When things don’t go well in organizational life, it is ever so easy to react by blaming others. For example, we may have a difficult conversation with a co-worker who seems, again, to dismiss our point of view. We wind up feeling “unheard,” frustrated, and possibly even insulted. We react (inwardly, if not outwardly) by […]
Perspective-taking as a leadership practice
Leadership Agility, the book I co-authored, synthesizes and builds upon the findings of all these trailblazers, adding additional insights from 5 years of fresh new studies of leaders I did while writing the book.
Do your direct reports work together like a real team? Do they need to?
In today’s companies, groups of direct reports are often referred to as “teams.” Yet, quite frequently, they either don’t function as true teams, or they don’t engage in the level of teamwork needed to optimize their performance. Many “teams” might be more accurately called “staffs,” implying a group that serves as an extension of the […]
The Power of Integrative Thinking
In her classic book, The Change Masters, Harvard Business School Professor, Rosabeth Kanter, found that the key difference between truly innovative change leaders and those who focused only on incremental change came down to two different mindsets. The innovative leaders – those who succeeded in leading change projects that crossed boundaries and addressed formerly unseen […]
How to Practice the Art of “Stepping Back”
Being absorbed in our work is a good thing in many ways, better than being distracted or feeling disengaged. Getting into the flow of our daily tasks is energizing, and it helps us get our work done with a certain level of efficiency and effectiveness. At the same time, we are so busy in our […]
Three Questions to Frame Change Initiatives
“Framing” an organizational change initiative means setting the context – clarifying fundamental questions about what the change is about and why it’s worth the time, effort and resources it will take to get from here to there. It means being clear about these issues in one’s own mind and communicating this frame to the initiative’s […]
New Leadership for New Times – Why we need to think differently about leadership development
We’ve come to a point where we need to think differently about leadership development – in a way that doesn’t reject what we know and do already, but builds on it. Central to this re-think, we need to understand what’s so dramatically different about today’s turbulent business environment, and the new forms of leadership it […]
How Great Change Leaders use Stakeholder Agility
In today’s business environment, leading change has become an integral part of a manager’s job. It’s also become more challenging. One of the biggest challenges is gaining sustained commitment from those whose support we need to be successful. This post is about a particular kind of leadership agility we need to lead change effectively: “stakeholder […]
Overlooked Practices Which Improve Team Decision-Making
Here’s a practice you can use when you make decisions with your team. It can significantly increase your team’s commitment to decisions made and as well as their trust in the decision-making process. The practice has two steps, both frequently overlooked. The first is the easiest: For each topic you introduce for discussion as team […]
High Quality 360 Feedback – Changing Mindsets
The importance of focusing on both mindsets and behavior when creating an action plan at the end of a 360-feedback process In a recent post, Kevin Cashman reported new research with a large sample size of managers and companies that clearly established, through quantitative assessment, that the managers in companies with higher financial performance had […]