Wells Fargo. Enron. The Challenger disaster. The Ford Pinto. The Baylor University football program. The list goes on for a long, long time. These are examples of doing the wrong thing – often with the senior leadership actually leading the wrong, or at the very least condoning the wrongdoing. It would be almost natural at … Read more
Patience: “The ability to remain calm and not become annoyed when waiting for a long time or when dealing with problems or difficult people”, per Merriam-Webster. If we as leaders have a consistent shortcoming other than being poor listeners, it is probably our lack of patience. And why should we? Far better in most cases … Read more
One of the toughest tasks of leadership is the difficult conversation. That’s why we don’t have them. When team members consistently underperform, we tend to compensate through doing their work for them, and consciously or unconsciously making the rest of the team take up the slack. Either way, we set the conditions for poor … Read more
I had an interesting conversation with a corporate executive earlier this week, where we were talking about what he kept referring to as “The Fear Factor.” It seems throughout his career, he’s been exposed to otherwise outstanding colleagues and team members that lived every day in fear. Fear of losing respect, fear of losing face, … Read more
How many of us have endured bad meetings? How many still do? The fact is, most of us fall into both categories. We’ve grown up with bad meetings, and now we perpetuate them on others as sort of a leadership punishment mandate – whereby we feel a perverse obligation to make our team suffer as … Read more
“I’m sure there is a reason why we have to walk along the sides of the hallways and square all of the corners inside buildings, they just don’t tell us.” West Point Plebe (freshman), in a video from the late 1980s All too often, it seems, we hear the request “Why?” from people we work … Read more
