Recovering Leader

Leadership via Crowd-sourced Ownership

As an executive coach, I have plenty of clients at any given time wanting to make a bigger difference in their organization and/or the world. Ownership is a powerful mindset to do that. Thinking like an owner is a leadership approach that saves money, time, and upgrades everyone’s ability to make a more significant difference. Read more →

Leadership and Letting Yourself off the Hook

“I know I need to …” indicates a well-meaning person who’s not yet ready to resolve an issue or problem. For example: "I know I tend to be the bottleneck in the process, and need to be more timely about my work." "I know I need to do more relationship-building in the organization." "I know I need to delegate more,... Read more →

Leaders: Understand Your Impact

As a leader, it’s important to understand the nature of your impact on the world. For better and worse, you are affecting your people, and, collectively, you are all affecting communities and lives beyond your organization’s walls. No need to wait until some unintended consequence or difficulty makes you take stock of how your leadership is touching the world. Better... Read more →

Leadership and Responsibility

Leadership requires the discipline to claim responsibility when something goes wrong. It may be daunting, but it’s necessary—it propels those affected by the problem from confusion to solution, enabling the right actions to be taken. Concerns about saving face, job security, and/or institutional liability are no foundation for leadership. In fact, the longer you delay, the more collateral damage you... 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 →

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 →

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 →