Leadership

All posts in Leadership

Are You Playing to Win?

Your #1 job as a leader is to create a compelling vision of winning, then keep yourself and everyone else in the organization focused on it with laser-like intensity. Are you focused on winning and moving towards it each day, celebrating milestones along the way? Or do you play to not lose? When an organization lacks a clear destination, it usually has many ill-defined ones. Employees feel unmotivated and uncommitted. Time, talent, and resources get wasted on products and projects that go nowhere. And people end up working on their own personal agendas rather than doing what’s best for the…

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Are You in the Innovation Danger Zone?

Ever wonder why some companies seem to effortlessly come out with one great innovation after another while others struggle to get even one new product or service out the door? There’s a reason for it. Innovation is a complex process that involves a lot more than just throwing money at an R&D department and hoping for results. Specifically, it requires certain ways of thinking and behaving that open people up to considering possibilities and prevent them from getting stuck in the past. Companies that innovate on a regular basis practice these behaviors on a regular basis. Companies that struggle to…

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Know When to Manage and When to Coach

Have you ever wondered why the head of a baseball team is called the manager and the head of a basketball team is called the coach? (These are the kinds of things I sometimes ponder on long airplane rides.) The answer has to do not just with the obvious differences between the two sports, but also with how the players are coached and managed during the games. Just as baseball and basketball are two very different sports, coaching and managing are two very different activities. One has to do with directing, the other has to do with teaching. Managing is…

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Four Strategies for Getting It Done in Your Organization

Getting the right things done involves a systematic process of rigorously discussing “hows and whats,” questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability. It requires making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who will implement that strategy, and then linking rewards to performance and results.

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4 Ways to Create Linsanity on Your Team

Do you have a Jeremy Lin on your team? You might. You may think you understand the potential of every person on your team but the truth is, you could have unbelievable, untapped talent sitting “on the bench” just waiting to be discovered by you—or your competitor. As company leadership we must think like championship coaches and learn to recognize and develop game-changing talent.

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The Human Brain: Friend or Foe?

The human brain is a remarkable organ, yet at times it can be our worst enemy. It comes equipped with remarkable cognitive, reasoning, and creative powers. But it also has many built-in patterns of thinking and perceiving that do not always serve us well. Two of the worst offenders are the tendency to see what we want to see and to screen out data that contradicts our prevailing view of the world.

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Got Flash Foresight?

“Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible,” by Daniel Burrus, redefines what is possible in the business world. I was so impressed after reading it that I sent Burrus an email telling him how much I enjoyed it and would enjoy chatting with him face to face. We met for a great glass of wine and had an interesting time discussing the book. Turns out we share many ideas on how business leaders can cope with today’s hyper-paced markets and high levels of uncertainty (Is it any wonder I thought he was brilliant?!)

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3 Tips for Better Cold Calling

As a sales force development consultant, I have worked with sales teams of all shapes, sizes and industries. Every team thinks they are “different” when it comes to their product and how it should be sold. And while I often hear “our industry is unique. We rely solely on referrals”, I can tell you that every company in every industry relies on word of mouth—yours is no different.

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Want employees to care about the bottom line? Set the example.

As a leader in your company you are the foundation of the company culture. Like many business leaders, you may be struggling with how to build a sense of fiscal responsibility within your team. It’s a challenging thing to try to get entry-level employees to care as much about the bottom line as you do. What is the number one way to get employees on board with penny-pinching?

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Redefining Excellence for Today’s World

Excellence starts with getting very clear on the end state you wish to achieve (winning) and relentlessly driving towards it every day. Excellence requires knowing when to push on (even when you don’t have all the information or the perfect solution), but doing it well and constantly refining as you forge ahead. Excellence means accepting only the best, and understanding that when it is not given, that you, as the leader, are at least partly responsible.

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Five Proven Ways to Undermine Excellence in Your Organization

Almost one of out every two employees does not know what management expects from them in terms of job performance, which means that management isn’t telling them what is expected. Management expects employees to be mind readers or they don’t care about performance. And we wonder why excellence is such a rare commodity in the corporate world! As leaders, the things we don’t do or say often have more of an impact than those that we do. So, I took my own informal poll and came up with the top five things managers don’t do that undermine excellence in organizations.

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10 Questions to Ask Yourself Regularly

After spending time with many business leaders, I’ve learned that knowing your industry, finding investment capital, and hiring good people is not enough to succeed. There are many keys to success, but one in intelligent introspection—asking the right questions. Asking and answering the right questions on a regular basis optimizes your business by ensuring that your answers are still relevant. As we enter a new year, this is a perfect time to ask those questions to make sure that we have the right foundation for success.

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True to Your Corporate Values?

In the good old days, corporations formulated their brands and corporate values from the inside out. That is to say, that the deeply held values of the person at the top insisted that the entire organization hold true to them as well. Firms such as Kellogg’s, Orville Redenbacher’s and a hundred other firms built by a single individual know, it’s all about character and reputation.

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7 Ideas to Engage and Motivate Your Staff – Part 1

As a business leader, the most important lesson you can learn about motivating staff is that what motivates you may not necessarily motivate Sarah or any of the other employees for whom you are responsible. Motivation means different things to different people. As a business manager, it is an integral part of your role to observe and learn what inspires and motivates each and every member of your staff.

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How to Be a Top 50 Innovator

Too many companies see innovation as merely coming up with new products or services. Certainly, that’s part of it. But at its core, innovation is all about thinking differently than you have in the past. It’s about finding new ways to improve internal systems and processes. It’s about coming up with better, faster, and cheaper solutions to your customers’ most pressing problems.

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