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.
In a recent blog, I talked about creating future leaders by building on successes. I advised doing this by mapping the behaviors of existing successful leaders in the organization with the Bizet Job Activity Rating job profiling tool and using these behaviors as the basis for developing future leaders. I suggested “gently” adding new behaviors…
I recently wrote a blog about the value of team building for consulting teams — including members from both the consulting firm and the client — to help prevent the “breakdown and rescue” that almost always seems to happen at some point during a project. As I pointed out, this costly cycle can be stopped…
We are often asked how strong leaders can be developed quickly with confidence that they will be successful in the organization. In responding to this question, we always ask three key questions: 1. What does a strong leader look like today? 2. What would make your leaders even stronger? 3. What is the best approach…
Recently, a senior talent leader and I were discussing how certain employees are asked by leaders to join teams based on the employee’s reputation from past work. Unlike some other employees, these employees are always in demand for the contributions they make. We described this quality as magnetism. I’ve had similar discussions with other talent professionals over…
Earlier this week, I was talking to two company executives about strengthening team performance. They had already put substantial effort into this area and they were not getting results at the desired levels. Specifically, they had trained a large portion of the workforce on expected behaviors of team members and developed ways to measure demonstration…
We’ve been stressing the importance of teams to business success. The benefits of successful teams are clear: Diversity of thought contributing to stronger outcomes Innovation at levels well beyond individual capabilities Better business results Socialization of information to and from stakeholders Experiential learning which adds organizational capability Getting these benefits requires that your teams have…
Recently, I’ve been blogging about improving team performance. The focus has been internal teams, beginning with the senior leadership team. In fact, the principles of team performance improvement apply just as effectively to extended teams. Here are a couple of examples to consider: Consulting teams — When consulting firms do work for their clients, it…
Today, some helpful humor and a preview of thoughts to come. … I’ve been blogging about teams in several contexts: performance, assessments, team building and coaching. A key tenet of our perspective is the importance of the six core team competencies: engagement, collaboration, innovation, trust, empowerment and awareness. Since we’ve promoted these competencies, they’ve begun…
At StangerCarlson. we are constantly refining our approach to our leadership and talent offerings. Our executive and team coaching offerings have several unique characteristics, one of which is how we measure growth 90 days after coaching has finished. The purpose of this approach is to establish that growth and renewal are continuing beyond formal coaching.…
In the last few years, we’ve worked with several middle market companies to design or formalize their talent processes. Some of the companies have been global. There is a clear theme which emerges from this work: find out what’s being done well before beginning the work. A great example of this is performance management. Recently,…