To be an Effective Leader you must be Flexible. This means you need to be Resilient, Agile, and Adaptable — 3 leadership traits that demonstrate Flexibility. In prior posts, I shared why I believe Resiliency and Agility are important attributes of an Effective Leader. Here are my thoughts on why Executive Leadership requires Adaptability. In…
I’ll bet you can name the first two great lies without any effort. The third one remains unnamed because nobody is willing to admit to it. Well, here we go: American Business is Great at Managing Talent!!! Yes, that’s the biggest lie possible. I’d sooner believe that then check is in the mail or you…
A recent blog post of ours began the discussion of this topic by presenting the three components of Leadership Effectiveness: Personal Effectiveness, Relational Effectiveness and Assertiveness. This post expands on Personal Effectiveness and its components. It is interesting that a recent HBR webinar relates to the first three components of Personal Effectiveness. It explains the…
In discussing strong leadership traits and manager behaviors, accessibility ranks extremely high as a factor in developing leaders, growing talent and shaping culture. This important behavior needs to be balanced with prioritization, the subject of some of my recent blogs. A recent Forbes blog piece makes the case for accessibility as THE top tip for…
Lately, I’ve been writing about prioritization as an important aspect of leadership, identifying it as one of those skills that virtually never makes it on a critical competency list, yet is just that: critical to leadership effectiveness because of its impact on engagement and productivity. An important aspect of prioritization is the ability to stop…
A change in top leadership is a most precarious time for any organization, including major companies and countries. The risks are portrayed graphically in The Pillars of the Earth, a classic historical novel by Ken Follett, best known for the fictional thrillers he has written over the years. I highly commend it to Boards of…
My most recent blog post discussed the benefits of knowledge workers making better use of time to execute on important priorities. It commented on the role of managers in this process. A recent HBR blog piece provides some good further thought to the role of the manager in helping knowledge workers perform, pointing out that…
A recent HBR podcast talks about the need for knowledge workers to spend more time on things that really matter and less time on the multitude of things that are a lower priority yet take up most of the day. Although not presented as such, the podcast brings into focus a skill that is never…
On Saturday night, I saw Woody Allen’s new film about a woman named Jasmine who, following her husband’s arrest and ruin for defrauding his investors a la Madoff, seeks in vain to rebuild her life in San Francisco. Instead, she devolves to a desperate, borderline state with presumably little hope of recovery. What’s revealed late…
Resiliency is the measure of an executive’s acceptance of realities and, beyond that, the ability to drive business results in this complex world. It has become so critical to executive performance. There is a close connection between Confidence and Resiliency. A recent Forbes blog focused on Confidence as being one of the most important business…