Leadership

A Leadership Reflection Last week I attended two retirement parties. As I reflected about them afterwards, there were a few key points that they made during their speeches that I would like to share with the group. Trust is so important.  Establishing an environment of trust-based relationships encourages creativity, self initiative, and incredible productivity fostered by […]

I would like to share my personal reflective journey to date, from the beginning.  I was invited to attend the MOR Advanced Leadership Program by my CIO at the beginning of the summer.  As one of the newest members of the OIT management/leadership team I immediately had two scenarios go through my mind. I haven’t been […]

We all attend too many meetings.  Some are initiated by others and we attend to contribute.  And some are our meetings, designed to further our team’s work.  Some of them are productive and some are not.  And, everyone I’ve talked to yearns for fewer of them. This week’s Tuesday Reading is drawn from Amy Gallo’s essay […]

I’ve attempted to maintain and effectively use a To Do list for much of my professional life.  At the moment, I have an application (Things) on my laptop, my iPhone, and my iPad that keeps the list synchronized.  This is really helpful, and would be even more helpful if I was good at keeping the […]

July 1, 2013 was the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.  In the course of that three-day battle, the armies of the North and South deployed some 180,000 troops on the field of battle and suffered some 51,000 casualties and the course of American history was forever changed. Much has been written about the […]

Our Tuesday Reading today is drawn from Robert Steven Kaplan’s new book, What You Really Need to Lead.  Kaplan was recently named President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.  Previously he was the Martin Marshall Professor of Management Practice and a Senior Associate Dean at the Harvard Business School. In a review of […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, The Five Leadership Lessons of Frank Underwood, is an essay written by Dustin Atkins last June.  Dustin is the Director of IT, Sponsored Research & Strategic Communications at Clemson University and is an alumnus of the MOR Leaders Program. In the spirit of bringing you all to South Carolina, I thought I […]

As I sit here before our last dinner and day together as a formal group, I remember our first day together and my inherent skepticism about whether this program would be much different from other leadership programs. I seem to have neglected the obvious difference between one week long leadership programs and eight month long […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “If You Want People to Listen, Stop Talking,” comes from the pen of Peter Bregman and appeared in the Harvard Business Review blog on May 25, 2015.  Bergman is CEO of Bergman Partners, a company that strengthens leadership in people and organizations through programs, consulting, and coaching.  He is also author of […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, The Balance of Planning and Spontaneity – What We Can Learn From Bilbo Baggins’s Journey Through Mirkwood, comes from the pen of David Kaplan – writer, software developer, and all around thinker of wacky thoughts.  It was published on medium.com in their Life Hack: Your Story, Experience, etc. blog which shares the […]

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts…” William Shakespeare’s As You Like It – Act II, Scene VII I had the distinct pleasure recently (sarcasm alert) of leading my team through an ERP […]

Marshall Goldsmith, one of the best known executive coaches in the U.S., has just published a new book, Triggers:  Creating Behavior That Lasts, Becoming the Person You want to Be.  One of the things that caught my eye in one of the book’s reviews that I read, was a practice Goldsmith has to bring significant […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Be Nice!, is based on Christine Porath’s June 19, 2015, New York Times Sunday Review essay, No Time to Be Nice at Work.  Porath is an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Her research over the past two decades makes it clear that incivility, rudeness and bad behavior have […]

From the 2015 MOR Leaders Conference, keynote Chris Mayer talks about the industry parallels between media and higher education.  In this three part video series, he prompts us to think about how education is defined and the experience will continue to change, in large part by students and employers. Universities as a whole need to understand […]

Last week we began a series of Tuesday Readings on the subject of feedback:  Feedback in the workplace is the sharing of information between co-workers about the impact that their behavior is having on the team’s results, its processes, and/or its relationships.  It can be positive in the form of affirmation of specific good work a […]

Returning to work after our second session, I felt like I was coming back not just with new tools, but with new lenses and sharper vision.  But would that have an impact?  I think it has.  Here are three mini-reflections focused around new things that happened in my leadership because of lessons and tools I […]

Stop Getting in Your Own Way My big takeaway from our first set of meetings has to be to “get on the balcony.”  Related to getting on the balcony, I recognized through our reading and activities that I need to delegate more, give work back, and say no more.  Once I condition myself to make […]

A couple of years ago I had my kitchen remodeled.  During the process, I, along with my young boys, reveled in the tools the contractors had at their disposal, and their skill in using them.  They had so many tools – some for general use (hammer) and others more specialized (router) – their truck looked like an […]

For the 2015 MOR Leaders Conference held May 27-28 in Indianapolis Brian McDonald and Jim Bruce collaborated on the following top trends impacting our clients: 1. Globalization of Education Education is global. Increased numbers of international students, US campuses abroad, countries creating new universities some of which are world-class and attract US students. The list […]

I attended the MOR IT Leaders conference in late May.  As an ITLP graduate who stepped into a CIO role two years ago, I was asked to share how I employ the elements of the MOR toolkit in my leadership role.  I’ve invested in relationships and focused on changing culture.  I’ve taken uncomfortable risks.  But, […]