Category: Team Management

Reading Time: < 1 minute It can be hard to give the young people in your life advice because of the age difference.  So here’s some advice from a younger person for his peers that I wish someone had given me.   Pass on 20 things I Should have known at 20  to someone with more years ahead than

Reading Time: < 1 minute Strategic intent is key to the success of any business.   A great (and cautionary) literary exposition of this is Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”  In this timeless classic, the CEO  (Captain Ahab) clearly had the requisite strategic intent to succeed;  but in the end failed utterly not only in his quest

Reading Time: < 1 minute Most C-level executives find themselves besieged by those with a vested interest in changing things.  Often consultants, new hires, academics and others often seem to be proposing change for change’s sake before looking at the reason why existing processes, institutions, traditions and protocols came to be in the first place.

Reading Time: < 1 minute Spring Training is well under way and along with it no lack of metaphors about baseball and business. Here’s one from Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, one of the most successful technology companies of the past decade. When asked what has been the most valuable lesson he’s learned as

Reading Time: 2 minutes As team leaders, we evaluate our team members and expect them to do the job up to our standards. Sometimes our standards are out of sync with their ability or training. After all, these individuals have not traveled in the same shoes as we have and may not have the

Reading Time: < 1 minute Teams need to collaborate to be effective – getting along with one another and focusing on the objectives or mission of the team to achieve its goals. Today there is more and more pressure to meet team objectives – there is not enough slack in the economy to be wasteful

Reading Time: 3 minutes If you ever stopped to figure out how much meetings cost, you would be amazed at the staggering price of a sit-down. We need to aware of the cost of having meetings and plan carefully. I’m not referring to the three-day off-site meetings that have a specific purpose to them.

Reading Time: 2 minutes It is interesting to view leadership of projects through the standard leadership lens and figure out if it is different (and perhaps more difficult) than leading in a functional organization. Leaders are used to functional organizations like sales and marketing, engineering, manufacturing, operations, finance, and human resource departments. Projects, by

Reading Time: 2 minutes Managers are expected to ensure that employees complete tasks and reach corporate objectives. But, what about your employees’ personal growth and goals? Are you watching out for them as well? It’s easiest to support your employees when you view them as people and not merely as subordinates. Taking an interest

Reading Time: 4 minutes One of the most important jobs any leader has is the need to make the right decision and build consensus, convincing his/her followers that a particular decision is in their best interests. Many organizational consultants will tell you there are varying degrees of building consensus and selecting the degree to