Leadership Development

Team-building ideas: Rx for coaching your team to greatness

December 11, 2009

Well-supported teams receive the information, training and rewards they need to keep chugging along. Here are four prescriptions for coaching your team:

Leadership Tips: Vol. 110

December 11, 2009

Hit upon more winning ideas by capturing more ideas in the first place. New communication and online mechanisms can help. Example: Starbucks gathers and codifies ideas with www.mystarbucksidea.com, and uses decision-market approaches to evaluate them. Meanwhile, innovative companies such as Apple or Google make generating ideas an informal part of everyone’s job and motivate employees largely with nonmonetary recognition.

Making the most of 2 billion heartbeats

December 11, 2009

Lauretta Hannon dithered around in safe jobs for nearly 20 years before taking the plunge in the career she really wanted, as a writer. Hanging onto the security of a steady paycheck is a fear that’s hard to overcome, she rationalized. She knows that life is full of losses, but she also knows that every living creature gets about 2 billion heartbeats, so we need to make the most of them.

Inspirational leadership: 3 attributes leaders need

December 1, 2009

Few large organizations doubt their own ability to survive the downturn, says leadership consultant John Baldoni, but sadly, few of their top executives possess the kind of vision and inspiration needed to move beyond survival—to “thrival.” In other words, the financials are acceptable, but the leadership is lacking. And right now, leadership is what we need.

Achieve any goal in 5 steps

May 1, 2008
Knowing what you want from your career or personal life is step No. 1. Once you’ve set your goal, it’s time for step No. 2: achieving it. Here’s how.

Career audits: Does the job work for you?

April 1, 2008
Every year, you probably receive (or help write) your performance evaluation. But have you evaluated your job lately? Workplace coach Joan Lloyd suggests asking yourself these questions annually:

Add aphorisms to your bag of tricks

November 1, 2007
Aphorisms are reams of wisdom packed into little sayings. They come in handy during meetings and speeches. Heres a sampling.

Will you let good ideas bubble up?

November 1, 2007
See whether you can relax enough to let your team innovate. Heres a business consultants list of questions titled Confessions of a Control Freak.Ask yourself how self-assured you actually are:

Why it’s hard to admit you’re off track

April 1, 2007
Leadership consultant Antony Bell tells this story to show the stubbornness of our assumptions: what psychologists and scientists call our “paradigms.”

45 years ago, leadership was different

November 1, 2006
If you read current books on leadership, you might believe that personality is the greatest determinant of leadership success. Only a few decades ago, though, that belief would’ve been viewed as flawed, self-centered and wrong.