Jim Bruce

You can find many lists of leadership competencies.  Some result from a careful examination of the work in a particular job family or from role descriptions.  Some come from discussions about what it takes to be a really good leader in a mid-level position at, say, an education institution.  Other lists are developed based on […]

Professor Bernard Roth is academic director and cofounder of Stanford’s d.school, the campus hub for innovators.  Students and faculty from engineering, medicine, business, law, humanities, sciences, and education come there to work together on some of the world’s most messy problems.  A part of that work encourages students to examine and take control of their lives.  In […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Giving Credit, is an essay by Anna Lynch, Manager, Online Instructional Design, eLearning Design & Services, and Julie Parmenter, Manager, Enterprise Decision Support Services, at Indiana University’s University Information Technology Services. Many of us at Indiana University attended the Information Technology Statewide Conference last fall where we heard CIO Brad Wheeler and IU […]

Got your attention, didn’t I?  In a recent HBR blog post, Bain & Company’s Michael Mankins answers with a strong very likely. Twenty years ago, new technologies like email and teleconferencing were key drivers in dramatically increasing productivity.  Information flowed faster, collaboration was easier.  However, by 2007 year-to-year growth in productivity was on the decline.  Yet, today, […]

Among the essential skills we expect leaders to have is giving and receiving feedback.  Everyone needs to know how they are doing, what they might improve, what they are particularly good at, etc.  Feedback focuses on the past, and in particular on what you did recently.  And, that’s important in providing guidance on how you […]

How to hold yourself accountable and help your staff do likewise. Merriam Webster’s on-line dictionary defines accountability as an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility for, or to account for one’s actions.  This definition does not speak to the issue of one’s success or less than that with regard to our actions.  Yet, as Connors […]

Last Sunday morning most of us experienced a disruptive event in our sleeping as we shifted our physical and mental clocks forward one hour to Daylight Saving Time.  This wasn’t all that unusual since most of us regularly disrupt our sleep.  And, in spite of our frequent claims – “I don’t need sleep,” “I can […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Life and Leadership are Team Sports, is an essay by Connie Buechele, Director of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management.  Connie is an alumnus of the MOR Leaders Program.  Her essay first appeared as a program reflection last year.   Some of you may have read this book, All […]

In a recent coaching session, my client began by saying “I feel like I’m an impostor.”  What that means is that the individual felt that any successes experienced – admission to a prestigious school, a special job, a promotion, recognition, good fortune of any kind, etc. – was a mistake.  Any evidence of success is […]

Two weeks ago, the Tuesday Reading focused on Mindset – a habit of thinking that determines how we interpret and respond to situations.  There we introduced the concept of “fixed” and “growth” mindsets and how a child’s mindset impacts her or his approach to learning.  (Carol Dweck’s RSI ANNIMATE presentation on the subject is listed in the […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Setting Priorities, is an essay by Gretchen Kopmanis, Office Manager and Mac Team Lead in a regional group of IT for the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan.  Gretchen is a member of the current University of Michigan MOR Leaders Program cohort.  Her essay first appeared as […]

mindset  ––  a habit or way of thinking that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, has focused her research on motivation, personality, and development for over three decades and is best known for her research on intelligence and how […]

In a recent Linkage Blog post – “Got 20 Minutes?  Try the 6-question approach to coaching” – Sarah Briegle points to a Marshall Goldsmith video clip where Goldsmith describes a six-question coaching approach that a leader can use with each of a his or her direct reports.  (Linkage is an international leadership development consultancy, Sarah […]

Being accountable is your ticket to earning the right to hold others accountable.     ––  Dan McCarthy In the course of our work, we develop strategies, we make plans, and assign or delegate the resulting tasks to teams (usually, through their team lead) or to individuals.  As we do this, we start the process […]

…face-to-face.  Amy Cuddy, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and author of Presence:  Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, recently wrote that there are lots of reasons to put your smartphones down – constantly checking and then responding to them takes us out of the present moment disrupting whatever you are focusing on:  for […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, I Met A Leader Today, is an essay by Mary Fuller, originally written as a reflection early in the University of Nebraska on-campus leaders program.  Mary is a member of the Data Warehouse Team of the University of Nebraska Computing Services Network.   I left our first 2-day session of the MOR Leaders […]

What did I do and learn?   What do I plan to do? A few days ago, we turned over the last page of our 2015 calendars to find the first day of 2016.  And, for many of us, soon after our New Year’s celebrations were over, we began to think about our resolutions for 2016.  […]

In previous Tuesday Readings we have focused on the importance of planning, on being intentional about how we use our time, and on the importance of regularly moving items from our one To Do list to our calendar. As good as a deliberate planning practice is, it can often leave us frustrated at the end of the day […]

In a recent essay, “Beyond Bias,” which is today’s Tuesday Reading, Heidi Grant Halvorson and David Rock wrote:   “Biases are nonconscious drivers – cognitive quirks – that influence how people see the world.  They appear to be universal in most of humanity, perhaps hardwired into the brain as part of our genetic or cultural heritage, […]

This week we celebrate Thanksgiving Day, traditionally a day of giving thanks for the harvest (that provides our food) and for the preceding year.  History and tradition suggest that this celebration goes back in the United States at least to a 1621 feast in the Plymouth Colony celebrating a good harvest in the Colony’s first […]