Mike Myatt’s July 28 Forbes Blog Piece on outdated leadership practices provides a lot of food for thought. He looks at roughly 30 areas of leadership focus and contrasts the traditional perspective with today’s thinking, nicely bundling all concepts into just a word or phrase. It gives us a great snapshot of what’s right and…
Since my last post on Executive Leadership, I have done a considerable amount of reading, listening and learning about what it takes to be an effective leader. My first post on this subject discussed Authentic Leadership, then I discussed the need for Resiliency as a Leader. Now, I am adding Agility to the mix. Agility…
So much energy goes into Developing Leaders, Growing Talent and Shaping Culture. In all the activity, a key point almost always gets lost: You can develop, grow and shape a lot of things in people, but not their values. This means that such things as Integrity, Trustworthiness, Honesty and Truthfulness are inherent in people or…
A recent HBR blog piece makes a convincing case that criticism of ideas in meetings results in much better outcomes than just saying yes to a leaders or a subcommittee chair. In fact, this point is so important that I would go even further: only by accepting — in fact catalyzing — criticism and and…
A recent HBR blog piece talked about curiosity as a leadership trait capable of getting much higher team performance. The main message is to transparently put your views on the table then solicit the views of others with curious questions, rather than rhetorical questions or questions asked merely to gain support for your point of…
A recent piece on the HBR Blog Site discussed a series that litmus tests to help in judging people and their real potential. Examples cited are meaningful listening, giving rather than taking energy and self-awareness. It is certainly possible to take the list of the ten criteria suggested and build it into a structured interview…
I first started using the term “people manager” when I joined IBM over 10 years ago. At that time, I thought the term was different, even interesting. I wasn’t sure why it was so important to distinguish the “people manager” skills from other manager activities. However, I knew it was important, even a pain point…
I’ve already identified this as the leading pain point of senior HR executives. This and several future entries will address this subject in more detail. As Baby Boomers are retiring, employee ranks are thinning, executive layers are disappearing and development budgets are shrinking, the road to executive ascent needs to be shortening. Yet can it?…