Leading When Things Go Wrong: Playing Soccer on the Ice
What do you do when things go wrong? Leading can seem fun and easy when things are going our way, but it’s when things go wrong that true leaders emerge. In this example from an Antarctic expedition gone disastrously wrong, one leader achieved great feats of endurance and survival to bring his men safely home. […]
Could Your Incentive System Be Hindering Performance?
What if that carrot we offer actually slows them down? In the effort to motivate our teammates, we are quick to offer carrots we think will incentivize them to greater efforts. But as this story of the Soviet Union’s most prolific athlete shows, sometimes our incentive system can do the opposite of what we intend […]
The Leader’s Triple-A Club: How to Navigate the Hazardous Highways of Leadership
Not long ago, my son called me from Oregon. He was driving some friends to the airport when his car suddenly quit and wouldn’t restart. Beyond attempting to diagnose the problem over the phone, there was little I could do to help from where I was in Minnesota. The good news was that we were […]
Running 50 Miles: 6 Lessons in Perseverance
What’s it like to run an Ultra-Marathon, and how do you motivate yourself to finish any great challenge? Today’s post will be a little different. In 2014, the year I turned 50, I somehow came to the notion that I should celebrate a half-century of life by trying to run 50 miles in one day. […]
Unstoppable: 12 Ways to Find the Courage to Continue
“How do you find the courage to continue?” Teddy Roosevelt once reminded us that “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” But in our struggles to achieve, that difficulty can be enough to make us want to quit. Where can we find the strength we need […]
The After Action Review: A Leader’s Guide
How do you improve your team with an After Action Review? The After Action Review (AAR) is a deceptively simple yet powerful way to stimulate the growth and performance of any group of people. As an organizational learning tool it has been used to transform small teams and entire armies into high performers. But as with […]
Who’s in Your Canoe? 5 Things to Consider When Building a New Team
I’m building a new team; who should be on it? Often we just inherit the teams we lead, but occasionally we have the opportunity to build a new team from scratch. How do you know who to pick? Here are five action steps you can take when building a new team that will give […]
15 Pretty Good Virtual Team Building Ideas
What kind of virtual team building can I do with my distributed team? We all know that teamwork is critical to getting things done through people. Building cohesive teams is already a challenge when everybody is face to face. But developing trust, communicating well, collaborating readily, and problem-solving effectively become all the more difficult when […]
The Leader Apprentice: 5 Ways to Master the Learning Mindset
Kennedy said that “leadership and learning are indispensable to each other,” so how do we make sure we keep learning? It’s easy to get caught up in the daily business of getting things done. But if we’re not careful, though we may accomplish much, we don’t become better in the process. To improve, we have […]
The Ransberger Pivot: How to Win an Argument By Not Arguing
“Do you ever really ‘win’ an argument?” When someone says something that we don’t agree with, our first impulse is often to contradict or correct them. They are wrong. We are right. Then they argue back. The debate becomes heated, personal, and ultimately counterproductive. No minds are changed. If anything, both sides are more deeply […]
Optimization: Surprising Lessons in Efficiency from the Ant World
“How can you optimize a system that’s error-prone?” As humans, we are fallable. In our efforts to achieve, produce, and progress, we make mistakes, we misjudge, we stumble. Any enterprise that involves humans will, by definition, be imperfect. But is that really such a bad thing? When it comes to optimization and effiency, there are […]
Problem Solving Steps: 3 Steps to Take Before You Take Any Steps
Is the first problem solving step really ‘Identify the Problem?’ If you’ve ever watched someone who is tired or emotional struggling to solve a problem, you know that somebody forgot a step in the problem solving process. People can get so wrapped up in the problem of having a problem that they can’t think straight, […]
