Much of a leader’s time is spent, formally or informally, working to influence decision makers, typically peers, cross-organizational colleagues, or those higher up in the organization. The Tuesday Reading this week – Effectively Influencing Decision Makers: Ensuring That Your Knowledge Makes a Difference – focuses on just this subject.
There’s lots of advice on finding and attracting staff and on identifying and retaining top performers you already have. Stephen DeMaio, in a recent blog entry – “How to Identify Employees’ Hidden Talents” – argues that it is even more important to look for your current staff's hidden strengths to find new skills and talents that have value to the organization.
DeMano suggests four approaches:
It seems like every week I hear of universities planning for, going through, or having recently experienced layoffs, terminations, or position eliminations as a result of the economic crisis we are experiencing. Today’s reading – “Ask the Expert: How Do Effective Leaders Handle Change?” -- is by Mark Hannum, Principle Consultant at Linkage and looks at practices that enable leaders to be more effective in such tough times.
Hannum talks in this short piece about many aspects of layoffs and offers a number of specific suggestions:
Well-integrated, high-performing teams, teams that “click,” is the subject of today's Tuesday Reading – “How Leaders Get Their Teams To ‘Click’” by Phil Harken. Such teams never lose slight of their goals and are largely self-sustaining. They often seem to take on a life of their own. Studies by the European Centre for Organizational Research show that teams that “click” always have a “leader who creates the environment and establishes the operating principles and values that are conducive to high performance.”
This week, for the week's Tuesday Reading, I turn to a recent message from the ITLP IX Vision Team: "The Key to Getting Lucky: PRACTICE!!!"
The Key to Getting Lucky: PRACTICE!!!
A Golf Story
Today's Tuesday Reading is "Making Decisions Outside Your Repertoire" by Ronald Heifetz (you remember him from the first session of the Leadership Program), Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow.
Today’s Tuesday Reading is from the April 28, 2009 Ask Annie column of Fortune Magazine: “How to work better with Gen Y”. The April 28th question has to do with working with a new class of interns – Generation Y individuals; birth years 1978-1990 – who are very much like our younger employees.
Everyone who has participated in the ITLP has had the opportunity to look back on their career and note the leadership lessons they have learned. Today’s Tuesday Reading is a leadership journey in the form of an interview. Recently, Richard Anderson, chief executive of Delta Airlines, was interviewed for the New York Time’s April 26, 2009 CORNER OFFICE column.
I think that you’ll enjoy and learn from Anderson’s learnings. Some gems that caught my eye:
- be patient and don’t lose your temper.
Somehow, Tuesday came and I was completely oblivious to my commitment to send out something for everyone to reflect on. Don't know where my thoughts were that morning! In spite of my forgetfulness, we do have a very good piece for this week from ITLP IX’s Vision Team – Tom Lewis (University of Washington), Todd Rheinfrank (Carnegie Mellon University), Randy Standridge (University of Texas), Beth-Anne Sullivan (Northeastern University), Terry Tatum (University of Texas), and Elease Welch (New York University).
This week’s Tuesday Reading is a piece “Anxiety for Fun and Profit” which I found on a recent flight in the April 2009 issue of United’s Hemisphere magazine.