Leadership Perspectives

Why Emotional Intelligence is important for leaders

Marie Peeler

How important is Emotional Intelligence for leaders? You be the judge. A very unscientific poll that I conducted on social media recently asked participants to think of a leader that they admire and then to identify attributes of the leader that make them admire the leader or want to follow them. When we tabulated the […]

Speaking your truth with courage and compassion

Most of us learned at an early age not to let everything that pops into our heads come out of our mouths.  Thinking before one speaks is generally a good idea.  It can keep us from saying things that we will later regret. But can self-censorship go too far?  Absolutely. Do you find that you […]

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 […]

How to make strategic planning more meaningful

Despite what the calendar says, late summer, when kids go back to school, the nights get crisper, and the days get shorter, always feels more like the start of the new year than January 1st does, to me.  Anticipation is in the air as we shake off “summer casual” attitudes and start thinking seriously about […]

Talking about what matters

Last night I had a peculiar dream. I was driving on a wide, two-lane commercial road near my home.  Suddenly, in front of me, there was an elephant.  I mean a real honest-to-goodness live elephant.  He was in my lane, staring straight at me, and he did not look happy. As I slowed down and […]

Managing conflicting leadership roles with personal mastery

This month, Financial Executive Magazine published an article that I wrote for financial officers. (Click here to read it.) The article was titled “Leading with Personal Mastery,” and spoke to the challenge that CFOs have in fulfilling a dual role. Dual roles to fulfill. On one hand, CFOs are responsible for guarding the financial integrity […]