It's Time to Lead

Last night, as I was telling the kids goodnight, I noticed that the movie Tin Cup was on television.  I’m not a huge movie buff but that’s one of the classics in my opinion.  I happen to walk through the room just at the beginning of the scene where Roy McAvoy, with a chance to [...]

Why does your business exist?  No matter what kind of organization you are leading, whether you are an executive in a huge corporation or a solo entrepreneur, you have a concept of what your business is about.  How you think about that question will greatly determine what your business looks like a year from now. [...]

I was working with a leader recently who wanted the people on her team to treat their relationship differently.  Because she was approachable, compassionate and empathetic to her team, they began to share every trouble, woe and bit of drama in their lives with her, often when there were pressing business issues that needed to [...]

Most of the companies I work with dedicate some percentage of their revenue toward developing the leaders in their business.   One of the discussions we often have up front is the difference between spending money to train leaders and investing to grow them. I spend money on a nice dinner; I invest in my retirement.  [...]

Often, when organizations are trying to make change happen, it comes down to a couple of levers that they need to pull to start the motion.  It might be organizational structure, or process, or communication.  Almost always, it’s a combination of things that need to be addressed in order to cause change to happen.  But [...]

On last week’s post about bringing leaders onboard in your business more effectively, I received a question about how to hire the right leaders in the first place.  I have a few clients that I am working with to solve that issue as well, so it leads us to this week’s post on how to [...]

I was working with a company recently that was looking for a way to improve the success of the leaders they bring into the organization.  They had hired several senior executives only to watch them struggle and ultimately leave or be forced out within the first 18 months. What’s interesting is that the amount of [...]

I met a business leader recently who was telling me about the challenges he was having with getting people in his organization to step up and take responsibility.  He felt like he was ready to turn more of his operation over to others in the company so he could stop working 70 or 80 hours [...]

One of the most basic questions leaders often ask is how do I get the people in the organization to do what the organization needs them to.  I was working with the president of a multi-billion dollar business when he said, “my biggest problem is that I know exactly what the people in this business [...]

Typically when I start coaching a new client, I spend our first meeting doing a lot of listening.  It doesn’t take long to figure outwhere the opportunities are to help someone if you just let them talk for a while.  A while back I was coaching an executive and he spent a great deal of [...]