Leadership

Today’s reading “If You Mess Up, Fess Up!” comes to us from Fast Company’s Expert Blog.  It’s author is Paul Glover, who founded the Glover Group, a management consulting firm focusing on improving workplace performance, after a long career as a labor/employment law attorney. Glover’s bottom line is very straight forward:  “Everyone makes mistakes.  It is how we deal […]

The Leaders Program workshops have introduced all of you to the 4 I’s at one time or another.  Today’s reading introduces you to the four A’s, strategies from the Mayo Clinic staff – ”Need Stress Relief?  Try the Four A’s”– for coping with stress:  avoid, alter, accept, and adapt. Since the early August incident between a […]

This week’s Tuesday Reading comes via Jim Hall’s blog <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/jhall/blog/>.  Jim is an ITLP alumnus and is currently campus IT Director at the University of Minnesota Morris. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article a few weeks ago, How to Run a Meeting <http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Run-a-Meeting/66237/> by Gary A. Olson,  provost and vice president for academic affairs […]

Today’s reading – “How to Become an Effective Delegator” – takes us again to the subject of delegation.  Delegation is the fastest way for each of us to create space in our minds and on our calendar for more strategic work.  And, this, I dare say, is something that we all could benefit from. Today’s piece is by […]

Today’s Reading, “Never Duck the Tough Questions”, is an interview with Dawn Lepore, chair and CEO of Drugstore.com.  The interview was conducted by Adam Bryant and originally appeared in the Corner Office column of the July 18, 2010 New York Times. What impressed me from the column was the set of leadership lessons Ms Lepore learned over […]

Today’s reading “How to Stop the Blame Game” is by Nathanael Fast, assistant professor of Management and Organization at USC’s Marshall School of Business.  It appeared in the May research blog of the Harvard Business Review. Fast points back to the recent “grilling” of three oil company executives by U.S. Senate committees.  He noted that the executives […]

Today’s reading comes from an Amy Gallo posting How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team to the Harvard Business Review BLOG.  Gallo is a writer, editor, and business consultant.  Her writing on management issues regularly appears in the HRB BLOG.  Earlier she was a consultant at Katztenbach Partners, a strategy and organization consulting firm where she was involved […]

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of “Made to Stick,” released a new book in February – “Switch:  How to change things when change is hard.”  Today’s reading is a review of the book by Keith McFarland which appeared in BusinessWeek. McFarland is founder of McFarland Strategy Partners and author of The Breakthrough Company, and BOUNCE. In Switch, the Heath […]

After my June 1st Tuesday Reading “Drilling for Certainty” – which made the point that our world has become extremely technologically complex and that the possibility for catastrophe is imbedded in the fabric of day-to-day live – I received several emails making the same or similar points. One, today’s reading – “The Real Cause of […]

A couple of months ago, Gary Augustson posted a BLOG at the Leaders Community Site which has a powerful message for all of us:  “Life is full of ‘wins’ and ‘losses’.”  In the end, how you deal with both will be one of the keys to your success as a leader.”  Given the importance of […]

David Brooks’ May 27, 2010 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times was titled “Drilling for Certainity”which is today’s Tuesday Reading.  The piece also appeared in the May 29th Pittsburgh Post Gazette and was seen by Annie Stunden, Former CIO, University of Wisconsin and IT Leaders Presenter and Coach.   Annie wrote pointing me to the […]

In today’s readings “Why Brainstorming Doesn’t Work”and “Better Brainstorming:  4 Ways to Generate Great Ideas“, Margaret Heffernan reminds us of several shortcomings in our brainstorming practices and suggests improvements.  Heffernan is visiting professor of entrepreneurship at Simmons College in Boston, CEO, author, and speaker. Referencing work by Nicholas Kahn and Steven Smith <http://bit.ly/cpRstq>, she notes […]

This Tuesday’s reading is “Communicating Vision”, by John Maxwell, prolific writer and speaker on leadership. In this short article, Maxwell outlines an approach for communicating a clear and compelling organizational vision.  (You will notice many similarities to the SUCCES tool that we have presented in many of the MOR leadership program workshops.) He makes six recommendations: […]

Today’s reading is Marshall Goldsmith’s article “The Mark of a Great Leader.”  In the article, Goldsmith says that the key trait of today’s leader is self-awareness.  He goes on to say that self-awareness entails “having a heightened understanding of one’s own behavior, motivators, and competencies – and having ‘emotional intelligence’ – to monitor and manage one’s emotional […]

A few weeks ago Angela Bell from the University of Iowa shared Dan Bobinski’s article “Is your leadership developing or diminishing?” with her cohort and now I’d like to share it with everyone. As Bobinski, a training specialist, author, and president of Associates at Leadership Development, indicates, too many leaders easily get caught up in the […]

In today’s reading “Back from a vacation?”, David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and CDO of Results Coaching Systems, reports on research indicating that we are more likely to solve really difficult problems when we have a fresh or quiet mind.  Specifically the research points out that when faced with a new problem we […]

Today’s reading is alternately titled “Five Lessons We Can Learn from Toyota”.  In this piece Roberta Chinsky Matuson, founder of Human Resource Solutions, reflects on how you rebuild trust after you’ve made huge mistakes.  She provides five lessons that can be learned from Toyota’s current problems:  1.  When you make a mistake, own it the […]

Recently Linkage published a short piece by Marshall Goldsmith – “When I Get Better at …” A Simple Exercise for Changing a Behavior to Achieve Results <http://bit.ly/aUrU3M> – which is this week’s reading. In this piece, Goldsmith describes a very simple exercise – select a behavior you want to change, for example listening, and then complete the sentence […]

 Today’s reading is – IT Hiring:  How Thomson Reuters’ CIO Identifies Cultural Fit – a recent piece appearing in the CIO newsletter.  It features an interview of Kelli Crane, senior vice president and CIO of Thomson Reuters by Beth Ehrgott. As we have noted in the Leaders Program workshops, hiring the right people is as important a […]

Today’s reading, “The Power of Trust:  A Steel Cable”, comes to us from the Mindtools Newsletter.  The author is Bruna Martinuzzi, the founder and president of a Canadian consulting company that focuses on emotional intelligence, leadership, and presentation skills training. Martinuzzi got my attention when she said:  “Trust is largely an emotional act, based on an anticipation of […]