Strategy

Practice is a word that is frequently used in leadership development.  For example, we can use practice to indicate engagement in a profession – I have a practice in engineering;  or to indicate development of a skill – I habitually practice my listening skills;  or to signify continual development of a skill – I practice the piano for four […]

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 […]

“The important thing is not to stop questioning … Never lose a holy curiosity.”                                 – Albert Einstein Young children are incessant askers of questions.  Endless, relentless.  Based on a 2013 Telegraph Media Group Survey of some 1000 mothers in the U.K., kids […]

re·sil·ience    rəˈzilyənsnoun, 
the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties;  toughness. Over the last few days, “resilience” has appeared so many times that it has become the word of the week.  I’ve seen it in leadership articles, it was discussed at recent MOR workshops, and of course, the trait was evident at the NFL’s Superbowl LI on […]

Now What? There is lots of advice available on running meetings (for our purpose an intentional gathering of two or more people), two examples of which are the MOR Meeting Jogger and the essay “How to Run a Meeting Like Google,” listed among the references below.  However, I’ve found little organized thought about the steps […]

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 […]

Everyone of us, at one time or another, has had “Aha!” moments.  Times when all of a sudden, typically when we are not working on it, the solution to a major issue we are struggling to address floats, as if by magic, through our minds.  Aha!   Cognitive neuroscience provides some insight into what is […]

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 […]

Resolutions.  Along with the arrival of the New Year come New Year’s Resolutions.  This is neither new nor all that unique.  Babylonians made New Year’s Resolutions 2500 years ago.  And, since then everyone has followed.    In a typical year about 40% of all Americans make resolutions to improve themselves in some way.  Popular past […]

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 […]

In the November 1, 2016 Tuesday Reading, Always on Stage, readers were invited to respond to the question  What’s the most important, or effective, way you lead by example?   Some 39 readers replied with 139 responses.  All of these responses can be found here.  I’ve included a group of responses below that I found to be […]

As the leadership communities grow across our client organizations, we’ve witnessed several effective approaches in leading 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 into […]

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 […]

Before the winter break, I spent some time considering who would make a great example of leadership for my reflection. I kept coming back to the idea of describing my friend David, who was once a colleague of mine at another university. Over the years, we’ve kept in touch on a regular basis, and kept […]

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 […]