Vacation: How about starting the next meeting of your leadership team with a personal check-in? Take a few minutes at the start of the session for each member to report on the last trip or vacation that person made. Getting to know each other personally, not just professionally, is an excellent way to grow trust. Building trust with a group …
First Manage: To be a good leader, you must first become a good manager. To do that, you must earn and accrue respect from the folks you manage. After all, the people give you permission to be a leader, not your position on the organization chart. Education Leadership is a learned skill. It seems to me that we forget that …
Lack of Clarity: There are several posts on this blog that relate some thoughts I have about complexity and how our businesses are affected by the external forces in a global market. What I’m thinking about this time, however, is the opportunity we can find in that complexity. Starting close to home, we are finding our workforce is multigenerational and …
Management: When the markets for our products or services are reasonably stable and predictable, managing performance makes sense. We are, however, no longer in such a world. Managing will lead to performing to short term goals while missing the fact that markets may be moving away from us. Managing focuses on mitigating uncertainty by making business processes predictable and efficient. …
Youth Lead the Way: I was speaking with a close friend who was lamenting the fact that despite having a grandson old enough to be driving, he wasn’t, and didn’t show any interest in driving. Therefore, my friend was relegated to being a chauffeur for all the grandkids and their various activities. We remarked that when we were approaching driving …
Who Hasn’t Been to That School? Recently in an e-mail exchange with a long-time friend, he wrote, “You have a degree from college, and I have one from the School of Hard Knocks, and we both seem to be doing ok….” That common idiomatic phrase got me thinking. My friend wasn’t being facetious. Like many people using that phrase, he …
Experience: There is a saying about sailing that goes something like this: “Sailing consists of hours and hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror.” In my experience, that is pretty much true. Moreover, while I am familiar with sailboats, my brother is an expert on all things marine. When I asked him about his experience, he agreed that …
The Garden is Well Planned: During a recent conference, I had the opportunity to visit the Chef’s Garden. It was a working garden for sure. By that, I mean that the Chef used the produce and herbs in her recipes. I’m guessing that the Chef also supplemented her yield with commercial herbs and produce since the small plot of land …
Change: What do leaders really do? I don’t think the old definitions work any more. As I was learning the leadership ropes, the saying was, “Leaders make sure we’re doing the right thing and managers make sure we’re doing it right.” There is still a bit of truth in that statement. And, both jobs have transformed and evolved as technology …
Not so fast! I’ve heard that saying almost all my life. So-and-so “is as dumb as a doorknob.” But, did you ever stop to think about doorknobs? They aren’t so dumb really. They are sometimes wrong, but they do convey a message. Take this rather standard doorknob, pictured above, on our front door. When I am inside our home and …