Goals & Practices

Today’s Tuesday Reading focuses on managing difficult conversations.  Most likely each of us will have at least one difficult conversation today.  We’ve all had difficult conversations that have gone badly and we instinctly fear that the one on the horizon will do so as well.  Today’s reading is actually a video produced by Fred Kofman.  […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Gratitude, is a reflection written earlier this year by Jaime Thompson.  Jaime supports IT in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and is a participant in the Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) there. What I am feeling this week is gratitude and how I identified it was through a […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, More About Questions, continues our discussion from the past two weeks.  As we’ve noted there, being able to ask good, well-formed questions is as important to a leader as being able to listen well.  Today, we’ll focus on crafting our questions, on asking questions, and finally on those terrible questions we should […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading begins a short series of readings on the subject of asking questions.  It was Voltaire who said, “It is easier to judge the mind of a man by his questions rather than his answers.” Mark Suster, entrepreneur turned venture capitalist said it this way:  “The ability to ask questions effectively is one of […]

Last week Mary Jordan’s post on the Linkage Leadership Blog showed up in my Inbox.  She is a Principle Consultant and Co-Leader of the Change and Transition Leadership Practice at Linkage, an international consulting practice focusing on developing organizations. We have all heard this admonition to “be still” at various times in our lives.  Usually, at […]

I suspect that we all have heard enough about Secretary Clinton’s decisions, first to use a non-government email server for both her government-related email as well as her personal email, and subsequently about the processes followed to preserve or delete emails.  And, that you like me want to be done with it.  Even with that as […]

“Humble listening” is among the top four characteristics of leaders.     – Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”     – Henry Ford “To be able […]

We began the Tuesday Readings for 2015 with a focus on being intentional, and followed that with an essay on practices and then, last week, on the art of saying “no.”  Today we want to take a next step and turn to your calendar and being intentional about it.  It’s been noted that you have a […]

Almost everyone I run into bemoans their busyness, the large number of To Do’s that are in front of them, and the seeming inability to make headway in reducing the length of the list.  Author and consultant David Allen suggests that the typical mid-level manager, at any one time, spanning all aspects of his or […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is an essay by Jim Dezieck, Leadership Coach at MOR Associates.  In the essay, Jim focuses on developing new practices.  As I indicated in last week’s Tuesday Reading, building new practices is one step in becoming more intentional. Everywhere in our work at MOR we promote practical action, through practices, as the […]