Managing Talent

How to win the Talent War – Part 3 – Be people-centered leader

People-centered leadership. Easy to say, and the capacity to do it will be tested when you commit to developing your people, because their career plans might lead them outside your team or organization. It is the time of year to make plans for 2016 – should yours be to increase your capacity as a people-centered leader? Here is a question that will help get that started.

read more

#peoplecentered #leadership – A Hashtag Does Not Make It So

What is leadership? How effectively am I leading? I believe great conversations start with a question, and here are the answers a group of leaders gave me during a recent presentation of my keynote workshop #peoplecentered #leadership – A Hashtag Does Not Make It So. It was a great conversation.

read more

How to win the Talent War – part 2

Nature abhors a vacuum. In the war for talent, your leadership weapon is to create positive vacuums and provide support for those willing to fill them in a positive way. It is not always easy work, but it will be the work that makes you stand out as a leader. Talent management, when done well, is about building a team of vacuum fillers and being skilled at creating the right vacuums. Read on . . .

read more
How to win the Talent War – part 1

How to win the Talent War – part 1

How worried are you about finding the right people? Lots has been written about the talent shortage recently.  In a recent study my state (Michigan) actually ranked as the fourth toughest state for finding talent based on a survey of employers.  As I interact with...

read more

The ONE key to performance

Everyone is a leader. More correctly, everyone has a chance to lead each day in all aspects of their life. It is your choice, so what is your answer? I work on helping leaders to lead more effectively, and I believe leadership is a partnership, so getting teams to work together is critical to effective leadership. Here are 5 tips for helping people manage their career and performance. The title should be – 5 Tips to help you lead from wherever you sit in the organization.

read more

Empathy: 3 Things Leaders Can Do to Develop It

Leaders have to be empathetic, and unfortunately there is not a metric on empathy which makes it elusive and often ignored. That is until the feedback comes by key people leaving or they do not care about me/us. Empathy can be developed, and here are three things any leader can do to develop it. Great conversations start with a question, and empathy requires some great conversations.

read more

Time to DEVELOP PEOPLE – 3 Tips to Make It Happen

Time has replaced money as the number one excuse from leaders for not developing their people. Here are three tips for making it happen if it truly is a priority, and one tip includes a lesson I learned parenting teenagers to help shift the conversation from excuses to reasons. I believe Learning + Doing = Growth, and here are some thoughts and resources for making that happen for you and your people around leadership and individual development.

read more

Failure 101 – The Movie Is Better Than The Book

Failure is painful, and yet a key part of the ‘entrepreneurial mindset’. This hit me as I tried to read a book from a speaker that gave me one of my favorite TED talks, Sherry Turkle. The book was not good in my opinion, and it reminded me of watching teams/leaders process failure. Here is one step you can take as a leader to see how your team processes failure – which will tell you how you lead through mistakes and failures.

read more
Leadership as a Buffer

Leadership as a Buffer

Colin Powell shared some leadership lessons with me recently and here is one I took away – sometimes as leaders we need to be a buffer. Being a buffer could be protecting your ‘turf’ and it has a possibility to be so much more. It can have huge benefits to your organization if you do it well. It is the leaders job to be a buffer, and here are 3 tips to make it a way to build a healthier organization.

read more

Passion and Art: Why does it matter?

The passion of the artist. Where does it fit in the performance equation and how do we find it? Here is the where, and a little bit of the how, but the how is a much bigger conversation. Here are four beliefs about passion and a few tips to shift your perspective about how to seek it.

read more