When you hear the words Professional Development, what comes to mind? Many people immediately think about terms such as “succession planning,” or “career path.” While those things certainly require new skills and knowledge, focusing on training for the next job may cause as many problems as it solves. Someone once described the normal corporate career path as “getting … [Read more...]
Displaying Empathy While Maintaining Standards
A few weeks back, I was leading a class on How Leaders Create and Manage Remote and Hybrid Teams. Two of the participants got into a heated exchange that was very instructive. It raised a good question: When does empathy towards your team members get in the way of managing performance? One of the participants said how much he liked seeing people when they worked from home … [Read more...]
Is Social Time Wasted Time?
It’s NCAA Tournament time again, which means nothing to 90% of the civilized world. But here in the US it means three weeks of drama, gambling, and well-intentioned foolishness. It’s also a good time to examine the role of creatively "wasting" time with social activities at work. First, we’ll start with the supposedly bad news. According to lots of studies done every year … [Read more...]
Do You Hold People Accountable or Help Them Be Accountable?
Accountability. We throw the word around quite a bit in leadership circles. We use phrases like ‘holding people accountable.” To many managers, it’s the stick we use when the carrot doesn’t work. In the words of that great philosopher Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Can we hold people … [Read more...]
The First Rule of Remote Leadership
In all the talk about hybrid work and RTO (Returning To Office for those of us who are acronym-intolerant), it’s easy to stress out. Let me remind you of a very simple rule to help guide your thinking. In The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, we have 18 (sort of 19) rules for leading at a distance. But whether all of your people are remote, only … [Read more...]