I have had the opportunity to coach a number of different leaders. Sometimes I am asked to observe how a leader interacts with their team members and then provide the leader with feedback about the impact of their behavior on the team. When I observe a lack of engagement in a leader’s meeting, I interview team members to discover the reasons for their lack of engagement in team meetings.
Whether you are a new leader or manager who is starting a new business, your mindset and those of your people are integral to the success of your endeavors. Why? Because your mindset influences your people’s performance.
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Recently I was sitting with a group of leaders who were discussing how difficult it can be to talk about what matters most, particularly when others don’t share your view.
Recently, I was asked to observe a Home Owners Association board meeting and to provide feedback about what the board members could do to have more effective meetings. From the outset, it was obvious that the entire group of individuals had never received any type of business communication training. More than anything, I was shocked
I recently had the opportunity to meet with a group of consultant friends. Our conversation turned into a debate about which essential roles leaders play.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to watch one of my favorite college basketball teams win their quarterfinal contest in the NIT. What was so memorable about this game was that one of the team’s long-time stars played even though he was very sick. He contracted the flu before the game and was not expected to play.
Recently one of my trainees went through her annual performance review. She received an unsatisfactory rating in one area because her manager told her that she was too argumentative. When she asked what that meant, she was told that she asked too many questions.
I recently had a VP tell me that she had assigned one of her directors the task of doing a comparability study of their company’s compensation and benefits vis-à-vis other companies in their industry. After the director had completed the study, the VP grilled the director on his findings. The director had a difficult time answering the questions that she asked and came across as lacking in confidence. The VP was then faced with a dilemma: should she make the presentation to the Board of Trustees herself or should she run the risk of allowing the director to make the...
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When I was in my first job in corporate America, I had a one-of-a-kind manager. The first thing he did when meeting with me was to ask me what I wanted to become and what my vision of my future career looked like. I really hadn’t given it much thought, and so I candidly told him so. Always abounding in patience, he began by asking me a series of well-thought out questions that made me think.
Recently I held a number of open office hours online to answer questions that people had about emotional intelligence. By far the most frequently asked question was, “Why do people become so defensive?” Perhaps the easiest way to understand defensiveness is to understand what makes each of us defensive.
One day this week when I was working at home the upstairs phone began to ring. Since I was busy, I ignored the call, figuring the answering machine would pick it up. During the next hour, the phone rang at least three more times.
My uncle Mel passed away after living a wonderful life. He was one of those brave souls who fought in World War II and was lucky to make it home. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was a member of 87th Infantry Division that came up from the south on the west side of Bastogne.
I was recently facilitating a class for executives teaching them how to hold potentially difficult conversations. One of the attendees asked me, “With all that we already have to do, is this really all that important?” I walked to the whiteboard and drew a picture
After becoming a new manager, I will never forget the first time I had to give constructive feedback to a member of my team.
Many of the organizations that I have worked in this year are involved in dramatic change. They are doing more to meet the increasing demands of customers in order to compete with companies within their industry. They are implementing new productivity standards which is causing them to measure more effectively the behaviors of their employees and the return on investment for the implementation of newly defined competencies. Because we usually get what we measure,
