Leadership Talk
Powerful exercises to propel your leadership effectiveness
As you consider ways to increase leadership effectiveness, two exercises help uncover and highlight your leadership style and values to share with your team. These exercises are especially useful for leaders assuming new responsibilities or adding team members and...
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Crush the fear of rapid decision making
Leaders are required to make decisions and deliver results. When we face a problem, we make decisions, we act, and we succeed, fail, and sometimes learn. As we reflect on a decision, we often find that the decision and subsequent actions were available to us early in...
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Recognizing your go-to people
Photo credit: Simon Migaj for stocksnap.io We may not spend much time thinking about it, but every leader has go-to people on their team whom they count on to get things done. What does a go-to person look like? You know they will move mountains to solve a problem....
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Stop thinking, start moving, and zap the mental gridlock
My caption for this picture: Mind over mattress this week. Start something. Start anything. Move. Starting and moving are not remedies for laziness. They are remedies for being stuck. Too often, we wrestle with problems in our head in a few ways. First, we do not work...
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A case for the non-obvious hire
Early in my career, I was searching for a hands-on IT pro to support a migration from a single desktop to a fully-networked, SAP-enabled location. The HR director led the search, and we interviewed several candidates. We had a difference of opinion on the final two....
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Creating value with less noise
Lately, I've noticed more cars with after-market upgrades that make them significantly noisier, but little else. A similar thing happens at work when extroverts drown out introverts in meetings. In Texas, all hat and no cattle describes things and people that generate...
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Tame the tough discussion
A CEO once asked me, “Is there anything you are afraid of?” My quick reply, “Not at work.” As I recall, he just shook his head. Upon reflection, my response was an unintended exaggeration. The reality is that I’ve had my share of fears at work, but having difficult...
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Create organizations where people stay
Copyright: photonphoto / 123RF Stock Photo According to the Gallup Daily U.S. Employee Engagement tracker (Gallup), U.S. employees engaged in their work was about 28% in January 2014 and 32% in August 2017. The inverse, employees less engaged, stood at 72% and 68%,...
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The power of getting in the way
I am a tireless proponent of getting in the way. As kids, getting in the way led to admonishment from parents or older siblings. As adults, getting in the way creates our universe of opportunities. In our careers, getting in the way shows up in many places. Bringing...
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