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Diversity and Style = Value
Diversity helps your team achieve outstanding successTaking On a Complex Topic The question that caused me to write this blog post came from a university student who asked, “How do you help a team work together effectively while respecting everyone’s individual style...
The Horse and His Boy
Be a student of leadership – especially in difficult times.
Trust and Social Capital
Do others seek your counsel or advice on things that matter?When Others Seek You Out for Advice - You are Trusted and have Social Capital An important way to measure the level of trust others have in you is to assess your social capital. Social capital is a...
Five Hacks to Make Virtual Meetings Awesome
Be engaging, interesting, effective, interactive, and outstanding.Every Leader Needs these Hacks Yikes, we find ourselves in a virtual world almost overnight. Well, some of us that is. For others, we’ve been toying around with the mechanics of virtual team experiences...
What Makes a Leader Memorable?
They believe in you. They care about your success.Memorable Leaders Have Common Attributes To answer the question, "What Makes a Leader Memorable?" think back in your own life to a leader you’ve had whom you loved – someone who made a huge impact in your life. Maybe...
Why Leaders Fail
There is really only one reason.It's Worth Learning About - Why Leaders Fail? This question came from a university student of mine who sincerely wanted to know because he didn’t want to make those same mistakes – he didn’t want to fail. There is really only one...
The Delicate Art of Leveraging a Mentor
Growing your career is NOT a chance event.Growing Your Career Growing a career is not a chance event. If you are leaving your future career opportunities up to others, then you are making a mistake. You MUST take charge of your own career and chart your course. Part...
Delegating Must be a Two-Way Street
Delegating seems to be a difficult skill to master.The Most Common Leadership Issue As a leadership consultant the most common leadership issue I hear about is delegation. It seems to be a difficult skill for many leaders to master. The skill I teach leaders is that...
Building Social Capital with Peers
Do your peers ask for your input and perspective?The Importance of Working with Peers We start by watching this 3-minute management tip from Harvard Business Review by Lynda Gratton. Lynda Gratton is a London Business School professor and co-author of "The 100-Year...
Three Strategies to Become a Good Leader
Leadership is all about relationships.A Relationship Approach that Includes You “Leadership is not a person or a position. It is a complex moral relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of the good.” Joanne B....
Are You a Trusted Leader?
Find out with this short self-assessment.Self-Assess Yourself as a Trusted leader At Leaders247 we build micro-assessments that leaders can quickly use to self-assess and to engage their team on topics that are proven to accelerate organizational performance and...
15-Minutes of Power
Personal Productivity is All About FocusHow to Get Your Most Important Work Done If you are like me it takes too long to get focused on the work that really matters, or almost as bad, once you do get started you are very easily side-tracked. For those of us who are...
Your Leadership Time is Critical
Introducing an Agile Prioritization Model that Works for Leaders Does this Feel Familiar? You wake up. You try to get the day started in a healthy way. Maybe that means drinking a glass of water, eating a good breakfast, spending some time meditating, or studying....
When to Critique
For many years I coached my Grandson - Jackson in soccer. Unfortunately, I was not able to coach him this particular season. The other day I watched anxiously from the sideline while he played. He is a natural athlete and was having a great game. However, the coach...
Positive Energizers
"Grandpa, it was a great day.” Marie Diane Hansen One of the most powerful highlights on being positive came from my Granddaughter. She was so excited about her first day of school yesterday that she face timed me and said, “Grandpa, it was a great day.”...
Keys to Creating Awesome Teams
Creating awesome teams is an art and it requires that you care deeply about the big picture. In this excellent short video from Stanford's eCorner, Cyriac Roeding gives four foundational elements to creating a great team. <iframe...
Ethics is the Heart of Leadership
Ethics is the heart of leadership, which is the title of one of my favorite books on both leadership and ethics.[i] The author, Joanne Ciulla, unites ethics and leadership in one topic because each is a part of the other. First, Ciulla defines leadership...
Chiune Sugihara – How Ethics Shapes Leadership
If you were the Japanese Consul in Lithuania during WWII and your government instructed you that you could not issue transit visas to Jews to leave Europe, what would you do? This is the story of Chiune Sugihara, and it illustrates the real-world ethical issues...
George Raveling – An Emotionally Intelligent Leader
A frenzied crowd, a bad call, an intense game – a packed university arena quickly going out of control. Plastic cups, paper sacks crumpled into balls, just about anything that could be thrown by a fan zoomed onto the court. George Raveling, the Washington...
Self-Healing Teams
Self-Healing Teams and Leading with Authentic Concern Great teams move fast, handle vagueness and uncertainty without getting ruffled, and instinctively produce high value business results. Members of those types of teams are happier, more engaged, and...
Trust Ownership Model
Let’s start with the idea that the primary role of a leader is to create a culture. And, not just any culture but a culture where people love to be (rather than have to be). What are the characteristics is such a culture? And, on what should a leader focus...
Making the Team
Many years ago I had a young athlete and her parents come to my office. The question on their mind was, “What does a player need to do to make the varsity team?” At that time I was the head varsity girls basketball coach for Dayton High School in Oregon. I...
The Art of Leveraging Mentoring to Grow Your Leadership
The Art of Leveraging a Mentor to Grow Your Leadership Growing Your Career Growing a career is not a chance event. If you are leaving your future career opportunities up to others, then you are making a mistake. You MUST take charge of your own career and chart your...
12 Keys to Building a Leadership University
Build Leadership From Within 12 Key Points to Building an Internal Leadership University Companies hoping to retain millennial talent and build future leaders favor an internal leadership university concept. A client asked about the 'gotchas' involved in building a...
Career Advice From a Successful CEO
I have a pretty cool job. I get to interview people with amazing careers, including CEOs and other top leaders from great companies. I’m pretty picky who I interview, so all of the experiences are amazing. In this post I share a nice simple tool one successful CEO used to chart his course to the top.
Ethics Skeptics
ARE LEADERS ETHICAL? I teach an ethics and social responsibility course at a University. I poll my students on various topics. The other day I ran this simple poll on 40 students: "Most leaders I know are ethical." The majority of students gave a mixed response -...
Be Pleasant – A Good Leadership Idea
“In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” How to use a classic movie to build your leadership team.
Collaborative Iteration Outperforms Performance Management
Modern performance review processes are insulting. They come from a manager’s authoritative perspective and attempt to document how a lower ranking employee is perceived.
Return on Character in Practice
What happens when you bring a veteran leader into the classroom to teach students who are thirsty for knowledge of what it’s like in the “real-world?”
The answer – you get moments of extreme clarity of the importance of leading people.
Trust Built with Dignity and Commitment – A. Philip Randolph
I have written about A. Philip Randolph before. He is one of my favorite leaders. He was dignified, just, committed, and understood the role of a leader fighting for a cause. You can read more in another post of mine entitled Followers are Required: A Lesson...
Brave, Strong, True – A Book for All Leaders
Leaders247.com highly encourages listeners to read this book. In fact, we feel this is one of those critical leadership books that teaches true and authentic principles that help us endure traumatic leadership crises. In particular, this book reveals how to survive...
Integrity Just Isn’t For Sale
What is wrong with taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune? My answer comes in the form of a true story about an ordinary football coach from an obscure little town in Oregon. The late Dewey Sullivan coached at the same school for 42 years and won more games...
Leaders Make Environments Safe for High Performance
A Simple Leadership Truth If you want people to give great performance and if you want people to push themselves, then do not punish failure, false starts, or a mistake or two along the way. Showing kindness, fostering forgiveness, and...
Leadership Scorecard
Leaders of large organizations are frequently inundated with data. However, the best leaders keep it simple and focus on two things: The mission. Their people. Simplify your leadership life and drive progress faster by focusing...
Will the Real Team Player Please Stand?
Does anyone other than me hate the idea of free-riding (getting equal credit for doing no work)? It seems to me that this probably happens all the time. Just think about this question: When was the last time you did most of the...
Atomic Brainstorming
In my new book on strategy I discuss the problems with brainstorming. But, if done right, working as a team to develop ideas can be powerful. I wanted to share how to do brainstorming the right way with a great example from...
Strategy
Strategy is over-taught and under-thought. Strategy itself is a rather simple concept....
Innovation Leadership and Creativity
Keys to Frugal Innovation Leaders interested in innovation, creativity, and establishing a culture that can achieve great things must watch this Ted talk. I want to emphasize three important concepts from this talk: Use what's...
What Leaders Need to Know about Brainstorming
Brainstorming Does Not Work! Pulling people together to brainstorm cold is not effective. If you are considering running a brainstorming session watch these two videos first. A Successful Process for Idea Collection Atomic Object...
Strategic Leaders Iterate
Strategy and the Tricky Nature of Iteration A classic example of a strategy is the United States Pacific Theater military strategy in World War II. The strategy was Island Hopping to bypass heavily fortified positions and...
Strategy and Leadership
The Importance of Strategy What is Strategy? Strategy is from the Greek stratēgia, which has to do with the art of troop leadership, the office of general, command and generalship. The art of generalship included several skills...
How We Help Leaders
Leaders 24x7 Promo from gordon on Vimeo. We are almost ready to launch our first courses. We plan on hosting the following topics: Dealing with mistakes Assessing your leadership without expensive tools The challenge of leading...
Leaders Fix Mistakes
Everyone Makes Mistakes It is important to recognize everyone makes mistakes. If you try to make your leadership experience one that is “perfect” and without “error” you will fail. Since making mistakes is a natural occurrence then we have to properly and quickly...
Assessing Leadership
4 Simple Ways to Assess Your Leadership Impact The good news is you don’t have to buy a tool, develop a survey, or hire a consultant. If a leader is really honest with him or herself, then this simple method will be accurate, informative, instructive, and inspire...
Leading Followers
Working with what you have Leadership is the art of executing goals and objectives through the efforts of others. However, we don’t often get the dream team. Washington encountered this phenomenon, and his advice is good for us today. The Continental Army lacked all...
Leaders Teach
A Lesson from the Life of John Wooden Many years ago I read a book written by Andrew Hill and John Wooden entitled Be Quick But Don’t Hurry. Coach Wooden knew about building winning teams, nurturing talent, and creating lasting relationships. For those who don’t know...
