“Show your team you care, and they’ll give you everything they have.” This is the philosophy of Sean McVay, the coach of the Los Angeles Rams football team, who is taking his team to Sunday’s Super Bowl game largely...
Read moreSeparation Should Not Be Surprising
Firing with respect and compassion Call it what you may – dismissal, discharge, layoffs, workforce reduction – firing a team member is not an easy task. This is the reason that it is often not done well. People want to sidestep the issue...
Read moreProfit Is a Reward, Not a Goal
Profit is the reward that a business earns for providing value to its customers and producing that value economically. While the customer does not intentionally award profit, they recognize the value offered and pay what they consider a fair...
Read more“The Servant Leader” by James A. Autry
This book, “The Servant Leader: How to Build a Creative Team, Develop Great Morale, and Improve Bottom-line Performance,” by James A. Autry, is very much a how-to book, describing the way to implement servant leadership in many aspects of leading...
Read moreDisagreement vs. Conflict
Call it what you will – discussion, debate, disagreement, argument, conflict, confrontation – as a leader you face the task of keeping these encounters productive for the organization and preventing them from becoming debilitating. To gain the...
Read moreResolution or Resolve?
It is the time of year when some people make New Year’s resolutions. Resolutions are often something like “I want to lose weight” or “I want to spend more time with my kids” or “I want to improve my performance on the job to get that promotion.”...
Read moreCongruity in Leadership
Congruity is a quality of agreement and appropriateness. Where there’s congruity, things fit together in a way that makes sense. In terms of our leadership, congruity is being the same person or leader in every situation. Leaders who lack...
Read moreAsk, Don’t Tell
One of the best ways for a leader to empower team members or the team is to adopt the practice of “ask, don’t tell.” This concept, sometimes called coaching for performance, moves decisions or solutions from solely the leader to a shared process...
Read more“The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle” by James C. Hunter
Jim Hunter’s previous book, “The Servant,” was an allegory that told the story of a business leader whose life was spiraling out of control in every arena. He attends a leadership retreat where the instructor, a former businessman now monk, leads...
Read moreLeadership and the Peter Principle
Most people are familiar with the Peter Principle. This principle was first published in a 1969 book, The Peter Principle, by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their own level...
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