Everyone can be involved in innovation: Not all improvements are world-historical acts of bravery and genius. You can start at any level. Get your employees to start where they are—whatever they are ready, willing, and able to do—and then work up the chain to bigger and better improvements. Levels of improvement: Improvements range from petite [Read More]

Organizational culture has an enormous impact on employee engagement, customer service, and business performance. There are many complex and sophisticated methods for analyzing organizational culture—I use some of them myself. But culture is an important business issue and leaders should be able to discuss it in everyday, normal-course, business language—relatively free of technical HR jargon. [Read More]

How do you get your new employees to work really hard for you, live your core values, and be great ambassadors for your company as quickly as possible? You can’t underestimate the stress employees experience during mergers and acquisitions: job insecurity, new bosses & colleagues, changing roles, extra work, survivor guilt…and a myriad of other [Read More]

There is so much pressure in acquisitions to deal with immediate financial and operational issues that the talent & culture side of mergers is often under-managed. This costs organizations millions of dollars in: reduced employee engagement, productivity, and retention declines in work quality and customer service, and opportunity costs What kinds of risks and costs [Read More]

Every company has a culture. Your company’s culture is either helping you get the job done or holding you back. Culture matters. When should your culture be changed? When is a culture-shift necessary? When you need to align your culture with strategy When your culture isn’t working (dysfunctional) When your core values become stale or [Read More]

Mindfulness is more than being present, awake, and aware. It’s also an ethical stance and generosity to the world around you. Mindfulness will have a positive impact on your peace of mind, your impact on the world around you, and your performance as a leader. I will offer a personal / family example of mindfulness [Read More]

Crucial Leadership Practice: People mistakenly assume that delegation is all or nothing: “I do it” or “you do it.” This view is over simplistic—and sometimes negligent. “To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” (Abraham Maslow). Don’t be a hammer. Expand your range and flexibility as a leader. In my last blog, I described [Read More]

Collaborative practice is one of the most significant and critical challenges in business. How do you get people to work really well together, participate to the max, share their best ideas, have strong, healthy, functional debate, and make great team decisions? A diversity of perspectives and talents on your team is useless if people don’t [Read More]

Feedback can be invaluable for improving your performance, calibrating your efforts, and identifying opportunities for improvement. Good feedback is tough to get: Asking for feedback is a risky business. You never know what you are going to get. And it is usually difficult to get anything at all. When you ask people point-blank for feedback, [Read More]

Workshops can be great opportunities to step back from the trees to look at the forest: What kind of leader am I? What kind of leader do I want to be? How can I take my leadership practices up to the next level? I encourage my workshop participants to engage in the workshop – to [Read More]

Pitching a big idea, and asking for approval on the spot, is very tough: People often resist ideas that they are hearing for the first time Asking people for an immediate decision can put people on the spot People tend to support the status quo when confronted or challenged   Putting people on the spot can [Read More]

Quick audit for team or project priorities: Auditing for value, relevance, and balance:  After identifying your highest priority objectives (instructions here), or after writing your statement of purpose for a particular project and identifying the project’s key objectives & metrics, ask yourself the following questions, ideally together with your team. The discussion is as valuable [Read More]

Outline: This blog will: Define strategic alignment Share a process for improving alignment between two departments or teams Map the value and benefits of alignment (metrics) “Strategic Alignment”: Strategic alignment is the practice of aligning individual and team goals with organizational objectives, and more broadly, aligning all of the organization’s resources (human, financial, systems, relationships, [Read More]

Here are a few of my favourite reflections on leadership from an elder statesman: John W. Gardner, On Leadership (Free Press, 1993): The world is moved by highly motivated people. No human venture succeeds without strongly motivated men and women. Anything that humans expend effort for can be a source of motivation. They expend effort [Read More]

Prioritizing goals for strategic alignment:  How do you prioritize your work; ensure you spend the most time on what counts most; align individual and team goals with organizational objectives; maintain a big picture focus? Here are some places to look, criteria, parameters…to align your efforts with the big picture—and help others do the same. Tactics: [Read More]

Moneyball is a great movie about leadership—and based on a true story. Setting the stage: Billy Beanne (Brad Pitt) is the GM for the Oakland A’s baseball team. He has a tiny budget for players, putting him at a major disadvantage in big league baseball. He hires Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to help him with [Read More]

This blog is about doing things right and doing the right things. In a world of complexity, constant change, huge workloads, and intense pressure to perform, it is very difficult to maintain focus and stay clear on your priorities. This blog will review a great technique for setting priorities and then show you a little [Read More]

When was the last time you really talked to your employees, and really listened to them? How do they like working for you and your firm? What are they thinking these days? Do they have any new ideas? Could you be removing any obstacles for them? Brief 30 minute, one-on-one meetings with your employees can [Read More]

Many companies don’t take their core values seriously. It’s a shame. Even if your company’s core values are not original or cool, they express important decisions about how you are going to work together, get the job done, and present yourselves to the world. How do you get your employees to take your core values [Read More]

A key success factor in training & development (T&D) is support from senior leaders: you need funding, you need their buy-in and support, you need their time and help. The problem is that many business leaders don’t understand the value of training. And everyone has been to crappy workshops. Here is a little introduction to [Read More]