Year: 2019

Stop Trying to “Engage” Employees

Pizza parties, t-shirts, and ice cream sundaes are nice things to do, but don’t confuse the increased loyalty and happiness they might provide with “engagement”

Successful Turnarounds

Tiger Woods completed an amazing comeback yesterday to win his fifth green jacket at the Masters Tournament – 14 years after his last win there.

Culture Imperatives

If you’re still not sure about the affect company culture can have on employee behavior, take a look at Wells Fargo. The bank, known for

Investing in Managers

Every company has its own culture which is defined by the leader’s behaviors. And every department or function also has its own culture, and it

Leading for Results

The most important reason to be an effective leader is to help the group achieves its goals. Not for the status, or the power, but

Learning from Facebook executive departures

The departures of key executives from Facebook last week are the latest over the past 18 months. They highlight a number of key lessons in

The Key to Large-Scale Change

I’ve been road bicycling in Aiken, South Carolina over the past week and have been amazed at the amount of litter along the backroads. I

Avoid Accountability Gaps and Overlaps

I saw a professional soccer game on the big screen at a Mexican restaurant last night. I always admire how really good soccer players know

Too Busy to Succeed

Most of the leaders and senior executives I work with are grappling with not enough time in the day. They are running hard trying to

Why You Need to Talk With Employees

A leader needs to keep in touch with customers because a business’ real value is realized on the outside. But it’s just as important to

Time to Clean House?

Computers get bogged-down over time as programs take more and more memory. Similarly, organization structures and processes get bogged-down by the ongoing addition of policies,

How to Stop Circular Discussions about Decisions

One of the ways that meetings can be both frustrating and inefficient is when participants are faced with a situation and are going around and

How to Improve Accountability

The word “accountability” can have a lot of negative connotations for people, including managers. In most cases, that’s because they either don’t understand accountability, or

The Implementation Advantage

Strategy fails when it’s not implemented well – when it’s not connected to what goes on in people’s jobs day-to-day. You need to connect it.

3 Leadership Themes for 2019

A quick observation: My best clients, the ones who get the most value from our work together, take the ideas we discuss and put them