One of the core aspirational goals we encourage our clients to adopt is the following: Every employee will report to an outstanding supervisor. Easy to say; not so easy to do. Let’s take a quick look at what takes. It starts by …

Most every large organization has some terrific leaders within its ranks of executives, some mediocre leaders working right next to them, and often an abysmal leader or two thrown into the mix. The result is that a given employee’s likelihood of working …

I have recently worked with an executive who needed to more clearly establish and enforce expected performance standards for the staff members she supervises. She made good progress, replacing her previously hazy thoughts with a sharp vision of what she expects. One …

Over the past year, many of our client companies have experienced relatively smooth, steady success, while others have been on a rollercoaster ride of wins, losses, and frequent unexpected drops and turns. This contrast has reminded me of the wisdom of an …

My formative years coincided with the peak of the cold war in the sixties. It was a raucous time of great social unrest coupled with an ever-present awareness of the danger of nuclear annihilation. I can recall asking adults the following question: …

Some leaders fail to grasp the importance of opinion polling regarding how their team members are perceived. These leaders work from a premise that if they are happy with how their staff members are performing, then things are good…but such is not …

The old bromide is that patience is a virtue – and at times that is obviously true. Leaders do indeed need to listen well, avoid knee-jerk reactions, and seldom make decisions fueled by anger. But it is also true that patience should …

Good decision making requires the maintenance of rational thought – and few things are more conducive to that objective than an adherence to something most of us were taught in middle school: the scientific method. The scientific method encourages us to develop …

One of my more intellectually interesting and inquisitive friends recently asked me an interesting question: What is the most potent driving force for spurring productivity? It was a question that I had not previously considered. As I now reflect, it seems that …

Leaders do a lot of listening. We just often do it wrong. Jennifer Garvey Berger, the CEO of a London-based coaching and consulting company called Cultivating Leadership, has laid out a brilliant model for categorizing three types of listening. It is smart …