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Leadership Strategy: Fire yourself

I’ve been doing some writing and editing for this OPEN for Business blog recently, and today my friend Steve Dunlap fired off a new post about “firing yourself.” The concept is pretty basic to understand, but to summarize, every year —… Continue Reading

The leadership void, explained

Linda Hill and Kent Lineback appear to collaborate often, including on this book about “imperatives for becoming a great leader.” (The No. 1 imperative for that, IMHO, is caring about something more than just targets.) They wrote an article for Harvard Business Review on… Continue Reading

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How to have a team that actually executes on goals

Sometimes when people discuss “strategy” breathlessly, I don’t know what to say. Who cares about strategy at some point if you don’t have a team in place that can actually “execute” on the strategy at hand? It’s kind of a… Continue Reading

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Managers manage team energy, not team performance

This post will probably be fairly short — I haven’t blogged in a few days due to a couple of different reasons, and mostly I wanted to dip my toe back in the water — and it’s probably somewhat similar… Continue Reading

The only thing that matters about a meeting is the action items, honestly

Let’s get philosophical for one second. You know the whole idea of a tree falling in the forest and no one is around, right? So does or does it not make a sound in that case? I feel like the… Continue Reading

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Lack of strategy = rise of politics

Was just reading this review of #CMWorld from a few weeks ago in Cleveland — it’s a content marketing conference, if you don’t know — and came across this section: This approach is the result of us starting out with… Continue Reading

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Rather than focusing on your best employees, improve your worst ones

There’s a lot of research in workforce management / HR / organizational health / organizational development circles around high-performing employees, and there’s almost no research around bad / toxic employees. This is probably fairly logical: we don’t often discuss failure at… Continue Reading

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Half the time, we pick leaders for the wrong reasons

From research at Stanford University on hierarchy and leader selection: Most surprising, the researchers found, was that 45% of the time, team members picked leaders for reasons other than competence, such as the person’s age, dominance, or perceived power level.… Continue Reading