2 Minute Tip: How to Learn from Every Event – Stop, Start, Continue!
If you rush blindly from one event to the next, you miss out on the opportunity to learn and improve. After a major event, what good leaders and teams do is take a moment to think about what just happened and how they can make things go even better the next time. Today I’m going […]
How to use the Sandwich Method to Make Constructive Feedback Palatable
There’s no such thing as perfection when you are dealing with people. Inevitably, something will go wrong. After all, we’re only human. As mistakes and errors happen, good teams get better by talking about what occurred and finding ways to improve. But calling someone out for an error can be as hard to do as […]
Span of Control: The Leadership Secret of Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab is famous in modern fiction for his maniacal pursuit of the Great White Whale, Moby-Dick. He gets a lot of bad press for his poor leadership style, and things didn’t end up going very well for most of the crew by the end of the book. But there is one thing that the […]
The Brilliant Planning Trick Lewis and Clark Used that Nobody Noticed
At 3:30 in the afternoon on May 21st, 1804 the Lewis and Clark expedition set off from St Louis on their famous journey to explore the unknown territory west of the Mississippi. On that first day they made it three and a quarter miles, and stopped. That doesn’t seem like a very auspicious start if […]
20 Email Best Practices for Leaders
“Didn’t you get my email?” Ever heard that before? Usually it’s right about the time everyone is figuring out that someone dropped the ball: the cake didn’t get ordered, the drivers didn’t show up on time, or the meeting moved up an hour. Leaders at every level are more and more dependent on email as […]
How to do Team Building the Fun Way
Trying to get off the ground with a new team? Looking for a way to get some bonding going sooner rather than later? Want to make it fun? Developing a sense of team within your group is critical to do early on. If you dive right into a project without building the team, you may […]
Brainstorming: 20 Ways to Make Good Ideas Rain Down
At some point everyone has a need to come up with a new idea. Whether it’s for a new fund-raiser, or a better process at the job site, or to solve an unexpected problem, brainstorming is one of the best ways to get the job done. In this post we’ll get you ready to run your […]
Book Notes: The Ice Master
What happens when the leader abandons the people he’s supposed to be leading? With The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk, I thought I was just reading another tale of epic survival in the arctic. But as this true account developed, it was soon clear that the underlying story line was about […]
How to Plan the Annual Plan: Six Steps for Success
How do you get 30 very different people to agree on something? How do you engage all those minds to come up with an annual plan? It doesn’t need to be as challenging as interpreting the Mayan calendar. Every year our Scout troop meets in August with one objective: come up with a plan for next […]
Adaptive Leadership: How to Match your Style to the Circumstances
OK, so you have a sense of where your power to influence others comes from. But how do you use this power to get others to do things? Different leadership approaches use these powers in different ways. A quick search of the internet reveals a wide range of opinions on the number of leadership styles […]
Book Notes: How to Win Friends & Influence People
As a leader, I enjoyed reading How to Win Friends & Influence People and you will too. Part of what made it fun was that it is absolutely crammed with short, interesting stories and examples of the concepts and ideas that author Dale Carnegie is talking about. But I almost didn’t pick up the book – […]
Death By PowerPoint: The Death March
Ever been on a PowerPoint Death March? The lights are dim, the presenter drones on and on. You’ve lost all sense of time and place. You are long past the point of caring. You eye the door furtively but you are not sure you can make it there without waking up the boss. You are […]
