Keeping Your Executive Leadership Team Sharp
One of my greatest joys is working with highly motivated executive teams – particularly within organizations that have moved from small and scrappy to mid-sized and more formal. A question many of these teams ask is: How do we make sure our team stays sharp and effective as our organization grows? It’s a great question! […]
Part 5 – Leading Better Meetings: Five Strategies for Addressing Problem Behaviors
In Part 4 of this series we identified six archetypal problem behaviors – patterns of participation, often unconscious and habitual – that distract from the purpose of our meetings and undermine productive engagement. The following five strategies will aid you in addressing such behaviors. Separate the person from the problem behavior. As a rule, problem […]
More Faces. Less Facebook.
Take a minute and think about your three or four dearest friends in the world (excluding your intimate life partner). Now be honest: When was the last time you had an in-depth, heartfelt conversation with each of them? Yeah, when I asked myself this question about a year ago I was disappointed in my answer […]
Purpose: Finding Your Sweet Spot
About five years ago I got really serious about articulating my professional purpose. At the time I was moving through a lot of life changes. I was spread thin across too many projects. The work was interesting but I felt like I was not having much of an impact. I remember telling a colleague, “If […]
Five Lessons Surfers Can Teach Us about Strategy
On a recent trip to California I ventured out to a place known as “surfer’s point.” The waves were more than 12 feet high and the undercurrent was strong. Looking up and down the coastline I counted nearly 100 surfers, young and old, testing their skills and courage in extraordinarily challenging and unpredictable conditions. Challenging […]
Recognizing and Dealing with Defensiveness
It’s not easy to give critical feedback. Especially when the person on the receiving end gets defensive. Here are five common types of defensive responses. How many have you encountered (or perhaps even caught yourself engaging in)? Deny or Argue Intent: Cause internal doubt for the person delivering the critical feedback. Sounds like: “That’s crazy. […]
Is Your Ego Getting the Best of You?
I think about ego as the idealized or overinflated story each of us tells about who we are – a story that is like a shield. It provides protection, but also blocks our view and it is very difficult to put down. Do you have an ego story? It might be the story about how […]
Seven Principles for Fostering Resilience in the Face of Challenge
You may be impressed to know that in my senior year I was my high school’s #1 tennis player. You will be decidedly less impressed to learn that our team was the bottom ranked in the league – every year I played. It’s safe to say we were the “underdogs”. My school, which was located […]
ON MY MIND: The Wisdom of Chickens
Chickens? Wisdom? Give me a chance to explain. When I’m working with leaders I often find myself coming back to three words of advice inspired by author Greg McKeowen – “protect the asset.” He wrote: The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves. If we underinvest in ourselves, and […]
IN MY EARBUDS: If you don’t decide what matters, someone else will do it for you
A while back I wrote a review of a wonderful book entitled Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. The book is about consciously choosing where to invest one’s time and energy in order to feel fulfilled and make a true contribution. My summary of the author’s premise is this: Most of us […]