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Leadership & Performance Articles
The 4 Major Leadership Mistakes that Many Business Owners Make (Part 1 of 4)
In this short series of posts, I’ll cover the 4 major mistakes that business owners, or senior leadership teams of larger companies, make on a regular basis that limits the performance of the organization. The first major mistake: Confusing ‘running the business’ with ‘leading your people’. Continue reading
“It’s Me. I’m the Problem.”
Said by no business leader, ever. (Well, okay. There was that one guy, but he was the exception.) Yet, it’s often one of the most powerful statements there is in business. I’ll often ask an audience, “What’s the one thing you would change to improve the performance of your organization?” As you can imagine I get all types of answers, everything from team structure and compensation to policies and procedures. Rarely, do I hear the most powerful answer: “Me. I’d change me to improve the performance of my company.” Continue reading
The 3 Most Powerful Strategies for Personal Growth
One of the biggest differences between successful and unsuccessful people is how they think. Specifically, how they think about, and value, personal growth. But even successful people often times struggle with creating effective, high-value personal growth plans. What I’ve discovered in all my years working in personal growth, both personally and with my clients, is that using the correct strategy is key to getting the most from your investment of time and money. Continue reading
The Moral of the Story?
As the story goes, a professor and a farmer were traveling together by train. After several days, they tired of talking and reading, so the professor suggested they play a game of riddles. ... Continue reading
4 Steps to Intentionally Living a Life of Significance
All of us, at least at some point in our lives, have a desire to be someone…to make a positive difference in the world…to make our life count…and add-value to others. It's a question of intention. But, intention alone is not enough. The question is, ‘How am I going to do it?’ Continue reading
The 7 Steps that Convert Experience into Insight
Just over 5 years ago, I got a personal invitation from John Maxwell to join him as a founding partner in the launch of his international coaching organization. I jumped at the opportunity, (which honestly was a little out of character for me since it wasn’t part of the direction of my company at the time). I knew – okay, I was pretty sure – that it would be a great investment that would allow me to go much deeper and much further in my ability to develop highly effective leaders throughout my clients’ organizations. The investment of money and time, much of it evenings and weekends, has been tremendously rewarding and transformed how I develop leaders and leadership teams. What I didn’t realize at the time, was... Continue reading
5 Powerful Ways Strengths-based Talent Management Manages Weaknesses
For fun, let’s start (warm-up, if you will) with dispelling a couple myths about strengths-based talent management that have been around for quite a while. Myth #1: A strength used to excess can become a weakness. Truth #1: Strengths are strengths. They become bad (ineffective) only when used with negative intent, to gain power or control, or cover-up for a true weakness. Continue reading
Visionaries, Talent Managers and Achievers: What They Each Do For Business Success
In a general sense there are three major categories of personalities in the work environment. (While the right number of categories can be endlessly argued, this article is intended to describe these three types that have been identified through experience, and talk about why it is important to understand them.) The three categories are Visionaries, Talent Manager and Achievers. Let’s look at them a little more closely, based upon important characteristics of their... Continue reading
How to Deal with a Difficult Team Member
Sooner or later we all have them. We don’t ever wish for them, but they show up nonetheless. Difficult people, non-performers, ‘challenging’ team members, whatever you want to call them. Whenever conflict or low performance arises, we are tempted to avoid it, procrastinate dealing with it, or ask someone else to resolve it for us. But the truth is that anytime we let conflict go – for whatever reason – it only gets worse. So we know we must deal with these people and their impact on the team. But how? (Yes, I get this question a lot. Any time we have difficulty with people we lead, we need to start a process, and fortunately that process is the same for nearly every situation. Before we get started, though, there are two questions we need to ask ourselves: Continue reading
Challenges of Leading from the Middle of the Organization
As top leaders we often expect the people on our leadership team to see the world the same way we do. But that is rarely, if ever, an accurate assumption (or maybe better stated ‘hope’). Leaders in the middle of an organization – those not the top leader, or the front line employees – have a unique situation. To lead them most effectively, we need to view the organization from their perspective. This article will present just three of the (many) unique challenges... Continue reading
