Leaders Are Optimists
Owing to ever tighter budgets, higher expectations, and a skinny but distracted workforce, the practice of leadership in today’s workspace is difficult enough. We unnecessarily add to that burden and materially hamper our effectiveness when we fail to maintain a positive outlook. How so? Because negativity saps our own energy, and people won’t follow a […]
Some Tips for Emerging Leaders
As a leadership coach, I work with managers up and down the ladder, helping them capitalize on their strengths, discover hidden (to them) weaknesses, and rehab or minimize the impact of the latter. In almost every case, these leaders find that there is more work for them to do in at least one of the […]
Dealing with Bullying in the Workspace
Bullying seems inescapable in modern life, whether the context is school-aged children, adults in the workspace, or newly elected politicians behaving badly. The associated consequences and handwringing prompt us to take a swing at it, at least as far as the workspace component is concerned. What Bullying Is and Isn’t: Bullying is the misuse of […]
Good Leaders are Masters of Their Time and Priorities
Nearly everyone who steps into a leadership role at any level is asked to do many more things than can possibly fit on their plate. They’ve got essentially four choices: Say no to some things, negotiate others off the plate, delegate, or gag. Some might say there’s a fifth option; that we can always multitask. […]
Good Leaders Are Quick to Share Credit and Take Responsibility
I became a fan of Green Bay Packers quarterback, Aaron Rodgers recently. Not for what he did during his game-time 30 minutes with a football in his hand, admirable as it was, but for what he did and said with a microphone in his face in the televised press conference following his team’s win over the Detroit […]
Leaders Show Up
Two days before New Year’s day, I walked into a Kroger grocery about five miles from my home to pick up a few items. I should have known better. The parking lot was quite busy, and the store was packed with frenetic shoppers playing a nonstop game of chicken with one another using shopping carts, and […]
Being “Damn Right” Doesn’t Earn you Extra Points
Thirty-five years ago this week, when I was a young middle manager at a nascent FedEx, my boss flew to New York for exactly two reasons: 1) To go Christmas shopping with his wife, and 2) To do a little coaching with me. Though the time-split between those two objectives was about 90/10 in favor […]
A Few Words on Workplace Feedback for Millennials
Over the last few years I’ve had the pleasure of providing professional coaching for a diverse group of a dozen or so Millennial professionals, managers, and executives in the workspace. Though it is a disparate group other than the age cohort, we’ve individually uncovered and worked on a fairly short list of remarkably common performance […]
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Popular vote totals suggest that less than half of us got what we wanted by way of the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. Indeed, many had been, as Tom Brokaw said just prior to the election, “curled up in the fetal position saying, ‘get it over with’”, while hoping and praying to avoid getting […]
Carrots, Sticks, and Unintended Consequences
Having seen example after example of the “power of the carrot” I have long maintained that organizations large and small should be careful, very careful what they incentivize people to do, because it will absolutely, positively drive behavior… in every one of us. We’ve seen it on a super-sized scale in the healthcare fee-for-service model, where providers […]