I’m just coming off a very lovely few weeks with my family. We saw friends, went skiing, and spent 12 solid hours on Christmas day together in the living room playing with new toys and games. It has been great. And it has also been educational. Because sometime during all this family-ness I realized that…
At its most basic, effective leadership consists of two key components. One of them is the human element – that’s the part where you’re showing and telling the people who work for you that you’re glad they’re there. This is the piece of leadership that gets the most attention, because there are an endless number…
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about my job is the opportunity to meet people living in places I would otherwise probably never go, doing things I know almost nothing about. It’s given me a chance to see a much broader cross-section of the world than I think most jobs allow for, and my…
Recently my wife and I were in Barcelona, visiting her family and 87 of their closest friends. (Not quite, but there were a lot of people.) We were outside, it was a beautiful day, and it was time to decide where to have dinner. The only thing everyone agreed on was that we wanted to…
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I also wanted to be a builder (which was my Lego-inspired term for ‘construction worker’), and I also wanted to dig up dinosaurs. I have done none of those things, and it’s perfectly OK. I chose a different path, and I’m happy with it. …
To be fair, there are probably more than three things all employees want. Most employees would probably take a million dollars if you felt like giving it to them. Or a jetski, the ability to talk to animals, telekinetic powers – the list goes on. But in this article we’re going to talk about three…
Every minute, approximately 765,000 articles about leadership are written. That’s only a slight exaggeration, because we are collectively obsessed with the notion of leadership. But I run across relatively few articles that contrast a leadership mindset against some of the other mindsets that are equally critical to a company’s success, and so I thought it…
Ah, crisis. It’s a fun word to say, but that’s the only fun thing about it. Crisis brings massive uncertainty, and we generally don’t deal well with that. Besides, crises often bring the potential for something significantly negative without offering the potential for something positive. We call it risk when things might end well but…
As I’m sure you’ve heard before, creating a good culture is enormously difficult. At least it’s often presented that way. Companies are made up of dozens of moving parts, and those parts sometimes wake up in a crappy mood or get divorced or decide they want to work somewhere else. Structuring everything in a way…
One of the most important skills a leader needs to develop is the ability to articulate a vision that employees can attach to and rally around. (Indeed, the word ‘vision’ is such a common part of leadership education that I wouldn’t be surprised if you occasionally have visions about creating a vision.) Having a strong…