What happens when your leadership pipeline creates a leadership bottleneck? Here’s the scenario: A new CEO takes the helm of your organization. She quickly sees that she’s got a problem on her hands. Before she got there, people in formal leadership positions were not trained properly before they moved into their roles, and now they are not particularly responsive to professional development. They’re getting … Read More The Leadership Bottleneck
Regarding that age-old question of whether leaders are born or made, here’s what I think. No, I don’t think people are born to be leaders. No, I don’t think anyone can be a good leader. But it’s not as mystical or dramatic as some might like to believe. Really it comes down to two things. You gotta want it and you gotta want it for … Read More Making Leaders
In the future, HR will be fervent about developing people and helping them realize their greatest potential. It will be about proactive care of people—maximizing the good, not just minimizing the bad. HR won’t be about reacting to screw-ups all day long, struggling to keep up, and bemoaning an inability to do anything about it. Nor will it be about providing loads of training … Read More The Future of HR
There has been some great effort to get people to the polls this year. It’s encouraging. I have noticed, however, a common argument for voting seems to be that a single vote can make all difference. They talk about how close races have been in the past, where very few votes made the difference. NPR, for instance, had an interesting article titled “Why Every … Read More Voting is Not About You
There tends to be a lot of confusion between training and professional development. Most often, those two things are conflated. Other times, people are vaguely aware that they are different things, but they’re just not sure what the distinction is or how to define it. So first I’ll just make this simple by explaining the difference. Training is operational. It teaches people how to … Read More Is There a Difference Between Training and Professional Development?
Why do otherwise promising leaders hitch their wagon to an anchor? Being an effective and ethical leader is exhausting. It requires constant effort and a strong group of allies and advisors (i.e., other leaders). When you’re desperate or feel like you’re drowning and someone tosses you a rope, you can be so eager and grateful for the gesture that sometimes you don’t notice when … Read More The Destructive Advisor: When a Leader’s Closest Ally is Her Undoing
Some people, I have found, are displeased when we mix politics with talk of leadership. Readers who feel this way, I surmise, just want to stay focused on what they know to be an important subject without having to wade through someone’s political opinions to get to the point. They want to be free to talk business and share knowledge of their profession without … Read More The Slow Boil: Why We Shouldn’t Shy Away from Politics When Discussing Leadership
There’s a lot of information out there about the importance of creating workflows and documenting processes. Process outlines and checklists are incredibly important for cross training, consistent and accurate service, reducing error, and continuous improvement. A lot of smart folks are giving great advice on the subject, but it can also be intimidating. For many situations the methods they provide for documentation is overkill. … Read More A Simple Way to Improve How Your Work Gets Done
What the hell is happening? We can look back at centuries of what makes good and bad leadership. Our culture is rife with leadership programs, courses, and institutes. Books on leadership rain from the sky. We are obsessed with leadership. And yet in virtually every industry and institution today we can find numerous examples of absolute horseshit leaders and they only seem to be … Read More The Rise of Horseshit Leaders
I loved the movie The Omega Man when I was a kid. Charlton Heston is seemingly the only man left in the world. He spends his days scavenging the city for goods (sometimes really good goods), and every night he barricades himself inside his fancy house to protect himself from the apocalyptic mutants known as The Family that ravage the Earth. He’s safe outside … Read More Introverts, Extroverts, and Being Out of Your Comfort Zone
For several years (a lifetime ago), I tended bar in Madison, Wisconsin. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, but I worked with some of the best people I’ve known and learned some important lessons about life. Many of those lessons have to do with leadership. The tales you collect working in a bar are long and varied, but I recollect just a few below … Read More 7 Things Bartending Taught me About Leadership
Developing as a leader is important business. You have to focus on the present and the future while taking care of people (including yourself) and systems. Doing that properly means continuously strengthening core competencies. This is daunting and there’s no getting around it. However, there is a way to provide some structure. Whether you’re helping someone else develop as a leader, or developing as … Read More The Leadership Scorecard
