Insights | Leader Effectiveness
Refine your Questions to enhance your Collective Leadership Skills
We are evolving into a new stage of business operations, one that is driven by virtual relationships and management, and therefore, our leadership styles and skills must evolve as well. Collective leadership is emerging as the next and best phase of leadership for our post-pandemic world. Collective leadership embraces shared responsibility and accountability. It offers the realization of more potential from team members, distributed decisions that are better aligned with the areas of responsibility, and a flatter organizational structure in which success comes from [...]
Develop Self-Awareness with 3 Action Steps
“A good half of the art of living is resilience.” ― Alain de Botton In my last blog, we discussed the five core skills to building resilience. Now, we are going to give some quick tips on how to develop each of these five core skills. We’ll call this blog series “Building Out the Five Core Resilience Skills”. I will begin at the foundation of resilience with action items to help develop self-awareness. The two aspects of self-awareness In a 2018 article for HBR [...]
Leading through Uncertainty
You got this. While you may not think so, you know what to do. You’ve done it before.Sure, you haven’t had to deal with a global pandemic, but if you have been a leader at any time during the last 20 years, you have had to lead through times of uncertainty, significant change, and complexity. While COVID 19 is having impact on a larger scale, the skills you need to lead your teams and organizations through this time are the same.How did you lead through [...]
Your Executive Roadmap for Performance Review
How would you rate your own skills on the performance review process? Like most soon to be or junior executives, you may not have spent much time evaluating your own skill at performing this routine task of leadership. However, your ability to effectively review the development of the leaders in your organization will have a significant impact on their individual accomplishment within your organizational vision. If you haven’t upgraded your review skills recently, you may not be getting the most out of reviews. If [...]
Will your team follow you?
Will your team follow you? An organization’s many stakeholders value strong decisive leadership. We see the decisive leader as someone who gets things done and makes things happen. However, there are times when there is a disconnect between the leader and the team they are leading. The leader feels they are being clear in the direction and that everyone is proceeding forward toward the same goal. In reality, the team is perplexed and uncertain as to what is actually going on. Unrest is building [...]
The Best Leadership Lessons I’ve Ever Learned Came From Parenting
I often tell my clients, that the best leadership lessons I have ever learned were from being a parent. The leadership skillset requires that you are always thinking ahead, balancing multiple priorities, helping others to accomplish stretch goals, noticing their needs and feelings, resolving conflicts, and listening, really well. To all the parents out there or those who fill that role in the life of a family member, someone they love, does this sound familiar? Parenting, not unlike leadership, is challenging and rewarding. It [...]
When the Middle becomes the Beginning: Why and How – you need to invest more in coaching your mid-level leaders
When the Middle becomes the Beginning Do you think it’s too costly to develop your middle managers as well as your executives? Think again. Many organizations treat middle management as a Darwinian proving ground by making a minimal investment and then waiting to see who survives. Meanwhile, the best development tools such as executive coaching, action learning task teams, and high fidelity simulations, are reserved for senior leaders and a select group of high potentials. These are often expensive and the size of their [...]
The Risks of Either-Or Thinking
Either-or thinking is a trap we can easily fall into that encourages us to believe there is only one right behavior and it blinds us to the opportunities of a more balanced, albeit more paradoxical, approach. Life is full of light-hearted paradoxical sayings: slow down to speed up, tough love, stability through change, and more. Most leaders easily understand that these behaviors sound like opposites ends of a continuum but are really very complimentary. We know there can be great benefits in using “both” [...]
