Posts by Jeffrey Boersma
High Impact Listening
Tucked between the content on Living Systems and Leaning Into Healthy Conflict on the day we visit the jail is a segment in LEAD 365 called High Impact Listening. It is sandwiched between those two topics for good reasons. Here’s one of those reasons: Great listening breaks the power of dysfunctional living systems by stopping…
Read MoreMind Your Own Business
Business is the activity of making one’s living or making money. Acumen is the ability to make good decisions. Great organizational leaders are able to make great decisions about making money, they practice business acumen. When we use the expression “Mind your own business,” it’s usually used in a negative way. What we are really…
Read MoreLiving Systems and High-Impact Listening
A living system is any group of people who spend time together and therefore become “emotionally wired together.” A Living System is the people and the stuff that connects the people in a defined group.
Read MoreVulnerability and the Johari Window
Remember the Johari Window? Many of us were introduced to the Johari Window in the chapter on Feedback. If you went back to your slides, you would notice that there are 4 quadrants. In the upper right is the “I know, You know” box. In the lower right is the “I know, You don’t know”…
Read MoreGreat Onboarding
(This post was first published here on December 19, 2016.) Part of building great teams is getting the right people on the bus. And getting the right people on the bus means having a great onboarding process. This is indispensable to helping them get started on the right foot.
Read MoreVision Accomplished
Many of you know that over five years ago a vision was established. My daughter Morgan and I committed ourselves to summiting the 46 high peaks of the Adirondacks in upstate New York. On July 26, 2013, we summited the first of those high peaks: Cascade Mountain. We had no idea what was ahead of us or exactly…
Read MoreThe Great Eight: Knowing Yourself and Others
(This post was first published here on September 12, 2016.) If everyone were just more like me, the world would be a better place—or at least my organization would be—or at least my team would be. Besides being an entirely narcissistic statement, it would not be the case that if our teams simply had more uniformity,…
Read MoreThe Great Eight: Commitment
(This post was first published here on August 15, 2016.) In Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he lists five characteristics of a dysfunctional team. One of those five is “the lack of commitment.” When people have not had the opportunity to air their opinion or challenge others, they often do not have the…
Read MoreThe Three Ears of Great Listening
Great listening is hard work. When done well, listening will yield huge dividends. If you are not fatigued after a period of focused listening, there’s a pretty good chance that you weren’t listening as well as you could have been. When we covered high impact listening in LEAD 365, we did so in the context of…
Read MoreVision Worth Fighting For
Fellow leaders, My guess is that most of us have not heard of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery. I want to introduce you to him today even though he died back in 1976. Bernard Montgomery led and fought in World War I and World War II. In fact, he fought in about ten other wars and scores of…
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