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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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