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 […]
Part 3 – Leading Better Meetings: Stage-Setting for Success with ACORN
Pilots don’t just throttle a jet down the runway and into the air. First, they check out the plane, set the GPS, and confirm the basics with their co-pilot. Likewise, the most successful meetings involve a “pre-flight protocol”. But too often eager leaders simply launch into their agenda and miss the opportunity to properly set […]
Five Questions to Answer Before Embarking on Strategic Planning
Each year organizations invest significant time and money in strategic planning efforts that, according to managers who participate, result in limited impact. Why do these efforts fail to produce the anticipated benefit? In my opinion it’s a lack of readiness or, more specifically, a failure to answer five questions: Are you driven by fear or […]
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 […]
Make Your Strategic Vision a Call to Change
A strategic vision is meant to articulate the preferred future of your organization. But visions are too often written as broad, idealistic statements that don’t explicitly convey change. So, several years ago I developed a tool called the “Change Trajectory Chart”. It assists you in framing your organization’s strategic vision as change. Creating a Change […]
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 […]
Discover Your Inner Saboteurs
For many years I’ve been asking my coaching clients to complete a free online self-assessment instrument developed by Shirzad Chamine, Stanford University lecturer and author of the New York Times bestselling book Positive Intelligence. His assessment helps identify “saboteurs,” the voices in your head that generate stress and undermine your potential for happiness and effectiveness. […]
ON MY MIND: The Cynics Among Us
I work a lot with teams that are trying to make something better – their organizations, their communities, their countries. Inevitably, early in any change process, there’s often a person at the back of the room who raises his or her hand and asks a question that’s masking a declaration of doubt. It sounds something […]
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 […]