Leadership Skill

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Leadership Skill: Leaving a Leadership Legacy

Sunday, April 8th, 2007

Take a look at all the leaders who have left a positive legacy of organizational effectiveness, and what do you find. Breadth, depth, and talent. But what do they actually do? They develop themselves, they develop others, they develop big ideas, and they develop high performance cultures. They leave a legacy by leveraging their natural [...]

Leadership Skill: Low/No Cost Rewards

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

Few effective team leaders have a laundry basket of financial favors to hand out to deserving team members.  But there are still lots of no-cost or low-cost ways to keep team members involved and in the mood to perform:
1. Establish a prize. 
Establish a quarterly “most valuable team member” award that teams themselves vote on.  Or a [...]

Leadership Skill: Giving Feedback

Monday, January 20th, 2003

One of the hardest tasks of effective leaders is giving people feedback. “Giving people feedback” is really a neutral description for something decidedly un-neutral - telling people how they could be doing their job better. And because it is a loaded area, with a high potential for ticking people off and alienating them, just when [...]

Leadership Skill: Rotten Rewards

Monday, December 23rd, 2002

Despite some talk about team rewards, most team members are paid today exactly as they were paid in the days before teams, on a strictly individual basis.
We are rewarding individuals when we should be rewarding teams or the workforce as a whole. Not that there cannot or should not be “stars”. Once again the 80/20 [...]

Leadership Skill: The Meaning of Meaning

Monday, December 9th, 2002

The “Pull” approach toward change (looking to the future) derives in large part from the writings of psychotherapist Viktor Frankl.  In 1959, he published a remarkable account of survival, Man’s Search for Meaning. Because of the insights in this short, readable book, Frankl was hailed by the psychological world as a liberator from the dominance [...]

Leadership Skill: Psychological Context

Monday, December 2nd, 2002

There is a natural human trap in which we often get caught. Basically, we all interpret information we hear based on the last piece of information we happened to be thinking about. For example, if a salesperson is thinking she knows what a customer needs (”a blue coat”), she may unthinkingly ring up the blue [...]

Leadership Skill: Trust Depleted

Monday, November 18th, 2002

Trust depleted may never be regained. It is a tough business - two strikes and you’re out. When trust is gone, it must be replaced by control: rules, regulations, structure, three-ringed notebooks. The team spends as much time policing itself as doing its job.
A world without trust is a world full of . . . [...]

Leadership Skill: A Nod to The Predatory Organization

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2002

There are a few instances of organizational hypocrisy which just burn my butt. This is one that I feel the need to get off my chest.  My apologies up front.
There are organizations for which neither teams nor a team environment will do a bit of good. These are companies whose culture is unalterably predatory, unapologetic [...]

Leadership Skill: Hope

Monday, September 9th, 2002

In a couple days, the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 will be upon us. That day marked the beginning of a sea change for the world. And change is hard. Now is a chance to reflect, to become introspective on a number of fronts.
It is easy to hate those who transgressed against [...]

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