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

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Leadership 101: Don’t be so obvious about the stuff that actually matters to you

Here’s something I’ve run into for pretty much the entire 12-13 years I’ve been working: oftentimes, senior leaders — people at the top of a silo within an organization, or an organization as a whole — clearly have things they care… Continue Reading