wolff presents a new strategy for time management – what he calls the “alter-ego strategy”.
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Great Managers Help People Hone Their Strengths
Managers only have one thing to invest in their people, that being time. Because of this, the challenge for managers is how to get the best return on investment for your time?
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Difference Between Good Leaders and Great Leaders: Empathy
Great leaders possess what Marcus Buckingham refers to as “extended empathy”.
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Overcoming Fear: Techniques to Drive Performance
Vince Poscente outlines a four part technique to overcome fear when pitching a sale.
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Adversity and Opportunity
As humans, we’re all fragile. Somewhere in our personality, our persona, lies an area of insecurity, of doubt. How do you overcome something that has been so trying, so difficult?
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Competing Smarter: Do What Your Competition Isn't Willing To Do
How do you get your people to innovate? You start by looking at the competition.
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Great Managers Set High Expectations
The relationship between manager and employee drives growth and it’s when the employee is challenged that growth takes place.
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Great Managers Take the Time
Great managers understand the relationship to be an essential part and are dependent on both the successes of the employee and the manager.
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Retaining Talent: Aligning Top Performers with your Best Managers
When a relationship between manager and employee is compelling and invigorating, the person wants to achieve goals not only for the organization, but for the sake of the relationship as well.
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How to Deal with Non-Performing Employees
Great managers set themselves apart from bad managers when they know how to deal with nonperformers. They act quickly, without spite or anger – because they genuinely care for the person.
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Managing Top Performers
You can develop your average performers into better performers through a genuine authentic relationship between manager and employee.
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Manage People for Who They Are
Research indicates that the more engaged a person is at work, the more engaged they are at home, in their family, and in their community. Engagement begins with the relationship.
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Customer Focus
Software salespeople talked to customers about the software, not about how the software could help customers achieve their goals. To change the focus to customers a “customer value” life cycle management model was developed and used around the world.
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Managers Need to Understand their Customer's Business and Strategy
Align your business model with your customer’s strategy and the business outcomes he is trying to achieve.
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Data: There Should Be One Version of the Truth
Data is speed. Speed is winning.
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Challenge Your Orthodoxies
Write down your core beliefs about consumers, how you operate, and how you make money. Then flip them. What if they weren’t true? What would we do differently? Marla Capozzi gives examples.
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Where Executives Struggle in Innovation
Executives struggle in 1) setting the focus for innovation, e.g., twelve initiatives is too many; 2) setting the outcomes that define success; 3) insufficient attention and governance; not encouraging debate; and 4) too much attention to process.
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The Importance of 'Why' in Innovation
Incentives like recognition, working with a certain leader, and monetary rewards are associated with unsuccessful outcomes. What works is to explain why the innovation is needed. That builds trust and purpose, and commitment to reach the top of the mountain.
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Requirements for a Successful Innovation Team
First, clearly define the problem to be solved. Second, assemble the right mix of deep technical expertise. Third, the team needs resources, but not too many; they need to be experimenting and getting to the next level. Fourth, leaders should be engaged throughout.
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Leading from Adversity
People who start with struggles learn early how to recruit others to their vision. He had learning disabilities; Chuck Schwab and Richard Branson are dyslexic; Schwab was thrown out of Stanford twice; Branson never graduated college; Steve Jobs was fired from Apple.
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Innovation Often Isn't Innovative
Innovation has its fads—open innovation, business model innovation, etc.—and the fads usually don’t work. Leaders apply tools designed for other problems, like process maps and stage gates. Teams often change the idea to fit the process rather than the reverse.
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Ask What The Other Person Values
To sell, recruit, or otherwise influence another person, first determine what they value. Then deliver on that value. In recruiting, for example, it’s not just the money and the time and the resources. It’s all that plus a reason why the person you’re recruiting should join.
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After You Complete an Orthodoxy Exercise
After you question some basic beliefs, you can focus on questions you should ask. Change your perception to be more creative. Use analogy brainstorming; how would Google attack this problem? How would constraints change your attack? Test as quickly as possible.
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Characteristics of Successful Teams
The most admired companies and leaders have three characteristics. 1) They are clear about why the task in front of them matters, 2) everyone knows why they should show up for the task, and 3) everyone on the team feels like they belong to the team.
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Finding Time for Innovation
Innovation requires debate, reflection, and learning. These take time. 3M and Google provide time, which allows “collisions” with people, and time to read something that sparks an idea. If there are only two dots in your head there’s only one way to connect them.
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Funding Internal Innovation through Budget Reallocation
To innovate organically requires P&L dollars, which are the most difficult to get. But if companies think about inputs in addition to outputs, they may find diminishing returns, overinvestment in core products, duplication, and other opportunities for reallocation.
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Five Levels of Accountability
Levels 1 and 2 are accountability for yourself and your people. That’s usually as good as it gets. Level 3 is accountability for peers, level 4 is accountability for the boss, and 5 is for the enterprise. Division heads can demonstrate accountability at level 5. He gives an example.
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How High-Performing Leaders Perform
High performing leaders model the behaviors they seek in others, including behaviors they don’t want to do themselves. He will interrupt his own agenda to coach on request. He tries to make decisions more consultatively than unilaterally. He gives other examples.
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Dealing with Conflict
When two people don’t agree, first reward them for bringing up the issue. Then observe the issue in a neutral light, explain how it affects you, what you want, and end with a contract. Handle conflicts assertively, not aggressively or non-aggressively (as a passive aggressive).
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How to Be a Better Coach
1) Work on listening skills. Take a class; read; watch a video. 2) Demonstrate you’re at stake for the other person. 3) Be sensitive to behavioral triggers. Great listening includes body language like nodding, and verbal behaviors like mirroring. Also, don’t interrupt.
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Obstacles to Accountability
Employees who are rewarded for individual performance have no incentive to be accountable for others. These managers and teams play a game where they win and others lose. Some managers will play for the entire enterprise, but they are few and far between.
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Managing Conflict in High Performance Teams
In high performance teams it’s okay to confront or let it go, but not to go underground. The parties to a conflict are accountable for reaching closure. If they can’t, there is a protocol for who to bring in as a mediator/coach. Conflict is usually a symptom of misalignment.
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What All Great Sales Professionals Have In Common
All great sales people have a sense of professionalism. They carry themselves with a sense of power; they can carry a room.
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Great Leaders Teach and Don't Leave People Behind
Leaders have a passion to win and truly care about people and their goals.
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Meetings with Purpose and Energy
Ditch meetings that are a waste of time in favor of meetings that have a good purpose, bringing together many engaged minds to achieve a specific objective.
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Time Management: The Six Box List
A six box to-do list can help you be much more productive on your main goals.
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Don't Be Nice with Your Feedback, Be Helpful
Giving feedback is about being helpful, not about being nice.
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Skills for a Difficult Conversation
Self-control, empathy, and assertiveness are all traits that can help you get through a difficult conversation.
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Difficult Conversations
Use Peter Bregman's rule of three to know when it is time to have a difficult conversation.
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Preparing for an Effective Presentation
Richard Goring offers tips that will make your presentations more engaging and more memorable. It all starts with preparation.
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Developing Persuasive Value Propositions
Richard Goring describes the steps for developing a value proposition that has the power to persuade your audience.
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Powerful Presentation Openings
A successful presentation starts with a focus on your audience and what they care about, not a laundry list of your qualifications.
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Characteristics of Good Sellers
Good sellers are trustworthy. They communicate honestly and transparently with their customers.
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Reframing Risk
Think of risk-taking as a skill you can develop. Normally we are in our green zone, where we’re comfortable. Don’t jump from there to a red zone risk, where it’s scary. Move into a yellow zone place of growth. Jodi Detjen gives an example of a person dealing with conflict.
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Perfection
Women feel they need the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect everything. It holds them back. What is the cost of that marginal increase toward perfection? Better to live in the messiness of imperfection. Learn from the mess. Have fun in the mess.
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Ask for Help
Women aren’t good at asking for help. As a result they don’t have space — for creativity, to increase their impact, to become leaders. Women need to ask for help — from an assistant, a delegate, a peer, or even a person more senior. Women also need to ask for help at home.
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Competence to Confidence
Confidence is an outcome of competence. When you become competent at something confidence will follow. Women downplay their competence — “Oh, I was just lucky.” Shift your self-talk. Congratulate yourself when you have done something well.
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Be Selfish
Don’t assume you’re not important. Your needs are important as anyone else’s. Add your voice at the table. If you have a conflict, speak directly. State your view, how you feel about the situation, and what you would like to see happen. Jodi Detjen gives an example.
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Buyers Are in Charge—Use Technology That Helps Them
Salespeople aren’t in charge anymore; buyers are.
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Talk About Benefits, Not Product Features
Don’t bother talking about the benefits of your product if they have no basis in customer reality.
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Focus on the Customer: Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are a way to understand the groups of people you need to reach.
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Real-Time Marketing
Marketing happens on a minute-by-minute basis in the modern world.
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Follow-Up, Don't Stalk
Follow-up is polite; stalking is aggressive and nearly always unsuccessful.
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Overcoming Fear of Public Speaking
Diane Darling shares her advice about how she was able to conquer her fear of speaking in front of others.
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Writing Emails That Get a Response
Use these four simple tips to write an e-mail that increases the chance of a positive response to your request.
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Networking Mistakes
Before you attend your next event, be sure you are not making these common networking mistakes.
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Seven Elements of Effective Networking
Networking is more than just attending events, and the acronym DARLING can help you remember seven key points to making it effective.
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What Separates High EQ Leaders
High EQ leaders refuse to fall into the isolation as they advance in their careers.
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How to Improve Your EQ
Emotional intelligence is not fixed; it can be improved upon over time.
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Busyness Does Not Equal Productivity
Being busy doesn’t always guarantee that you’re being productive.
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Stay True to Your Passion
Ron Cohen’s dad used to advise, “To thine own self be true.” What do you want to with your life? What turns you on? What gets you up in the morning?
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The Secret to Ultra Productivity
It takes only a few simple habits to become ultra-productive.
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Developing Yourself: Be Proactive in Getting Feedback
Everyone on Nicole Piasecki's team has a self-development plan.
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Building a Great Team
The best leadership advice Nicole Piasecki ever received was to get the best talent in the right seat on the bus (“Good to Great,” by Jim Collins).
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Deep Listening is Critical to an Effective Partnership
A great collaboration starts with trust and openness at all levels in the organizations.
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Resolving Conflicts with Customers and Partners
Use challenging situations in a relationship as opportunities.
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Strategic Planning and Alignment
The business plan and strategic plan should be the same.
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Results Through Individual Accountability and Cross Functional Teams
Employees cannot tell you what motivates them over a cup of coffee. You have to observe them over time for how they react to things, how they go about their daily work, what frustrates them, and what they find energizing.
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Email Sanity
As email arrives decide whether to delete it, file it in an action folder or a reference folder, or act on it if the action takes less than two minutes. Make your decisions quickly.
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Having Complete Creative Skills and Integrity
Writing ability predicts success in college and beyond. A good writer is a good reader and oral communicator.
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The Keys to Getting Things Done
First, you need to know what “done” means. What is the outcome? Second, you need to know what ”doing” looks like, where it happens, and who is doing it. That is, what is the next physical action?
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Build in your Personal Reset Button: The Weekly Review
A weekly review is a one- or two-hour period when you look at your list of projects and your calendar or diary, step back, reset, clean up, see things from a different perspective, and start fresh.
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Mastering the Five Stages of Workflow
The five stages of planning are 1) define the purpose, 2) define success, 3) brainstorm the elements of success, 4) organize the elements by priority, sequence, or major components, and 5) decide what to do and who will do it.
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The Five Stages of Gaining Control
David Allen shares the five steps to getting things under control.
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The Two Core Elements of Self and Organizational Management
The two elements are control and perspective—having things under control and focused appropriately.
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Priorities: Making Trusted Choices
Deciding what to do next depends on your overall strategy; where you are, the available time, and your energy level; and type of activity—whether to work items already on a list, respond to unplanned activities, or process incoming information to define the work.
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How Do You Get Room to Think?
To get psychic space, you need to identify and remove or manage distractions.
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The Most Important List (The Projects List)
A projects list is the most important list to make you feel in control of you work.
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Partner with Employees to Improve Poor Performance
Managers need to partner with employees having performance issues in order for the situation to improve.
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Alignment Depends on Behaviors
Getting everyone moving in the same direction starts with values and culture.
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Four Neurotransmitters That Enhance the Ability to Lead and Influence
Leaders have access to four naturally occurring, legal drugs--neurotransmitters, actually--that they can prescribe to improve the health of their leadership and the health of the people they lead.
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The One-Minute Rule for Relationships
Laurie-Ann Murabito's one-minute rule helps you build stronger relationships, trust, and loyalty in only 60 seconds.
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Accountability Raises Employee Performance
Help employees bring their best performances through accountability.
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Leading With Emotional Courage
Leaders don't fail because of ignorance; they fail because they lack emotional courage.
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How to Regain Control When Under Attack
Instead of letting your instincts control you, give your body four seconds to decide how to proceed.
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Avoid Constant Performance Mode
Individuals need to set boundaries to avoid being sucked into the work culture of constant performance mode.
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Break Rituals Increase Productivity and Prevent Burnout
Break rituals refresh your mind and body, making you healthier and more productive.
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Anxiety Is a Frienemy
Like a frienemy, anxiety has a good side and a dark side, and we need to understand how to make the most of both.
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RESET to Increase Positivity and Productivity
Americans need a reset button--a change in mindset or behavior--in order to relax and refresh from the stresses of work and life.
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How to Inspire Others to Inspire Others
Leadership is the ability to inspire. Inspiration comes through trust and empowerment — empowering people to make decisions based on trust, and then empowering their own people. This distributes leadership throughout the organization and allows it to go faster.
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How to Empower Others
Teenagers need to make mistakes to learn. The same is true in business. One tactic he used was to attend meetings and say nothing. It took several weeks, but it worked. Managers learned to make decisions, and then how to influence others to implement those decisions.
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Getting Feedback and Enabling Success: Ask 'How Am I Doing?'
Steve Strout shares an exercise he did upon his one year anniversary with the organization to elicit open and honest feedback. As a leader you're there to help employees be successful. In order to do that you must ask them "How can I help you be more successful?"
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Empower to Go Faster
When Steve Strout played chess as a child, his dad taught him to think ahead five moves. He teaches that approach to everyone, at all levels. It allows the team to go faster — to learn faster, decide faster, recover faster. But you can only go as fast as the person in the front.
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Motivate by Satisfying Psychological Needs
High-quality motivation comes from satisfying the three psychological needs that are foundational to all human beings.
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Optimal Motivation
People are always motivated, and different motivational outlooks produce different outcomes.
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Change and Motivation Science
In the midst of change, let motivation science lead the way.
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Motivation Misconceptions
When intrinsic motivation is absent, leading with carrots and sticks isn't the answer. Instead, motivate by providing a sense of purpose and by satisfying psychological needs.
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Choose Your Values
Looking for meaning or motivation? Develop your values.
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Avoiding or Seeking Conflict
Your choice to seek or avoid confrontation often depends on the situation, but it starts with your personality.
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Reframe Difficult Conversations
Reframe a difficult conversation as an opportunity to gain something and it will be easier to have.
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How to Open a Conversation
Fumbling the opening of a difficult conversation sets the stage for failure.
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Dealing with Direct People
Conflict avoiders can still make sure their voices are heard with just a few simple adjustments.
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Leaning Into Conflict
Conflict seekers often intimidate conflict avoiders, so extra consideration is needed when a hard conversation has to take place.
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Dealing with Different Types of Conflict
Conflicts come in many forms. Amy Gallo identifies the four most common that happen at work.
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Words to Use in Tough Conversations
Words have the power to create a solution or cause a virtual train wreck, so they need to be chosen carefully.
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Overcome Emotional Feelings
Focus on your physical feelings to take power away from your emotional feelings.
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Turn Stress Into Positive Pressure
When Shawn’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, she turned negative stress into positive pressure by exercising control. She built a support network that included physical, nutritional, and pastoral therapy, artists, musicians, and laughter. Action brings clarity.
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Beware the Joy of Talking
In general, people who talk the most say they learn the most and like their peers the most. These “conversational narcissists” steer the discussion. To deepen the discussion, make supportive assertions (“Interesting!”) and questions (“How did you get interested?”).
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How to Make Better Decisions
Firefighters ordered to drop their gear to escape a fire didn’t, and died. To avoid fixations, medical students were told to say, out loud, in the presence of others they trusted, all the symptoms, all possible diagnoses, and a plan to eliminate the diagnoses one by one.
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Individual Accountability
Bob Sutton describes organizations where everyone feels individually accountable. People are recruited who reflect that mindset, and are placed in groups that live the mindset. These employees feel obligated to correct each other, and admit their mistakes publicly.
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Commitment to the Team is Critical to Success
The best way to show commitment to the team is through encouragement. When he was late for a briefing, his commander didn’t chew him out. Rather, he asked if everything was okay. His commander’s concern for him increased his commitment to the team.
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Walk the Flight Line and Connect with Your Team
When Waldo Waldman chewed out a 19-year-old crew chief for not topping off the fuel in Waldo’s F-16, his commander challenged him to spend a day in the chief’s shoes. Waldo learned to appreciate what went on behind the scenes, and apologized to the crew chief.
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The Four Ingredients of Employee Motivation
Employees want autonomy, opportunities to grow and collaborate with each other, and a sense that what they do is important to the company.
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Effective Communication is Key to Becoming a Better Teammate
When you’re flying an F-16, you can’t see threats behind you, but your wingmen can. Similarly, you can see what’s in their blind spots. As a leader, be open to threats that others see. Get your ego out of the way. Be decisive. Speed is life, whether in combat or in business.
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Real Creativity and Innovation Happens in Networks
The idea that creativity and innovation comes from individual geniuses is a myth; they always come from networks.
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Are You an Energizing Boss?
An energizing boss demonstrates care for people and helps them succeed.
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From Behavior to Belief
Management is about persuading others to do things.
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Bad Competition Can Sour Good Markets
It’s hard enough to compete against good competition. It’s harder to compete with poor competitors because their fog of messages and lower quality make it harder to reach your consumers.
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Create Value Before You Create Risk
You can be an entrepreneur without going into business by being an entrepreneur in your own or someone else’s organization.
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Amid Chaos, Learn to Improvise
We grow when we are uncomfortable—when we have “growing pains.” Learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
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Hire and Collaborate into Your Weak Spots
Avoid the temptation to hire people like you. Hire for similar values but complementary skills.
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Producing Remarkable Projects
Rules for producing remarkable projects are, be passionate about the project or get passionate by developing new skills in the project, work with others, develop habits of commitment-making and fulfilling, and create a story about the project that lifts you up.
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The 5C Approach to Career Mobility
When it's time to develop your action plan, take advantage of the 5C approach to launching your career mobility strategy.
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Career Mobility Roadmap
Once you've embraced career mobility from a kaleidoscope mindset, it's time to design your roadmap.
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Live Event: Leadership in the Digital Era
In this talk, Charlene Li will examine how organizations manage digital transformations, the leadership required to manage change, and the culture necessary to execute on growth strategies.
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Three Rules for Leaving Your Current Job
So you've decided to leave your current job... Do you know the cardinal rules of what you need to do and what you need to avoid doing?
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Employee Engagement Starts with Engaged Managers
Managers have an impact on almost everything employees do, so it makes sense to develop engagement in managers that flows through to employees.
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Project Kick-Off Meetings
Project kick-off meetings are critical to your project's success. Here's how to make your kick-off a success!
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Are You as Humble as You Are Hungry?
Humble leaders know that the best ideas can come from anywhere.
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It’s as Important to Be Kind as to Be Clever
The importance of human connection may not fit on a spreadsheet, but it is incalculably worthwhile.
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Why Great Leaders "Talk the Walk"
Leaders have to walk the talk, but they also have to know how to talk the walk to their employees.
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Are You Consistent In Your Commitment to Change?
Constant change isn't any better than no change. Only change that is also progress is useful.
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Culture Counts: How Values Create Value
You can't be amazing in your marketplace unless you're amazing in your workplace.
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Appreciative Inquiry Brings Out the Best
To bring out the best in others, ask generative questions that create innovations for change.
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Career Development
Employees want career development and will go wherever necessary to find it.
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S.O.A.R
S.O.A.R. is a results-oriented method of strategic thinking and planning that has proven to be highly successful in a variety of industries and organizations.
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The 5D Cycle of Appreciative Inquiry
To create amazing, positive change, follow the 5Ds: define, discovery, dream, design, and destiny.
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Interactions Define Relationships
Our interactions define our relationships. What kind of relationships will you build?
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A Kaleidoscope Mindset for Career Mobility
Career mobility is similar to a kaleidoscope in that three major factors combine to make a plethora of options.
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Passion!
The soft stuff is the numbers and the plan. The hard stuff is passion, energy, values, character, and enthusiasm.
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The Myth of the Tough Negotiator
The person who slams his fist on the table doesn’t get the deal done.
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Hire for Passion and Engagement
If you have two candidates who are equal in work and college experience, communication skills, and the like, hire the one how has the greater passion for, and engagement with, the industry.
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To Achieve Work-Life Balance Do What Makes You Happy
If you are happy every day going to work you’ll make it work.
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Communication is Key to Successful Leadership
Leadership requires courage and confidence because sometimes you’re unpopular.
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'No' Is an Invitation to 'Yes'
“You said no but I’m coming back.”
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The Importance of Diversity
Diversity is bigger than male, female, Asian, black, white, Latino.
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A Challenge Is an Opportunity
Internal struggles and awakenings can make us better leaders. Karina Andersen shares a personal story of how the challenge of dealing with a personal tragedy turned into an opportunity for growth.
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How to Convince People of Your Ideas
Don't try to convince others with facts and numbers. Instead, appeal to their own experience.
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How Does Innovation Really Happen?
Innovation may come not from thinking outside the box, but from finding the right box to think in.
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What Makes a Great Presentation
Don't begin with facts and statistics. Instead, use a compelling human example.
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Don't Bury the Lead
State your ideas simply in the lead paragraph.
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Made to Stick
Ideas that are unexpected, concrete, and easy to visualize are "sticky" -- easy to remember.
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Stories Aren't Entertainment, They're Flight Simulators
Don't use stories as dessert. They should be the main course.
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Leveraging Talent and Financial Capital for Corporate Social Responsibility
Green Mountain Coffee values three types of capital: social, environmental, and financial.
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Preparing for High Stakes Situations
When preparing for a presentation or other high-stakes situation, focus on how you speak more than what you say. Tap into your belief in your message, so you can present it with confidence. Practice power poses before you walk in; they configure your brain for success.
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Psychological Power
Psychological power is not about power over others; it’s about power over yourself — the ability to self regulate so you can bring out your best self. Psychological power is related to creativity and positive mood, so you can feel good about yourself.
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Earning Relationships
To build a relationship and not just a transaction, use the rules of romance.
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Why Resolve Wins
The difference between winners and losers is the ability to keep going.
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Managing Energy
Jim Loehr describes four aspects of personal energy: its quantity, quality, focus, and force.
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Stress Management
We need to experience stress to grow, but growth actually occurs during the recovery period that follows stress.
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The Innovation Economy and the Future of Business
The innovation economy of the future will be based on infotech, bioscience, nanoscience, and cognitive technology.
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The Future of Talent Management
Organizations that offer distributed learning will keep employees, by building their skills and reassigning them as needed.
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The Path to Profits
We don't often hire managers for their ability to turn people on. But that skill is required for success.
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The Truth about Mental and Emotional Engagement
The best predictors of engagement are the connection between activities and values, and your physical health.
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Coaching a Bad Attitude
You may not be able to coach away a bad attitude, but you can coach new behaviors.
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Be a Better Coach
Coaching a reluctant employee takes a little more patience and effort.
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Better Feedback
The negative stereotypes about giving and receiving feedback needs to change.
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Better Meetings Means More Dialogue
Leading a meeting doesn't have to automatically cause a sense of dread, especially if you focus on audience participation.
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Be a Better Communicator
Being a more effective leader means being a more effective communicator.
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Better Listening
Being an effective listener isn't about better skills; it's about better habits.
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Better Delegation
Better delegation starts with overcoming the primary reason you avoid it in the first and then reframing what delegation is all about.
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Leading More Effectively Remotely
Leading remote teams starts with becoming a great leader and includes using and modeling the right technologies at the right time.
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Brainstorming Begins with Questions
Does your approach to brainstorming start with asking everyone to yell out ideas? If so, Levy has an easier, less-intimidating, and better way to begin.
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Four Steps to Solving a Problem
Even if your problem is well stated, it may not be solvable. Follow these four steps to frame your problems in a way that makes solutions possible.
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A Better Way to Find Solutions
To become an expert problem solver, you need to see opportunities that no one else sees. And to do that, you need to understand a problem-solving strategy called "generate mass."
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Motivating Employees Through Growth Opportunities
To motivate people give them something that acknowledges their worth and helps them fulfill their expectations, not a dumbed-down job.
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Five Principles That Shape Conversations
By taking time for self-reflection and applying five basic principles, you can positively shape your conversations to improve relationships and workplace outcomes.
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Best Practices for Great Conversations
To encourage dialogue that engages and connects people at all levels, add positive framing and generative inquiry to your conversations.
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Conversations That Move Teams Forward
Conversations have the power to influence performance. Will your team flourish or fail?
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Benefits of Friendly Competition
To solve a particularly difficult problem, challenge individuals to tap into their inner Frankenstein.
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A New Way of Thinking and Working
A better understanding of psychology and physiology can have a positive impact on people and performance.
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Choose Your Customers Carefully for Growth
Not every customer is a good customer. You can’t do everything for everyone. Focus on what you’re really good at.
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The Six Emotions to Setting Goals
If you’re lost, decide. If you’re frustrated, pursue the opposites of what you don’t want. If you’re confused, design a plan. If you’re unclear, follow your heart. If you’re unsatisfied, ask what matters. If you’re uncertain, stay focused.
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The Why Formula
Most people spend their life earning a living rather than designing a life. If you don’t have a strong enough “why” you’ll never do the “how.” What work matters to you? What’s the next step toward that work? By what method? How can you create momentum?
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Great Coaches Don't Have Answers
True leadership is about letting go of your own personal journey. Karina Andersen describes why great coaches share theories, not answers.
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Visualize Success
Even during the worst of circumstances, taking time to visualize success can give you what you need to achieve success.
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The Competitive Edge
To give yourself a competitive edge, end your proposals and presentations by planting action seeds.
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People Want to Work With You
How do you get people on your side in a matter of seconds? It starts with a compelling story.
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Don't Imagine It, Do It
Discover how to capture someone's mind, time, and dime in sixty seconds or less with Horn’s quick tips.
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Two-Way Elevator Conversation
Sam Horn gives a quick lesson in how to turn an elevator pitch into a vibrant two-way conversation.
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Get Others to Say, “Tell Me More”
Stop opening with your bio. Instead, start with intrigue to gain audience buy-in.
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True Humor
If you aren't funny, don't tell jokes. True humor works better.
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Help Instead of Hurt
Even with the best of intentions, your words can hurt—here's a better way to help.
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Our Actions Are Our Values in Conduct
When we feel good about what we do, it sets off a chemical reaction that causes us to say, “That felt good!”
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The Real Secret to Sales Success
The real question is, how do we differentiate in the marketplace?
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Gain Clarity on Your Ideal Customer
Unless you’re specific about your ideal client, they won’t know to come to you. Don’t be afraid to fire a client if they don’t meet your specifications.
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Growing Your Business Through People
Ken Wright replaced a Harvard-educated bank executive who bragged about the 60 percent ratings his section received for staff and customer satisfaction. Ken improved up on this. Learn how.
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Value Selling in the 21st Century
Clients today don’t ask where they can find a quality product. It’s about the buying experience.
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Great Salespeople Ask Questions That Mirror Their Values
Can you become a great salesperson if you’re not a natural? Yes. It can be taught.
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The Five Deciding Values of Buyers
Price is important, but if the price differential isn’t great, the four other reasons people will buy, in order of importance, are ego; they are buying the brand or because you made them feel special.
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Great Sales Professionals Sustain the Relationship
It’s important to reward, recognize, reinforce, and validate the client’s decision to buy from you.
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Think About How the Buyer Wants to Buy, Not How You Want to Sell
The buyer’s journey is characterized by moments of truth when value can be created.
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The Key to Evolving as a Leader
Self leadership consists of changes in behavior.
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Common Goals, Common Rewards
To make all 2,000 employees feel they were contributing to organizational goals they coined the phrase, “One mission one team.”
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People Are Not Assets, People Are Your Company's Value
John Grant dislikes the phrase, “People are our greatest asset” because it treats people as commodities.
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Building a Differentiating Value Solution
At Data#3, they operate in a competitive marketplace; differentiation is important.
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Aligning Your Solution with Customer's Needs
Dat#3 established a “solutions framework” that uses a six-phase, project-based process.
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Securing a Common Vision and Strategy
When employees are given a clear vision and empowered with responsibilities and accountability, they flourish.
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Controlling Emotions
To control emotions, stop, think, act, and rewire.
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Initiatives at Lower Levels
The best initiatives are driven at a lower level because higher management isn’t as close to the customer. Staying close to the front line is one of the greatest and most rewarding leadership challenges.
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Managing Managers
It’s harder to manage other managers than to manage people directly.
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Understanding Individual Contributions to Organizational Goals
It’s important that people understand their contribution to the goals of the organization—the “key results.”
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Hiring and Keeping Good People
Jobs are getting more complex. Semi- and unskilled jobs are being outsourced, off-shored, or automated. To attract and retain better people, remember that people leave managers; they don’t leave organizations.
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Setting Team Goals
Getting through the recession was a matter of survival. Now how can they go faster than the competition coming out of the recession?
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If It Were Possible What Would It Look Like?
Lincoln Crawley tells the story about a problem that seemed impossible to solve.
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Work Arrangements and Trust
Arrangements where workers are not physically present are based on trust. A balance is needed, but trust is the key piece.
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Creativity Involves a Leap
The creative process involves a leap to connection rational with irrational parts of the brain.
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Adversity Brings Out Our Best
Adversity helps to put down our narcissism and allow our good side to flourish.
