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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…
It’s become fashionable to stress Competencies in designing programs for developing leaders, growing talent and shaping culture. Increasingly, demonstrated Competencies are finding their way into the annual evaluation process where their weight can be significant. But what about Skills? Are there Skills that are so broad-based, even transformational, that they deserve the same emphasis? In…
We have engineered the individual performance process increasingly finely over the last ten years, and each new advance in technology helps cut it even finer. It’s time to look at how much value this activity is creating? While I’m not aware of a study that has looked at this issue in depth. The anecdotal evidence…
More and more good ideas are surfacing on how to be a leader who inspires and empowers, completely shedding the command and control approach . Most often the concept advocated expresses the new leadership style as a series of key behaviors by the leader. This checklist approach is helpful. but it is critical to keep…