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Leadership Lessons

A World Class Example of Dopamine Derailment

It’s hard to resist the Pavlovian need to check your device or post to social media. But what happens when that desire leads to a major error that could cost you your job? In this blog post, I look at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Oscar snafu and how to avoid what I like to call ‘Dopamine Derailment.’

Leadership Lessons, Mindful Mondays

3 Leadership Lessons Illustrated by Tom Hanks Heroes

With all of the different roles he’s played in the movies, Tom Hanks is as well qualified as anyone to speculate on what makes a hero a hero. From Army Ranger captain John Miller in Saving Private Ryan to astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13 to the cargo ship commander Captain Phillips and, coming later this year, “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Sully Sullenberger, Hanks has lots of experience going deep on what makes a hero.

Leadership, Leadership Lessons

Five Ways Leaders Can Make It Easier to Let Go

Earlier this month, I wrote a post titled What Makes It So Hard to Let Go? In this recent post I wrote for Fast Company, I outline five proven ways that leaders can make it easier to let go. In my 15 years of executive coaching and running leadership development programs, I’ve worked with thousands of leaders charged with getting different results. A number of scenarios can drive the demand for new results. How many of these apply to you?

Leadership, Leadership Lessons, Organizational Development

How to Get Your New Team Off to a Strong Start

If you’re a leader in your organization, there will be multiple times in your career when you have to get a new team off to a strong start. One of the critical steps in that process is when you bring the team members together for the first time. That’s a rare opportunity to define the purpose, build trust, establish the ground rules and set the priorities. Like they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Make the most of it by giving some thought to that first team meeting and taking some time to prepare for it.

Leadership, Leadership Lessons, Personal Presence

What’s the Difference Between Executive Presence and Leadership Presence?

The title of this post is a question I was asked yesterday during an interview for the book summary service Get Abstract. (Audio excerpts from the interview will be available in a few months.) While I guess I’ve thought about the difference between executive and leadership presence over the years (I wrote a book on the latter after all), I have never had the question put to me that directly.

Leadership Lessons, Personal Presence

Seven Ways to Play a Bigger Game This Year

In fifteen years of coaching high potential and senior leaders, I’ve conducted thousands of hours of colleague feedback interviews. One of the themes that I hear a lot from senior executives talking about high potential leaders is that the client needs to play a bigger game. What the executives mean by that is that the high potential needs to start making an impact beyond their immediate function and start acting as a leader of the entire organization and not just their function.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve asked around three dozen high potential leaders to answer the question, “What’s the one thing you need to do to play a bigger game this year?” I’ve boiled their answers down to seven ways to play a bigger game. If you’re ready to play a bigger game, you’ll want to take a look.

Leadership Lessons, Personal Presence

Leaders Behaving Badly

You don’t have to look very hard in any given week to find examples of leaders behaving badly. This week had a couple of doozies. First, we had the story of Heather Cho, the vice president of inflight customer service for Korean Air. She was travelling on her own airline and as her plane from taxiing away from its gate at JFK, a flight attendant gave her macadamia nuts without asking if she wanted any and, (worse!) left them in the package. Cho flipped out and called the lead flight attendant to her seat to dress him down.

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