Leadership
One of the many memorable lines from the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is “Youth is wasted on the wrong people.” The line is delivered by an older man watching a young couple struggling to find the next step in their awkward romantic dance. As we get older and our ideas about the right way to do things become firmly entrenched, we sometimes forget how those ideas were formed. It is easy to believe you simply always thought that way. But if you think back carefully to those formative years of university and early adult life, you…
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Leadership
Despite technological advances and unparallel access to learning, no one ever says that leadership is getting easier; quite the opposite is true. There is certainly some mixed motivation from the leadership training industry. Telling people to relax and enjoy all the great advances in leadership doesn’t create the urgency to invest in the wide range of leadership development resources out there. The primary argument for the difficulty in leading well relates to our increasingly complex and fast moving world. The good old days – which can mean anything from last year to centuries ago – portray leadership as more…
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Leadership
An important characteristic of wisdom is recognizing wisdom in the thoughts and actions of others. Sometimes we have trouble doing that when the wisdom comes from outside our community and looks different from our “brand” of wisdom. This can create barriers to finding integrative solutions that require us to broaden our horizons and embrace ideas that don’t easily align with our existing perspectives.
Working with people from other cultures can seem a bit bewildering at times. You can often find yourself thinking and sometimes exclaiming a decision seems to make “no sense.” Many times, once we understand the decision making…
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Leadership
Logic seems like it would be the great bridge to solving every problem. We often think of logic as a transcendent truth that overcomes all emotions, prejudices, and even experiences. “You can’t argue with logic.” The problem turns out to be that logic is much more personal than objective. In fact, because logic is in the eye of the beholder, it is often the barrier rather than the bridge.
This is certainly true in working across cultures. Culture has been defined as “the way we do things around here.” Generally, the approaches that seemed to yield the best results over…
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Leadership
Like most leadership approaches and philosophies, servant leadership is not a recent creation. However, the increasing interest around servant leadership has produced a broader range of descriptors and practices with more and more leaders describing themselves with this label. Perhaps more than any other leadership approach, servant leadership is defined more by a core belief than a specific set of outward expressions. Leaders who lack that core belief are not servant leaders but rather using some servant leadership practices among the many in their toolkit. The result may be an improvement in their leadership but may also create frustration…
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