Leadership is about overcoming the natural.
There’s nothing natural about excellent leadership. In our natural state, if someone attacks us, we get defensive. If someone hurts our feelings, we disengage. If conflict is foreign to us, [...]
If you fight your team’s fires, now you’re incompetent too.
If you’re personally solving urgent problems, you’re not holding your people accountable. Urgent problems mean the workplace is getting out of control, and if things are getting out of control, [...]
Your job is to make your boss look good.
Bosses have an essential function in the organization. Bosses succeed when they perform that function with excellence. When you help your boss function excellently, and be seen to function [...]
“Hard” doesn’t make it wrong; it only makes it hard.
Choosing the role of leadership means taking on many sub-roles. Many of the sub-roles are quite difficult, like firing people. The danger for the leader is thinking that because something is [...]
By doing nothing more than observing and acting on the obvious, a person can change the world.
The closer we are to something, the less clearly we see it. At work, standard procedures and the daily routine do not attract our critical attention. We rarely stop to look at what is going on in [...]
You can be as smart as you want. Other people choose if you will be successful.
It is easy to think of individual achievement as the key to our success. It’s easy to think the important factors are our intelligence, our hard work, our education, and our drive to perform. And [...]
Leadership is the art of becoming your better self
One of the hidden opportunities for leadership is that leadership is practice for your life outside work. Work is important, and we may spend most of our waking lives at work, but it’s not the [...]
Being offered feedback is an invitation to listen to the conversation around you.
Feedback isn’t a document. Feedback isn’t something that people create for a special occasion, like a performance review. It’s getting access to what people are saying. People talk about people [...]