The People Power of Effective Leaders- Connection, Collaboration, Holding the Center
People power, our ability to work with people and produce valuable outcomes together, is an essential dimension of leadership, teamwork, and human relationship. Some people seem to have it, and many don’t. How to develop this people power seems a bit mysterious in our...
Leading Successful Innovation – from Mystery to Skills
Innovation is a mystery for most people, though there are a very few that seem to have a knack for it. There are also the rare few who are serial innovators, but their success does not seem to illuminate the process for the rest of us. Amazon has over nine thousand...
Why Great Performers Fail as Managers
Why are promotions potentially dangerous for both the person being promoted and the organization promoting them? Why do great performers fail as managers? Let me share some key learning about these issues that come from over three decades of addressing them in our...
The Ten Conversations of Effective Teams
To answer “how” to produce effective teams we need to address “what” are we dealing with. Are we paying attention to the right things?
Your Career Journey – Cliffs, Barriers, Dragons, and Dwelling
We speak and think of our professional lives in terms of “careers.” The word career comes from roots that mean a street, or path for traveling, and hence we are on a journey. How do we progress on our journey? How do we deal with the challenges along the way? Early in...
Leadership Presence – Where Are You?
I once worked for a boss who tried to say the right words, but they never rang true. He didn’t show up with his heart, energy, and presence in alignment with his words. He produced distrust in me and other team members, and a desire to avoid interacting with him. I...
Leadership for a Good Life
The topic of leadership often brings to mind a bright side: people making a positive impact with others, often producing extraordinary accomplishments together, and “leading the charge” to get outcomes to happen. It is also often thought of as having more...
The Edge – From Hesitation to Generation
What do you do when you find yourself at your edge? The edge of where you know and don’t know. Where you are competent and not competent. Where you are in your comfort zone and where you are not. Where beyond the edge is the unknown? For most people, this...
Taking Excellent Teams to Even Higher Levels of Accomplishment
How to we add value to teams that are already excellent, even standard setters? Let’s begin by looking at the dark side of achieving excellence. One pitfall for teams that have achieved a level of excellence is to rest on their laurels and lose their hunger for...
The Leader’s Challenge
This discussion of leadership is drawn from chapter 12, Embodying, from the book The Innovator’s Way, where reference to “innovator” is changed to “leader.” The discussion is just as relevant since both innovator and leader engage in conversations to shift the...