Richard Stanger is the CEO of StangerCarlson. He is a business strategist, executive coach and advisor to senior leaders. His passion is working with leaders of professional services firms in developing and implementing their business strategies. Richard has more than 25 years of hands-on leadership experience at recognized accounting and advisory firms.
The most rewarding thing about our work is that we are able to help people quickly become more effective in their professional lives. Recently, we have been asked by several smaller companies to help strengthen the abilities of their leaders. While most of our work is with larger companies, we really enjoy working with leaders…
It’s been years since Peter Drucker taught us that culture eats strategy for breakfast. On a more micro level, culture can quickly chew up and spit out even the most talented people who don’t understand and can’t navigate the culture. I saw a great example of this recently. A woman executive I know was hired…
About five years ago, the concept of focal jobs emerged. Advocates of this concept stressed the importance of identifying the most critical roles in a company and investing development dollars in these roles as well as rigorous planning for successors to the incumbents in these roles. Despite persuasive thought leadership in this arena, the focal…
Cultural deficiencies are often the biggest impediments to business success. Peter Drucker put it well when he wrote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Yet, despite these time-honored words, companies continue to design and launch ambitious strategies without seriously tackling the cultural obstacles to implementation, mostly because they don’t really know where to begin. There are…
As we spend time with senior executives, advising them, coaching them and facilitating workshops for them, it’s jumps off the page how important passion is to success. To grasp this point, passion must be understood a little differently from its common meaning. Passion doesn’t always mean a visible display of enthusiasm or sheer extroverted energy.…
The New Year is a time for important resolutions and commitments, both personally and professionally. And 2015 is special for leaders and employees. It’s been a long six years since the recession of 2008, and it’s finally over. GDP and employment are on the rise, and a new sense of optimism reigns for the economy.…
Recently, I wrote, Five Steps to Guide Strategic Thinking, a blog post that emphasized the way leaders should organize their thoughts and behaviors in pursuing a strategic initiative. Last week, I was asked a question by a reader of the blog piece: “What precedes this process? Our leaders can think very strategically about their work.…
We’ve been advocating leveraging success in leadership development by profiling successful leaders and using their behaviors as the basis for developing your organization’s leadership competencies. Once established, we teach these behaviors to other leaders and future leaders in workshops, initially adding only a few additional competencies from our leadership competency library. The library contains the…
Appreciative inquiry is a powerful tool for motivating and engaging employees. Instead of asking why something is not working or being critical of an employee’s work, think about taking a different approach. Ask the employee to think about a similar situation where he was successful. Then ask what enabled the success and how he and…
Some of my recent leadership development client work has shined some new light on gender diversity. Much of our time in leadership workshops is spent helping leaders who got recognized earlier in their careers as top-flight subject matter experts learn the softer capabilities needed to be a strong leader. This transition is one that great leaders…