Tag: developing leaders
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Authentic Leaders: What do you stand for?
We’ve all heard the advice: “Fake it ’til you make it.” It shows up everywhere—from 1980s catchphrases like “I’m not a doctor, but I played one on TV” to today’s Instagram‑ready personal brands and sitcom‑inspired quips like “No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.” And to be fair, nobody is ever 100% “ready” when they step…
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Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, especially when it’s wrapped in a big compensation package
A friend of mine just got off the phone with the head of HR from a national company. The HR executive noted that his company’s growth prospects were being limited by the lack of executive talent due to a depleted bench. He felt that “outside” talent was needed to expand their footprint and to bring in…
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Forcing Honesty in the Workplace
One of the most difficult managerial tasks is providing honest feedback to employees, especially for new managers. Providing objective feedback, delivering the feedback in an appropriate manner, and being able to handle the employee’s reaction takes hours of preparation and can be anxiety producing. This is so difficult that many managers avoid providing honest feedback…
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Leadership Stories: The Importance of Storytelling
Storytelling has always been the most effective way to deliver a message about human behavior. There’s a time and place for everything My father was never one to walk away from a fight. As a young teen, he heard some kids being disrespectful to an elderly woman and he quickly stepped in and taught them a…
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Leadership Stories: Refuse to be Discouraged
For three days, he traveled only at night and rested in caves with a sack full of bread, cheese, and peppers, and his revolver. When he had finally crossed the border from what was Yugoslavia into Greece, he felt that he was one major step closer to realizing his dream of making it to America. His…
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The Ultimate Driver of Performance
You can have the best ideas on the planet. You can be Einstein and Steve Jobs rolled up into one. But if you can’t unleash the full potential of your people, you’re going to watch less ingenious competitors zoom past you and eat your lunch. Knowing what to do is just the start In my…
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Effective Communications: The Catalyst for Everything You Want to Accomplish
Innovation engineering…empowerment…entrepreneurialism…employee engagement… These are big themes. Powerful ingredients. And when they come together, they can help you accomplish great things. But it won’t happen without great leadership and a high-powered, multi-faceted, never-ending communication campaign. Nitin Nohria, Dean of the Harvard Business School, once said that “communication is the real work of leadership.” I’d like to…
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Fair is not Equal: How to win the hearts and minds of your people
I once had a union official lodge a complaint that we were not treating everyone in the factory the same and that it had to stop. I told him that if he insisted, at my next “all hands” meeting I would announce that the union told me to treat them all poorly. The reason –…
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How good was your last hire / promotion?
“One reason the Roman Empire grew so large and survived so long – a prodigious feat of management – is that there was no railway, car, airplane, radio, paper, or telephone. And therefore you could not maintain any illusion of direct control over a general or a provincial governor. You could not feel at the…