Leadership
Like many historical events introduced in my childhood, I had forgotten most of the details of the daring expedition of Lewis and Clark. Tod Bolsinger’s Canoeing the Mountains illustrates adaptive leadership practices through the challenges Lewis and Clark faced in their attempt to find a travel route across the western United States. Their response when they discovered the task was much larger and more difficult provides Bolsinger with rich examples of leading change.
Choosing an adaptive approach is generally not our default setting. We prefer to apply what we know and our proven problem-solving approaches to…
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Leadership
The 80-20 rule seems almost magical. The idea that you can achieve the vast majority of your desired results with a relatively small investment of your resources sounds too good to be true. Life just doesn’t seem to work that way. Most people report being overworked, stressed out, and running behind. The more common experience is that the 80-20 rule is determined after the fact, not before and during. In other words, it is tailor-made for armchair quarterbacks and pundits, but a frustrating reality for the rest of us who have to compete in real time.
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Leadership
One of the most unattractive qualities in a leader is a failure to take ownership. The relationship with your leader sours quickly when it becomes clear they are allergic to accepting responsibility. It may start out with a bonding experience to blame leaders above, other departments, or even ignorant customers, but at some point, you begin to notice the obsession with blaming others to look good. Worse than the relational damage is the hit to productivity. Learning does not take place in an environment where great effort is expended to avoid being blamed for anything. Like a…
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Leadership
Patrick Lencioni’s classic fable, Death by Meetings, captures all the challenges of meetings and provides some very practical solutions. In the story’s big climax, the team conducts a highly engaging and productive meeting when the stakes are high. The result is choosing one option over another and moving towards an action plan. One of the complaints about meetings is that firm decisions are seldom reached and everyone leaves the meeting either frustrated or with unclear assumptions about what was decided.
In Lencioni’s example, the team conducted research and identified two attractive but opposing options….
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Leadership
Watching your favorite team‘s coach discuss their failures after a loss in a game they were expected to win is painful but also insightful. In sports, there is a clear start and finish as well as a declared winner. The losing coach cannot deny his team’s defeat. In most cases, losing coaches seem a bit surprised at their team’s less-than-desired performance. It is not uncommon to hear a coach say, “We had a really good practice the day before the game” or “I thought the team was mentally and emotionally prepared to compete.” Often, a particular aspect of the…
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