Leadership

As young children, one of the first things we began to do after we had learned to talk is to ask questions.  Our brains thirst for information, for knowledge, to understand.  Paul Sloane, author of the Innovative Leader, tells us that asking questions is the simplest and most effective way of learning.  So, if as […]

Stop it!  It simply isn’t good for you. In last week’s Tuesday Reading, Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity, Shane Anderson, talked about his multitasking in meetings in order to meet deadlines and complete his work.  He discovered, when he stopped multitasking, that there was a lot of important content in the meetings that he simply […]

Only look back if that is where you want to be. Today’s Tuesday Reading, Don’t Look Back, is an essay by Scott Orr, Manager, Research and Infrastructure Computing, Dean’s Office, School of Science, Indiana University.  The essay first appeared as a program reflection earlier this year. Our last Indiana MOR Leaders Workshop focused on influencing others and […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, The Measurement of a Leader, is an essay by Jeff Sherrill, Assistant Director for Information Technology, College of Business Administration, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.  The essay first appeared as a program reflection earlier this year. Last year, I read the memoirs of Union General and later President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant.  I was really […]

We have all grown up in a give and take world.  Remember the times when you were small and were either willing to share your toys and stuffed animals with your older/younger siblings, or wanted to accumulate as many of them as possible whether you were playing with them or not, or were willing to […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “Don’t Get Gun Shy”, is an essay by Lizz Duke, Senior Systems Analyst and member of the ServiceLink Team at NYU.  The essay first appeared as a program reflection in November 2016.   I got my first job as a teenager at the Pathmark supermarket near my house.  I started there as a […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading is Nancy Koehn’s Whiteboard Session, The Ingredients of Great Leadership (a 4 minute video).  Professor Koehn, a historian, is the James E. Robinson Chair of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.  She is a prolific writer currently writing about lessons from the leadership journeys of a group of leaders including Abraham Lincoln and […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, Mastery, is an essay by Josh Lawrence, Manager of Technical Services at Washington University in St. Louis. The essay first appeared as a program reflection last year.   When I returned from my first MOR workshop, my mind was buzzing with concepts and tools.  My excitement was quickly overshadowed by the usual, day-to-day work […]

Civility and Respect?  You might be thinking, why a Tuesday Reading on this subject?   I would have thought so too until several essays by Catherine Porath crossed my desk.  Porath has studied civility and respect for over two decades.  Her studies have clearly demonstrated that civility and being respectful pay off.  She writes:  “It […]

I grew up in a home where apologizing for my wrong actions, for example, taking and hiding my brother’s toys, was required.  All that it took to trigger the apology was a stern look from my Mother.  As I got older and didn’t have the prompt from my Mother, I want to believe that I […]

Once MOR begins a leadership journey with someone, we never leave their side.  Or, put another way, they keep us with them.  Perhaps that’s why our organizational client retention rate this year was 100%.  Video of MOR minute with John Gohsman MOR minute with John Gohsman Our clients’ trust is incredibly important to us.  We […]

As the leadership communities grow across our client organizations, we’ve witnessed several effective approaches in leading other leaders.  We’d like to share a few, as we are also aware that they can be quite different from those that helped us earlier in our careers.  For each approach, we have included practices that you can work […]

In last week’s Tuesday Reading, Triggers, Once Again, I pointed to a set of questions Marshall Goldsmith asks at the end of each day.  These 20 questions include ones such as: · Did I do my best today to make progress on each of my priorities for the day? · Did I do my best today […]

Last year, shortly after Marshall Goldsmith’s book Triggers:  Creating Behavior That Lasts, Becoming the Person You Want to Be was published, I focused – in the August 11, 2015 Tuesday Reading, Triggers – on a practice he discussed there that has brought significant discipline into his life.  (Goldsmith is one of the best-known executive coaches in the U.S., if […]

Always on the Stage We say over and over again “Leaders are always on the stage.”  Why?  Because someone is always watching.  Someone is always taking the leader’s behavior to inform their impression of her or him and as an example of how to behave.  Good or bad, it’s OK.  We think, if it works […]

Last week’s Tuesday Reading, Toxic Staff Members, provided a set of steps a leader might take if she or he has a toxic staff member.  In outline form the advice was: Face, not ignore, the situation. Collect specifics about the behavior. Be direct in your feedback. Develop, with him or her, an improvement plan. Be extremely […]

Moving is one of the most stressful experiences.  Packing, cleaning, planning, arguing, worrying, and rethinking just about everything in our daily routine … no thank you. This week MOR moved its global HQ.  Although it is only about 1 mile away, the move required lots of planning and organizing.  Hats off to Maria here at […]

Do you have one? We’ve all encountered them.  The one, or two, or more bad apples on our teams who have little or nothing positive to say about anything, regularly upset and disrupt others, and make work miserable for everyone.  Dylan Minor, a faculty member at the Kellogg School of Management notes that there is a […]

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “Don’t waste your time looking back.  You’re not going that way,” is an essay by Mark (Bo) Connell, Assistant Dean for Hospital Operations, Texas A&M University, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Texas Veterinary Medical Center.  It first appeared earlier this year as a leaders program reflection.   That quote I’ve […]

It is an exciting time at MOR and for the MOR Leaders community.  We have just launched over 300 leaders into a year of stretch and challenge! How will you shape the year ahead for your own development?  What is your plan?  How can you use the energy of this new cadre of MOR Leaders […]