The Great Eight: Communication
(This post was first published here on August 22, 2016.) Communication is truly one of the key characteristics of great teams. Effective communication is rarely identified as a strength in the teams I’ve had the privilege to observe over the past twenty years. In...
The 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...
The Great Eight: Common Goals
(This post was first published here on August 8, 2016.) Imagine you are running a race. All the runners gather together, stretching muscles, bouncing on the balls of their feet to warm up, drinking a last few sips of water, popping in their earbuds. The loudspeaker...
The Great Eight: An Introduction
(This post was first published here on August 1, 2016.) Throughout our year together in LEAD 365, we focused on three "buckets" of leadership—three areas that great leaders need to focus on: Being a person worth following Creating clarity around purpose/mission,...
The 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...
The Care and Feeding of Leadership
Take your time. It is the fastest way to achieve your goal. At the end of LEAD 365, many of you were given a bonsai tree. We gave you the tree to remind you that leadership takes ongoing care in order to flourish, much like the tree. But there are even more parallels...
The Common Phases of Growth
As I age and become more aware of people over 60 I see two kinds of older people: those who are curmudgeons and those who are amazing. My theory for why this happens is that real, deep change is hard, and I suspect that it gets even harder the older one gets. Those...
Real. Deep. Change.
REAL Real value from your journey through LEAD 365, or any leader development engagement, only happens when something changes in your behavior. Knowing something doesn’t bring value—unless it leads to doing something in a better way. Learning a new concept or...
Vision 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...
Giving Long-Overdue Feedback
Early in my career I ran a database, and I trained a lot of people how to use it. Being new to the database, the people I trained often made little mistakes. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings or seem overly critical, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I’d just fix...