Enjoy monthly reads, reflections, and thoughts from our wisdom filled team.
I wanted to get a better understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it could potentially improve my leadership, so I decided to engage ChatGPT in a conversation on the topic. I started out with an easy one: “how can I improve my leadership?” As suspected, a laundry list of ideas with well-articulated statements streamed down my screen. However…
Studies have repeatedly shown that regular exercise is positively correlated with high scores on leadership assessments (1). It has been shown that individuals who allocate time for regular physical activity into their daily life have a greater capacity to achieve goals. If you need more proof type “statistics on CEOs and physical fitness” into your search engine and you’ll have ample evidence that leadership and fitness are intertwined. So, what’s the connection? With all the time constraints placed on a leader, is it worth the effort?
The key to unlocking your team’s superpower is showing them what it looks like to take the armor off, share your vulnerabilities, and work together to overcome each other’s blind spots. Telling your teammates they can be vulnerable and showing them what it looks like are two very different things. Your actions are more powerful than any words you can share, and your consistency will build the kind of trust that winning teams are made of.
We often wear masks and armor to protect the people around us: our families, our friends, our teammates, and more than anything, the people we are charged to lead. We think our masks protect the people around us from the things we see as vulnerabilities: fear, anger, disappointment, overwhelm, uncertainty. If we show them our fear, they will be scared too. If we show them our uncertainty, they will lose hope. If we show them our weakness, they will lose trust and faith in our leadership. This is what we tell ourselves when we put the armor on.
The statement, “Leaders Are Readers,” as others point out, has become ubiquitous on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Whether or not people who share that sentiment know of President Truman’s quote doesn’t diminish what he meant by saying it. Some people do innately possess powerful leadership attributes and abilities, most do not. Leadership is learned, and anyone, in my experience, can become better leaders through educating themselves.
Leaders are thinkers; they observe, reflect, learn, and apply. Sometimes we learn from reflecting on our experiences and other times we have the opportunity to learn from others through books and other media. In the words of noted philosopher and educator, John Dewey, “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on our experience.”
The best leaders are willing to get their hands dirty in order to understand what it is like to be on the front line serving customers or working on the shop floor. What’s that? You say you’ve been in the “trenches” before? How long ago? Reflect on how long it has been and admit, even if it is just to yourself, that you may have lost touch with your workforce. Look for new ways to connect with your team and lead from the front, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
Fear of failing is a powerful deterrent and an unrelenting roadblock to achieving remarkable results. Leaders who operate in a manner to avoid the possibility of failing, will fail to reach and realize the best outcomes for their organizations and their teams. Napolean Hill wrote, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
As many sectors of the economy were forced to telework or adopt some sort of alternate/hybrid schedule, resumed more in-person work following COVID, many workers were welcoming the return of face-to-face camaraderie and collaboration. Leaders were excited to be physically back with their teams, leaving the Zoom gallery behind. The immediate reaction was a rebound of sorts, striving to make up for lost time with maximum in-person engagement.
Succession is going to happen in your organization whether you plan for it or not. People take other positions, retire, or quit. Unexpected turnover can generate significant capacity shortfalls, lost knowledge, and talent misalignments that disrupt or derail organizations. The organizations that execute effective succession plans fare much better than those that don’t. It is the responsibility of senior leaders, with the support of human resource professionals, to create and execute succession plans.
Have you wondered what makes a high-performing organization tick? What secret sauce allows a group of individuals to achieve unparalleled success? Most people would agree that leadership provides a critical component. However, history is replete with examples of organizations, whose leaders demonstrated a history of outstanding leadership and management, only to create an environment that inevitably led to disaster. Enron, WorldCom, Blockbuster, and Blackberry provide vivid examples of…
The number of eye-catching articles touting the transformational capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems endless. From improved diagnostic interpretation of MRIs and CT scans to scam phone calls made in a person’s natural voice, the use – and potential misuse – of AI seems almost limitless. So, what, you may ask, does that mean for the future of leadership?
Good meetings allow people to be more effective and productive, which provides a good return on the time investment. Bad meetings, on the other hand, are a time suck that disrupt schedules and demotivate teams. After a couple of decades of leading and managing, I’d offer the following tips and perspectives on meetings…
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