30

Oct

Checklist for Effective Business Communication

4 comments

3coze

audience, clarity, communication, emails, grammar, memos, messages, spelling, writing

Communicate, Personal Development, Right Words to Say

Recently, I wrote an article about effective business communication for HBR that spread like hotcakes. You can read it here. It follows the standard HBR style and is therefore written in proper prose. When Missy Lafferty commented on Twitter that the post makes a great checklist for business messages, I decided to convert the ideas […]

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26

Oct

Why it’s hard to lead when times are good

5 comments

3coze

competition, Crisis, disruption, disruptor, innovator's dilemma, leadership, management, strategy

About teams, Bad Leaders, Be a better team leader, Strategy & Planning

“We’re lucky. Times are good and it’s pretty easy to manage right now.” This is a quote from a member of an executive team I’m working with right now. He’s right, times are good for their business…really good. He’s also right that the steady sales and recurring competitive wins make it reasonably easy to manage […]

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23

Oct

How to add value as a leader–Part 2

1 comment

3coze

abdication, escalate, governance, leadership, micro-management, monitoring, quality, review

Bad Leaders, Be a better team leader, Horror Stories, How to fix teams, Strategy & Planning

In my last post, I was ranting about the number of people who like to think of themselves as leaders but who are just glorified (and overpaid) individual contributors.  I started to describe the activities that leaders at any level need to do to get their team on the right trajectory and going the right […]

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19

Oct

Are you failing as a leader?

4 comments

3coze

bad leaders, goals, incompetent leaders, leadership, micro-management, priorities, strategy, thresholds, trade offs

Bad Leaders, Be a better team leader, Contribute, Horror Stories

Somehow, we’ve ended up with very few leaders in our organizations and a whole heck of a lot of very highly paid individual contributors. I’m getting pretty frustrated by this. I know immediately that it’s a problem in an organization when the CEO starts talking about upward delegation and a lack of accountability, even from […]

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16

Oct

Should you get involved?

5 comments

3coze

delegate, guidelines, incompetence, management, micro-management, risk, thresholds, weeds

Be a better team leader, Communicate, Contribute, Right Words to Say

Leaders often choose the wrong issues to get involved in. They meddle in activities that can and should be addressed by their subordinates while neglecting decisions that only they can make. Many leaders are consumed by the minutiae and out of touch with the strategic. The costs of both problems are high. Are you getting […]

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12

Oct

Your conflict defaults

7 comments

3coze

Aggressive, avoidance, Bully, compromise, conflict, harmony, passive-aggressive, styles, victim

conflict, Horror Stories, Personal Development

“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Words many of us heard from the time we were very young. If your family lived by this rule, you might still struggle to share constructive feedback or to raise uncomfortable issues. If, on the other hand, the rule was more like, “If you […]

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09

Oct

Fast or agile: Which are you really looking for?

4 comments

3coze

agile, agility, competition, decision making, disruption, execution, implementation, sense of urgency, Speed, strategy

About teams, Be a better team leader, Contribute, How to fix teams, Strategy & Planning

I was listening while a group of executives spoke about how to make their organization more agile. What was interesting, was that most of their comments referred to the speed they needed to move, rather than to their agility. I think it’s important to understand the difference between speed and agility because they serve different […]

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05

Oct

The Case for More Conflict

29 comments

3coze

aggression, avoidance, book, conflict, conflict averse, conflict aversion, hostility, passive-aggressive, workplace conflict

About teams, Be a better team leader, Be a better team member, conflict, How to fix teams

I’m toying around with writing another book; a thought that creates simultaneous excitement and terror. Given that it’s been three years since You First came out, I thought I better ramp up slowly. I’m going to write a few posts that capture some of the ideas I might include in the book. Then I need […]

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02

Oct

How to take the sting out of conflict (using magic from Harry Potter)

4 comments

3coze

anger, argument, conflict, Emotions, Empathy, humor, humour, resentment

Be a better team member, Communicate, conflict, Horror Stories, How to fix teams, Right Words to Say

I spent some time with a team last week that was really suffering because of several months of unhealthy conflict. Relations had deteriorated to the point that team members were feeling disrespected by one another. There was a lot of anger in the room and they needed help from someone outside the team to get […]

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