Leadership Perspectives

7 questions to see if communication issues are damaging your team’s productivity

The purpose of a team is to utilize diverse talents, experience, and world views to make better plans, arrive at sounder conclusions, and solve thornier problems than one might be able to do on one’s own. That diversity of thought and experience is what makes teams so effective, yet it is the very same thing […]

Five meeting blunders leaders should avoid

I often hear leaders lament how much they hate meetings, those time-sucking events that take us away from our real work to sit in a room, or on the telephone, with others who would also prefer to be doing something else. Sound familiar? Wait a minute.  By definition, leadership is guiding, inspiring, and working with […]

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 […]

Power of the mastermind. Part 1

A small group of colleagues and I meet on a monthly basis to talk about our businesses, share advice, set goals, and hold one-another accountable.  We represent different industries but we all have things in common; we own businesses and we want to continue to grow those businesses in alignment with our values. To this […]

Leaders, Get comfortable with ambiguity

Sometimes when I work with leaders, they struggle with ambiguity.  They want all the facts before they make a decision.  They want to memorize a script before an important presentation.  They don’t want to take questions for fear of not having answers. While I understand the urge to want to be certain, have all the […]

Are Your Meetings Making You Crazy? Fix them!

Does your organization hold meetings that seem to go on forever, that try to solve world hunger, but in which nothing really seems to get done?   Do you dread going to meetings – even your own – and do you cringe at the thought of wasting another hour of your entire team’s time? You should, […]