Leadership Perspectives

So you want to do some Team-building…

Marie Peeler

But do you want to build your team?  It’s a key question because sometimes leaders engage in ‘team-building’ in order to build their teams.  Sometimes they just want to do some team-building.  It’s important to understand the distinction and to know what your goals are when you begin a team building process. Whenever I get […]

Leadership Development

Uncovering what leaders know: What coaches do

Marie Peeler

The most successful coaching engagements start with a successful leader who, as a person, is healthy, whole, and resourceful. Leaders who are confident but humble, and smart but willing to learn, come to coaching with an open mind, so that another person, skilled in the tools of coaching, can help them find answers that are […]

Leading versus managing: Four things for leaders to let go of

Last year, I wrote a blog post on eight key differences between managing and leading. I recently had occasion to think of these distinctions again when a coaching client asked me how a person could lead a large team without spending all their time in the details. She had nine people on her team, which […]

6 ways to delegate more effectively

In the management and leadership classes that I teach, I’ve proven time and again that even leaders just starting out understand the benefits of delegating, the consequences of failing to delegate, and even some of the reasons that they don’t delegate.  Yet the need to delegate more effectively comes up repeatedly on the list of […]

The downside of failing to delegate

We are certain that leaders – at least on an intellectual level – understand the benefits of effective delegation.  Yet too many delegate too little.  Would we delegate more if we truly understood the impact of NOT delegating?  Perhaps. Here’s just a few of the consequences that arise out of a failure to delegate: You, […]

Benefits of delegation and why leaders don’t delegate

As leaders, we know that we should delegate so that we can spend our time more efficiently and give others in our organizations the opportunity to learn.  We also know that we don’t delegate nearly as much as we should.   We even know that there are negative consequences associated with not delegating more and we […]

Tapping your best resources to improve your operation

The following article, which I wrote, originally appeared on MailingSystemsTechnology.com on February 16, 2014.  Although I wrote the article for leaders in the mailing industry, it is important for leaders in all industries to tap their best resources. As a mailing operations leader, your key responsibility is to ensure that your operation not only survives, but […]

Getting teams to talk about what matters: Six ways to create a culture of reflection and dialogue

In my last post, I talked about the difficulty leaders run into when they treat strategic planning as a discrete event instead of the culmination of an ongoing process of reflection and dialogue.  When leaders bring team members together once a year for official strategic planning discussions, they often find that their people don’t know […]

5 ways leaders can promote worker engagement

Last week, a post on the Wall Street Journal At Work blog claimed that over half the workers in the US aren’t enthused by or committed to their work.  The claim is based on a recent Gallup research study and, if it is true, it’s pretty scary. To understand the concept of engagement, look at […]