It would be terrific (and terribly convenient) if leadership development occurred uniformly in a two or three day workshop. It would be great if our organizational change efforts happened instantaneously and all the result of a single email … [Read more...]
Lead Without Holding On
The path of leadership is not about experiencing comfort or certainty. Wanting to get the business or the team to a place of equilibrium is what keeps us miserable as leaders. There is no autopilot. If we are constantly seeking to find pleasure or … [Read more...]
What Do Leaders Do?
What do leaders do? The list is long; but in a nutshell, leaders enable positive transformation. Success in business requires leaders to be able to impact and engage people to join in important work that produces forward movement with positive … [Read more...]
Back Away From The Phone
I was asked to observe a leadership team in action recently to give them some feedback on their interactions as a team. Throughout the meeting, people kept checking their cell phones for emails and texts. This happens every day in meetings in … [Read more...]
Leadership and Communication: First, Do No Harm
“A primary role of leaders is to design, convene, and host conversations that matter.” This statement by David Isaacs is true in light of the fact that conversation is a core business process. Business, like relationships, happens through … [Read more...]
The Incredible Lightness of Leading
“Lighten up, Francis.” I love this line from Stripes (great movie, by the way). It is a constant reminder to me and to any leader that we run into trouble when we take ourselves too seriously. Most of us are not in roles where we are making life and … [Read more...]
The Field
In Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, Peter Senge and his co-authors write: “We’ve come to believe that the core capacity needed for accessing the field of the future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully … [Read more...]
Don’t Just Do Something. Stand There!
As we rush from meeting to meeting, task to task, project to project, how and when do we take the time to ask ourselves if we are doing more at the expense of “being” less? John Kotter talks of this as “false urgency.” We’ve all gotten very good at … [Read more...]
Cultivating Leadership
There are flowers blooming all around us at the moment so I had a thought. (Always dangerous!). We can’t make a flower; but we can create the conditions in which a flower will grow. We can cultivate the soil, provide water, air, and sunlight and over … [Read more...]
Leadership 24/7
Words have power; and we are never not leading. Let me explain. At a multi-day leadership team meeting, one of the leaders in attendance was becoming frustrated with the direction of the conversation so he said, “This makes no sense to me.” The … [Read more...]