From the category archives:

Leadership

7 Questions That Help Conversations Move Forward

February 2, 2012

The other day I attended a webinar led by Al Switzler, co-author of the books Crucial Conversations and Influencer. During the webinar Al made this point about interacting with colleagues: If your response to frustrating conversations is to increase the frequency of your key point or the volume of your delivery, but you don’t change [...]

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Command and Control Just Won’t Die

January 25, 2012

For nearly two decades, management gurus have been heralding the death of the “command and control” mentality in Corporate America. Personally, I think it’s very much alive. Over a year ago, I wrote that the so-called “death” of command and control management is nothing but an urban legend. Now, a recent article on the Forbes.com [...]

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Don’t Kill Productive Meetings by Dragging Them Out

January 20, 2012

My friend Sally works for a company that holds monthly small-group “open forum” type meetings for cross-sections of various company departments. The purpose of these meetings is to promote cross-departmental communication.  Each month, leaders from different functions in the company moderate the discussion. In general, Sally enjoys the meetings, except for one aspect: they are [...]

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Leadership Development Carnival – Best of 2011

January 2, 2012

Dan McCarthy from the blog Great Leadership has pulled together a year-end review of leadership blog posts from 2011. He asked contributors to the leadership development carnival to submit their favorite post of 2011. You can see the summary here, along with each blogger’s commentary on why it made the list. Good leadership reading to [...]

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6 Ways to Take the Dread Out of Writing Self-Appraisals

December 28, 2011

If your company conducts its performance appraisals on an annual calendar basis then the past month has likely had you knee-deep in the process. There’s an equally likely chance you are supposed to do a self-appraisal for your performance view as well. As a leader, do you dread this task because you’re so consumed with [...]

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Book Review: Leadership Caffeine

December 14, 2011

I’ll be right up front on this book review: I know the author. Art Petty and I are professionally acquainted; we’re fellow leadership bloggers and our paths sometime cross on consulting projects. I’m a huge fan of Art’s writing about leadership—he’s extremely pragmatic, yet self-effacing. You won’t find bombastic pontificating on his blog. What you [...]

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What Do Office Doorways Say About Leadership?

December 1, 2011

What do your organization’s workplace doorways signal to employees? Whether it’s the front door, the employee entrance, or the boss’s cubicle doorway, have you ever considered what happens in employees’ minds when they pass over their work threshold? As a leader, you probably haven’t given it much thought, but consider this recently reported brain research* [...]

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A Leadership Fail for Black Friday

November 21, 2011

As I write this, it is four days prior to Black Friday, long considered the kick-off to the start of the retail industry’s crucial holiday shopping season.  Every year, Black Friday starts earlier. Now, Thanksgiving Day is the new Black Friday. Many retail chains have announced plans to open at some point on Thanksgiving Day [...]

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4 Roles Every Project Team Needs

November 16, 2011

Over at the HBR Blog Network author Michael Schrage says that CEO’s should assign their top creative thinkers to fix up the organization’s most boring and ineffective processes. He says that this shift in thinking—putting the brightest employees on the “most trivial/scut work” projects will send a powerful signal to the organization: “Improving efficiency and [...]

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Book Review: The New Leaders’ 100-Day Action Plan

November 10, 2011

Thinking of taking on a bigger leadership role, either inside your company or with a new one? Chances are you already know that getting a strong start is critical to your success. You may be surprised to know exactly just how early a start you need to get. According to authors George Bradt, Jayme Check [...]

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