Throughout ITLP we talk about the importance of listening, of choosing to carefully pay attention to and to understand what is being said.
Today’s Reading “Soft Skills: Listening for Better Leadership” addresses this topic. In the piece, the author Diann Daniel notes that listening conveys respect, not listening makes people feel devalued and less motivated; good listening empowers, not listening guarantees you won’t understand.
Today's reading is "The Success Delusion -- Why It Can Be So Hard for Successful Leaders to Change" from the Marshall Goldsmith Library. Goldsmith's thesis is straightforward: The more successful we become, the more positive reinforcement we get, the more difficult it will be for us to make the changes we need to make to continue to be successful.
This week we turn our attention to Generation Y, those individuals with ages 21-31, the youngest members of our staff. The reading is “Leadership Lessons We Can Learn from Generation Y” which appeared in the July 9, 2008 issue of Fast Company.
Early in every Leadership Program group, we spend some time talking about delegation. Today’s Tuesday Reading, “How Well Do You Delegate?” from the Mind Tools website, brings us all back to this topic.
Today’s Tuesday Reading is John Baldoni’s column “Why Leaders Need People Skills”. This is a familiar topic to alumni of the IT Leaders Program but I thought that we could all benefit from Bald
This week’s Tuesday Reading is “Six Tips for Fessing Up to Your Mistakes" by Deborah Brown-Volkman, president of Surpass Your Dreams, a career, life, and mentor coaching company.
If you haven’t made a mistake you can pass this week’s reading. But, somehow, I think you may find the column interesting. We all mistakes and it is supremely important that we take responsibility for the mistakes we make. Deborah suggests that fessing up involves six steps:
A number of you are fans of David Allen and follow many of the recommendations in his book, “Getting Things Done.” Our reading this week is “The Curse Of The Eternally Urgent” which you will find at <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-allen/the-curse-of-the-eternall_b_96512.html>.
In my reading not long ago I found a pointer to a short piece by Sean Silverthorne – "The Power of the Humble Checklist". As the author points out, and as I will confirm, having a standard checklist for complex, but nevertheless, routine tasks – e.g., the pilot’s pre-flight checklist or the hospital’s safe-surgery checklist – is lifesaving and invaluable.
We all remember Ron Heifetz from the first day of the IT Leaders Program. There we learned about "adaptive leadership," “giving work back to the workers,” and about “getting up on the balcony.”
Today’s reading “The Leader of the Future” reports on a series of 2007 conversations that William Taylor, a founding editor of Fast Company, had with Heifetz. In the conversations, Heifetz offered ideas, advice, and techniques for leaders of the future. The conversations are structured around four topics:
Over the past few weeks I’ve seen a number of pieces about how email is disruptive, how some companies are suggesting ways to that staff might step away from the constant flow of interruptions, how IM, blogs, and wikis can be effective in reducing your email load, etc. So, there seems to be even more concern about how our "always on" culture may be having negative impacts on our work as well as the other facets of our life.