Category Archives: executive leadership

What Books or Blogs Influence Your Personal Leadership?

What books, blogs, speeches or newsletters made a significant impact on you and your personal leadership goals in 2011? How will they impact your goals for 2012? For me, books provide a continual guide to growing my personal leadership. I asked this question over on LinkedIn Answers and got some great suggestions for books and blogs. [...]
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Leadership Challenge: Be a Better Listener

A big leadership challenge is how to become a better listener. I hear this from my coaching clients: many of them are aware they don’t listen well. This may be because most top executives are highly goal-oriented and have a winner’s attitude. While that’s good for most things in life, it gets in the way [...]
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Leadership Problems: Clear Thinking

Clear thinking leads to decisive action. Too many leaders, however, rush to judgment and act before really examining the problem from all perspectives. In today’s organizations, if you’re dealing with simple and easy solutions, then you’re missing something. Problems are multifaceted and complex. As I mentioned in a post last week, problems are both technical and [...]
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The Backside of Leadership…

I asked a question about leadership competencies the other day and got a thoughtful response from a reader, worthy of sharing with you here in a new post. I’d like to stimulate your thinking on this topic — leadership competencies and values — and perhaps hear from you as well in the comments section. In a [...]
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The Five Core Competencies of Leadership

By some estimates, there are over a half million business books about leadership, but when you study the ideas of the most respected experts, there is frequent agreement on the core competencies required. The same 5-10 competencies define what leaders do. The authors of the book The Leadership Code (Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, and Kate Sweetman) [...]
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Leadership Is Changing: Are You?

As I read through the many comments about leadership and managing younger generations on LinkedIn, I’m reminded of that old French saying, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The younger employees are different, and workplace attitudes are changing, but they’ve always been changing. (Image by digitalart, freedigitalphotos.net) Leaders and managers have always [...]
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Boomer Retirement: Are You Ready for the Labor Storm?

We haven’t yet seen any mass exodus of Boomers from the workplace: most are waiting for their retirement funds to improve. Since many are still relatively healthy and vibrant due to improved health habits and medical innovations, they see no reason to stop working. Sooner or later, they will retire, leaving gaps in positions that need [...]
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Is Leadership Changing?

Someone asked me the other day if leadership is changing… if the skills required today for good leadership are any different than 20 years ago. Clearly, businesses are getting more complex, as are all organizations and governments. Are the guiding leadership principles the same? I just kicked off my 16th session of the North Carolina Institute [...]
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Clarity Takes You Where You Want to Go

Without clarity, our actions are just actions. We’re moving, we’re moving, but we’re not really getting anywhere. It literally doesn’t matter how hard we work, because we’re not working toward anything. But with clarity, two powerful things happen. The first is, we start making better choices. When you’re clear about what you want, it’s much easier [...]
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Golfing, Marriage and Bad Leadership Behaviors

What do married couples playing golf together have in common with bad leadership teams? You can guess, right? In many golf clubs, couple’s tournaments are very popular. But they can be painful. Golf can bring out the worst in married couples. I’ve even thought that if marriage counselors were smart, they’d start hanging out at couple’s [...]
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