Posts tagged as:

Management

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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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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3 Keys to Keeping a Virtual Open Door Policy

December 9, 2011

Recently I wrote a post about what happens to employees’ brains when they cross the threshold of their workplace door. In a happy coincidence, at about the same time, I was connected to Kyle Lagunas, who wrote an excellent post on his blog about doors and workplaces: how to maintain an “open door policy” when [...]

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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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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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Leadership Development Carnival – November 2011

November 7, 2011

The November Leadership Development Carnival is up at Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog. No theme this month, just a straight-up presentation of 45 great essays on leadership. Go on over to the carnival to see how leaders can be both bold and humble, 5 reasons for leaders to engage in social media and letting go [...]

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Tag-Team Workplace Coaching

November 3, 2011

Sometimes, a person’s boss just isn’t the right person to do the coaching. Consider this story, as told to me by my client Pete: Pete was part of a new product ideation team tasked with creating a proposal for the company president. On the day of Big Presentation to the president Liz, the team gathered [...]

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What Type of Angry Boss Are You?

September 24, 2011

My kid came home the other day and showed me some artwork that he drew while waiting for his classmates to finish their math tests. He drew a series of random dots, connected them and then created a cartoon out the resulting shape. His first shape resembled an angry person screaming so he labeled it [...]

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