Winter has definitely arrived across the country. People from coast to coast are digging out of some hefty snow. As my dogs and I try to navigate around my subdivision, I’ve noticed four types of snow shoveling strategies. Interestingly, these strategies line up very well with four different types of leadership. What snow?The first type …
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Take a look at the picture below. Which of the horizontal lines is longer? This picture is the famous Ponzo Illusion. The lines are the same length. How did you respond to that question? Did you trust what you saw and say that the top line was longer think back to a similar illusion that …
Who are the “hot potatoes” in your organization? You know – the people who no longer are performing but have not been told. Instead, they just get passed along from department to department. We all have them. Having difficult conversations is hard, especially when they involve someone’s performance. Despite this, not confronting poor performers is …
Read more “Hot Potato: Great kid’s game, but a bad leadership strategy”
I recently heard a wonderful poem by Jack Riemer. I was struck at how well it captures the essence of leadership and personal accountability. We cannot merely pray to end war;For the world was made in such a wayThat we must find our own path of peaceWithin ourselves and with our neighbor. We cannot merely …
Read more “Leading in the passive voice isn’t leading at all”
Data-driven decision-making or gut-level decision-making, which is the answer? The pendulum has swung way over to data-driven. But isn’t your personal experience and judgment what got you to where you are? Your value as a leader comes from your experiences and judgments. If organizations could codify every decision into a predictable formula, leaders would be …
Read more “Don’t discard your biases and “gut”, just change the way that you use them”
I don’t know if it’s an excuse or a misperception, but lately I’ve been hearing that people don’t have time to follow sound business practices. There is no time to plan, to get people’s buy-in to change, or to think critically about the business. Execution is the name of the game. Most people agree that …
“Now those memories come back to haunt me they haunt me like a curse Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true Or is it something worse that sends me down to the river though I know the river is dry“ -Bruce Springsteen, The River Perhaps Bruce Springsteen was on to something when …
I don’t think so. In the past two months I have purchased or been involved in the purchase of three new cars. It seems like auto dealers operate (or at least think they operate) in a dimension where basic principles of consumer behavior do not exist. For an industry that is reported to be struggling, …
Read more “Do auto dealers read the same newspapers and books as the rest of us?”
One of my bosses once asked me how I was able to generate so much loyalty and engagement from my team. I told him that I cared about them. He didn’t like my answer. His concern was that we couldn’t put “caring” into a program that we sent across the organization. I think he was …
I learned many things as an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center. One of the most important lessons was that senior executives don’t like getting emails or phone calls from irate customers. I received my fair share of forwarded emails with a simple two word introduction: “Fix this.”It’s not that these executives don’t …
Read more “It’s lonely at the top – and people are always yelling at you”