Unleashing the full capacity of your people
We have ten questions that leaders can ask themselves as a check to see if they remain "engaged" with their followers. Self-examination leads to self-awareness, and the humility to make stronger commitments to deepening employee relationships.
The idea that a leader never stops learning while “remaining a student” underpins the Pursuit of Truth. You are a leader of people, not an owner of knowledge or manager of process.
Cognitive flexibility is particularly affected by sleep deprivation, much more so than most other cognitive processes involved in decision-making. Why is that critical? Because cognitive flexibility is considered a key executive function. Thinking and acting well in a crisis, for instance. So, get more sleep.
Management “by walking around” topped the business leadership advice list a number of years ago, and still sells books. Credit for the original idea variously is given to an HP manager from the Seventies, or to Abraham Lincoln.
Read a biography of Lincoln and you will see that he indeed did a lot of “walking around” as part of his management style. He visited army camps unannounced. He hung out …
Apples-to-Apples is a popular game in my house, where a person must decide which word submitted by the other players best fits a theme card. The winning entry gets the theme card. Collect enough theme cards and you win the game. Players are allowed to lobby for their submission to win that theme card.
This has a strong echo in corporate decision-making processes. The best decision is not always taken, …
We have written more than once about how infectious great leadership behavior is, and how it drives up team engagement and productivity.
The inverse situation is all too common, too: Poor attitudes and negative behavior can infect a team with low morale and depressed productivity.
As a leader, you need to remain alert for such developments, and work actively to isolate and fix the source of the negative influence.…
We all have experience working with jerks. It is part of the landscape of corporate America. We get a job that throws us into a diverse mix of people, some of whom act in ways that you might consider jerky. The offenders could be on our team or on teams with whom we collaborate. And you have to figure out how to work with them!
We wrote about this way …
Research confirms that downtime regularly interspersed into our working lives raises our energy and ability to focus. We live in a 24/7 world, so leaders must actively work on shielding their people from work "alerts" during their time off. Engagement rises when employees can disengage at night and on weekends.
As Q1 ends and Spring arrives, it is time to inject energy into your own leadership improvement program. Remember those earnest January commitments? Time to measure your progress and reset your improvement plan to move forward with renewed commitment. We have some ideas for getting that done.
Your achievements are the sum of your habits. What you get done each day is built on the habitual way you approach your job and work relationships. So, holding onto bad habits, largely out of comfort, impedes your own career progress! How to swap those out for great habits? Read on.