Recovering Leader

8 Ways to Enjoy Your Work Most Days (a.k.a., "Success")

Most people settle for jobs that fall far short of “happy at work” for too many years. In fact, to some, the notion that we can enjoy our work most days, and have both rewarding and fulfilling (and even fun) careers seems absurd. Yet when you enjoy your work you’re going to do a great job—the best work of your career. Here are 8 tips for helping make that happen. Read more →

One Formula to Lead and Live Better: 75+/25-

When you strike the right balance between a positive and negative outlook you lead more skillfully and live a better life, and help others do the same. It’s not magic: By resetting to 75+/25- each day, you enable engagement, creativity, good health, and reduce stress. Read more →

4 Ways to Reclaim Your Leadership from the Distraction Monster

If you're like my clients, you've noticed that productivity has simply never been so entwined with distraction, and it takes its toll. Here are four great steps you can take to reclaim your time from the monster. Read more →

Leaders Make Fun, Not Stress

It's up to the leader to encourage a playful spirit at work whenever possible -- do this, and you will unleash good energy and creativity on old problems. Read more →

Starter, Builder, Fixer, or Runner? How to Find Your Happy Problems

What type of situation best fits your leadership? Not only is it critical for a leader or executive to know themselves, but it’s also important to understand your team, and anyone you may hire. Read more →

How to Develop Your “Future You” Mantra

Having a “future you” mantra is an innovative and individualized way to make sure you attain the goals most important to you, and to lead in the most effective way. Read more →

Leadership Lessons From Recovering Alcoholics

Fear, force, greed, and need are all tried and true ways to lead. Yet none positive or sustainable. When it comes to greatness, and lasting for the long haul, look no further than 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA. Its membership has grown into the tens of millions, fully global (since well before Walmart or even Sears Roebuck, for... Read more →

Land Critical Conversations Right the First Time

Many key discussions end with one or more people in a holding pattern. Unfortunately, it's often after the fact that we realize something was missed or left unaddressed. Whether an interview, tough discussion, sales opportunity, executive team or board meeting—the many variables in the room (personalities, agendas, politics, etc.) can take you off course, diverting you from your main objective(s).... Read more →

Excellence in Leadership Means Being Savvy in Four Systems

Achieving, Relating, Culture, and Influencing: these four “systems” silently but surely surround us in any organization. Understanding each of them is key to maximizing your own contributions as a leader. I share this because most of the feedback I hear on the up-front interviews I do about executive clients falls into one or more of these areas. If I did... Read more →

Six Simple Steps to Ensure Your Best

What does it take for you to be doing your best most days? How do happy, effective leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals, workers, and athletes manage to bring their A-game the majority of the time? It’s simple: either deliberately or not, they have an index—one that acts as a compass to align / realign them to their best. Before I explain that,... Read more →

Self-test: Doing and Being at Your Best at Work

Are you doing your best work and happy at work, most days? Here’s a tool I use with some executive clients to self-assess what may be standing in the way of being at their best and happiest at work, and what to do about it. Take a look at the graphic below and place yourself in the square that reflects... Read more →

Why Leadership Meant Quitting My Executive Job

I feel a great affinity with those protesting on Wall Street and other business centers right now. When I asked myself why, I remembered a key turning point in my own career: my response eight years ago to the then-shocking dehumanizing corporate behavior that’s become the norm in recent years. I started my business career delivering interoffice mail—yes, rolling around... Read more →

Know Why You Do What You’re Doing?

Are you at your best professionally? Are you doing your best work ever? If not, then maybe you need to take a look at your purpose, and the premise behind it... Talking to the leader of a Fortune 100 company several years ago, I asked: when you fall from the tree of life, how would you like to be remembered?... Read more →

Imagination and Leadership

Couple an active imagination with a healthy amount of pragmatism, and you will move mountains. Whether you’re a facilities manager, CFO, or running the project to develop the next generation of cancer therapy, all of which my clients have done, doing your best work starts with using your imagination. What we imagine solves problems, sparks us to do our best,... Read more →

Being in the Flow of Leadership

You're in the flow of leadership when you're 100% in this moment, feeling your feelings, and 75% sure anything good can happen. Yet life has a way of distracting us from the flow. Fear, anger, strife, pessimism and crisis are everywhere in the world. The challenge is to accept--and not deny--these tragedies and not to buy into the gloom. You're... Read more →

9 Steps to a Happier, More Effective Work Life

One of the top lessons I’ve learned in my career of 26 years and counting: the best work I’ve ever done and the best jobs I’ve ever had were situations where I designed the job I wanted to do, then chose my boss. Worst were “getting promoted” into, or “chosen” for a job I wasn’t seeking, and/or working for a... Read more →

Why It's Great that Your Job’s at Risk.

It’s no secret that fear of losing your job will hinder your quality of work, and even put that job in jeopardy. Yet anxiety about job loss is rampant. Layoffs, changes in job, boss, colleagues, and companies have put many on a mental edge and/or ledge. In my work with leaders I see that excelling in this “new normal” means... Read more →

Great Leaders Ask Better Questions

You're paying your people too much to think for them. Guide them to do their own best thinking, and their contributions multiply exponentially. Directive behavior does the opposite ... it shuts people your up, and shuts them down. "Why doesn't she do what I tell her to do?! " This CEO mentioned he was having trouble getting one of his... Read more →

Leading in Sync with Organizational Heartbeat

Organizations--like people--have a heartbeat that speeds up, slows down, and rests at a certain rate. Put your finger on that pulse and lead according to what you discover. You gain greater precicison about what's needed, how to be at your best as a leader, and how to help your colleagues do the same. It's a powerful practice--and surpisingly uncommon--to be... Read more →

Addressing Dressing

Perhaps this is an awkward topic for some, but the way you dress and groom shouldn't be a factor in how you're evaluated or perceived as a leader. By that I DON'T mean let your fun or freak flag fly--I mean, don't dress yourself as a distraction. Things are more complicated today--when and how to be formal, casual, in between,... Read more →

Doing Your Best / Best You Can Do

EVERYONE is doing the best they can do, all the time. How you think about others—strangers, friends, family, people providing you services—sets the stage for what comes next between you, for better or worse, in every moment of your life. Thinking about particular colleagues, directs, boss, or others in your organization—or even people in your life—you may laugh at my... Read more →

Leadership and Complexity: Think Like a Child

Leadership requires the simplest thinking and actions when facing the most complex dilemmas. In fact, imagine a four year old facing your most pressing business or organizational issue. It would be worth it if they did. Wielding the sensibility of a young, inquiring mind (the average four year old asks 450 questions per day) is a canny and refreshing way... Read more →

The Excessively Critical Leader

What's one to do? Everyone has a story of a nightmare boss. Why? Because overly critical people are in positions of authority with surprising frequency, and tend to be, well, memorable. They can be hurtful, insulting, angry, disapproving, intolerant, abusive—or any combination thereof. People who work around them are often stressed out or shut down, operating in coping mode—avoiding touchy... Read more →

Leadership and Fun on the Job

Peak professional experiences are often described as “constructive play.” If you’re hoping for the best from your people, promoting some fun on the job is well worthwhile. Leaders who believe work can't or shouldn't be enjoyable create an atmosphere of indifference and stress. Who wants that day in and day out? Encourage a playful spirit when possible and you unleash... Read more →

Monday’s LeaderTip: Worry Management

We all worry about the future at times, and leaders are no exception. Some even hang onto it, believing it to be an effective motivator. Yet the positive results you achieve are in spite of—not because of—the strain and stress of your worries. When you notice yourself doing it, call it for what it is: counterproductive, nagging, self-inflicted negativity about... Read more →

Monday LeaderTip: Find the “Why” of Your Leadership

Design a future that holds meaning beyond bottom lines, and you are likely to bring out the best in your people and organization. After all, nobody ever found their personal best, nor inspired their brightest people, without something above and beyond the numbers. It’s up to you to find and communicate the compelling “why” people should get behind your vision,... Read more →

Monday LeaderTip: Reaching Your True North

We all have the capacity to make the time we spend doing our work—or living, for that matter—more meaningful. Yet we limit ourselves by not really thinking about it, submerged as we are in the familiar routines of our daily lives. When we do think about it, we scapegoat our constraints or limitations for not changing the status quo. Consider... Read more →

Monday LeaderTip: Making Your A-game Reliable

It’s rare to find someone who can stay consistently fresh and fired up about his or her work. No matter how interesting or important a role you may have, complacency tends to creep in, turning novelty into routine—it’s human nature. Yet with a small, conscious effort you can turn off the autopilot any day. Start that day by recognizing that... Read more →

7 Leadership Strengths Are Weaknesses When Taken Too Far

Consider a few of the typical strengths a leader may have: maybe they're a good delegator, a great relationship-builder, results-oriented, decisive, etc. Interestingly, our strengths become weaknesses when we overuse or misapply them to the situation. That's why I often hear my clients' colleagues say, "It's his strength, but also weakness at times..." So it's important to know which of... Read more →

Monday LeaderTip: Innovation’s Challenge

Innovation—in your own life, or as a leader of others—requires an open mind, creativity, capability, resolve, and courage. Many leaders get stuck in the status quo because it’s easier than tapping into these qualities in themselves or others. Beyond that, transformative change upsets our sense of normalcy, which can be uncomfortable. Yet you need not remain complacent. When you might... Read more →

LeaderTip: Balance

We are surrounded by well-intended suggestions to achieve work/life balance. Yet in reality, technology surrounds and links us constantly to a virtual office of demands and expectations that blur the lines between work and life. To make matters even more confusing, it’s common in the workplace to talk up the need for greater balance while rewarding those with an excessive... Read more →

LeaderTip: High-Performing Leadership Teams

It’s not uncommon for an organization’s senior executives to call themselves the "Leadership Team." Yet frequently divisional self-interests drive their actions more so than teamwork—a lower-performing model for people at all levels of the enterprise. In contrast, members of high performing leadership teams watch out for each other, share resources and knowledge, trust each other, are brutally honest, embrace healthy... Read more →

Letting Go of Lonely Leadership

“It’s lonely at the top” is not the way of leadership. If that’s the case for you, the quality of your leadership, your life at work, and your P&L, would likely be enhanced with some work on changing how you relate to others. I’ve seen this play out in my executive coaching work with clients. Their successes add up to... Read more →

LeaderTip: Leading in Sync with Your Values

We are at our best when our work is well-aligned with our values, and leaders are no exception. Yet in the fray of day-to-day challenges, rarely do we stop to reflect on what we hold most important, and/or how that might have changed over the years. If you don’t take time to do that, you may miss an important insight,... Read more →

LeaderTip: Leadership and Unity

Sustainable leadership requires making the common good your highest priority. “Common good” doesn’t mean consensus—in fact it’s often discovered through intense and candid debate. Develop your own methods of assessing what’s best for your people, organization, clients, and your community, and where those interests intersect. You can “succeed” without doing this, but over time you risk undermining what you intend... Read more →

Chemistry + Inflection Point = Great Coaching Outcomes

All engagements can be powerful, but significant, positive changes require coach and client to be well-matched (great chemistry), and client to be at an important inflection point in their development. Champion athletes receive frequent coaching. Similarly, the best executives and aspiring leaders -- the ones who you want to retain -- are curious and hungry for new ways to upgrade... Read more →

LeaderTip: Caring Connection

One’s ability to form caring relationships in the workplace is highly correlated with business results. While a mountain of hard data led to this conclusion, many consider warmth, approachability, empathy, and personal accountability to be the “soft stuff.” Such thinking, and the behavior that goes with it, only gets you to the table—it doesn’t keep you there. Developing a more... Read more →

LeaderTip: Resentment

We all feel resentment toward others at times, and leaders are no exception. It’s been said that holding on to it is like taking poison and hoping the OTHER person will die. Denying resentment only prolongs the stress it causes you. In fact, you won’t free yourself of its side effects until you let go of the wish / hope... Read more →

The Why and How of Your Next Promotion

Suggestions and considerations to help you move up At its best, a promotion to a more senior level of responsibility can challenge, energize, and reward you, and enable you to accomplish something of greater meaning in your professional life. Moving up isn’t for everyone—it may not be important to you, and/or you may be happy with the level of responsibilities... Read more →

Are You a Manager or a Leader: Complete Analysis of Survey Results (Final)

In June, 2009 we started taking a sharp look at the distinctions between manager and leader. I developed a 20-question online survey (“Are you more of a manager or leader?”) that's so far received 139 responses. Given the volume of info, I broke my analysis into several blog posts that cover all 20 questions. Previous posts had analyzed the results... Read more →

Ethical Leadership: Make the World a Better Place

My work as an executive coach has me working with leaders constantly. I can’t help but notice that they have a wide variety of reasons for doing what they do. When asked, they tell me things like this: “My job as a leader is to motivate people,” or “I’m here to tell people what to do and how to do... Read more →