Leadership Perspectives

My day at the museum: Coaching leaders to see with a different lens

Marie Peeler

I’m in the UK and I had the most wonderful day yesterday. I met and spent time with a most generous colleague who not only told me about his work but allowed me to experience it firsthand. Given that so much of my work is about helping leaders see things with a different lens, it […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Five traits of effective leader-coaches

Lately, there has been a lot of interest from leaders who want to learn to coach.  We’ve been asked to do programs – from one-hour conference presentations to multi-day training programs – to help leaders acquire coaching skills.  Leaders recognize that there is less and less use for old command-and-control styles of leading, and they […]

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 […]

Empathy: A powerful tool for leaders

The following article, which I wrote, originally appeared on the PMANewsline.com Business Success Column on July 3, 2013.  It is reprinted here with permission. People – and your relationships with people – are the lifeblood of your business. Customers, prospects, employees, and even suppliers are people that you need in order for your business to […]

Do you want to be right or do you want to win?

Recently, I had a most singularly rewarding experience when a client told me that something I had asked her weeks before profoundly changed her relationship with the world. When she repeated my question, I had to smile.  Many years ago, a man that I coached – a man that worked for me in my corporate […]

How to ask good questions

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of empathy.  One of the best ways to demonstrate empathy is to ask questions and really listen to the answers. In addition to showing empathy, asking the right questions and having an open mind to hearing the answers helps leaders avoid myopia by exposing them to […]