Many of the business leaders I work with, and entrepreneurs I mentor, have a great strategy and an innovative solution, but struggle with building and motivating the team necessary to run your business. You assume everyone has your passion, and simply needs your command and control to make it work. In my experience, what a team needs more is your
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In growing your business, how you communicate under pressure can make or break your progress, as well as your relationship with the team and outside constituents. In my experience as a mentor and consultant, it is not just the words, but also your tone, approach, body language, and the context in which you choose to engage that can make all
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The pandemic is forcing workers to reevaluate the way they look at work. Employers should do the same if they want to stay competitive. Last May, Texas A&M Professor Anthony Klotz predicted that pandemic related resignations would grow, saying “the Great Resignation is coming”. He was right. It started in April 2021, when a record 3.8 million people quit their
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Look at where you spend your time as a leader to see who you might be covering for. I deal with many CEOS who are incredibly capable at their job. They can also do the job of many of the people who work for them. They may even be an expert in their area. The problem is that if CEOs step into
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Leaders, by definition, have followers. It’s natural to presume therefore, that a main indicator of leadership success, maybe the most important, is number of followers. We see that dynamic played out with celebrity CEOs, social media influencers, and thought leaders too; their worth and impact is based on how many people follow them. That’s a mistake because it conflates a
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Ineffective communication costs individuals time and organizations money. Misunderstandings, ambiguous instructions, unclear calls to action, and confusion start as small stressors that can snowball into outcomes that impact organizational bottom lines. A report from The Economist Intelligence Unit on “Communication Barriers in the Modern Workplace” found that poor communication results in lost sales, lost clients, low morale, delayed projects, and
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The concept of resilience, as it applies to both organizations and individuals, has evolved significantly in recent years. The term that once referred to the ability to withstand sudden change or bounce back from crisis now has a decidedly more proactive connotation. In the modern business world, highly resilient organizations and people don’t just persevere in spite of change; they
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Leaders are facing two relentless sources of pressure right now. The first is the intense demand to perform— to deliver excellent short-term results despite radical shifts in what customers need and want, where and how people choose to work, and whether supply chains work at all. The second is the urgent need to transform — to reimagine the future of
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There is ample discussion about the best styles of authority and how to emulate them, but far less about the more nuanced attributes of excellent leadership… until now. Depending on what books or articles you read, there are more than twenty different leadership styles. An autocratic leader, for example, is generally a unilateral decision-maker, while a democratic one encourages input
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Have you noticed that your boss delivers more bad news and critiques of your performance than compliments? Managers are generous in pointing out what you’ve done wrong but parsimonious when you’ve excelled. To add insult to injury, they pile on more tasks and take all the credit in front of senior executives. This is unfortunately commonplace in the workplace. In
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