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Current Affairs, Leadership Lessons

The Rutgers Basketball Fiasco: Leadership, Responsibility and Accountability

If you follow sports or even just the news in general, you’ve likely seen the video of Rutgers men’s basketball coach Mike Rice shoving his players, hitting them with thrown balls and screaming homophobic slurs at them during practices last year. Make that former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice because once the tape was aired on ESPN this week, went viral and commentators started calling for his head, he was fired within 24 hours.

Current Affairs, Leadership Lessons, Personal Presence, Team Building

Five Reasons Why You Should Help Your Frenemies

So, back in 2009, I wrote a post about how I wasn’t going to blog anymore about Tiger Woods. This post isn’t really about Tiger but he’s involved in the story behind it.

Last week, Woods won the Cadillac Championship tournament at Doral. Good news for him but not the most interesting part of the story. The interesting part is that the pro Steve Stricker gave Woods a 45 minute putting lesson the night before the tournament started.

Leadership Lessons, Personal Presence

What Verb Tense Do You Lead In?

If you want to read a blogger who gives, gives, gives and never takes, check out Leadership Freak by Dan Rockwell. With his regular posts of 300 words or less, Dan has built a loyal following of tens of thousands of leaders in the past few years. As an example of his work, check out his recent post on “Ten Strategies for Starting Over.”

It’s a great post with ten simple, actionable tips for overcoming something that many of us do without even recognizing we do it – getting stuck in the past.

We tend to hang on to stuff that’s not doing us any good and that we need to let go of. There’s a simple way to check yourself on that. Over the course of a day or a week, notice which verb tenses you find yourself speaking in throughout the day. Your choices are past, present or future.

Current Affairs, Leadership Lessons, Personal Presence

Three Lessons Dick Clark Taught Us About Succession Planning

Like millions of Americans on Monday night, I watched Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve to count down to the new year as the ball dropped in Times Square. Of course, it wasn’t the same show as in decades past because Dick Clark passed away last April. But, it was still Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest. And, as the title of the show implies, among his many other accomplishments, Dick Clark left a world class lesson in leadership succession planning.

Current Affairs, Leadership Lessons

The Traits That Make RG III a Leader

Given my history on this blog, I never thought I’d write anything positive about anything to do with the Washington Redskins. After all, one of the most widely read posts I’ve ever written was one back in 2009 called Learning What Not to Do from the Leadership of the Washington Redskins. Heck, I even did a television interview on the topic. There is no denying that I’m on the record as thinking that the Redskins have had some pretty bad leadership for over a decade. I swore I wasn’t going to root for them until it improved.

Well, it has and it comes in the form of rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III. It’s been a strange experience to find myself rooting for the Redskins but that’s what’s been happening this year as Griffin has led his team to the verge of the playoffs. The guy is so compelling I can’t help myself.

Leadership, Leadership Lessons

Are You a Meta-Leader?

As I’ve written here before, I’m a big fan of retired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant, Admiral Thad Allen. I’ve been fortunate enough to hear him speak a couple of times, the most recent of which was a few weeks ago at a meeting of senior U.S. government executives. Most Americans know Admiral Allen from his roles in leading the responses to Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In the talk I heard most recently, the Admiral explained how the concept of meta-leadership helped him organize his thinking and plan of action in each instance. Meta-leadership calls for a thoughtful integration of five elements when developing a leadership plan of action. The factors are:

Current Affairs, Leadership, Leadership Lessons

How to Remember You’re a Manager and Not Royalty

Last week, former FBI director Louis Freeh released the results of his investigation into what top officials of Penn State University including its then president Graham Spanier and the late head football coach Joe Paterno knew about the child sexual abuse perpetrated by convicted felon Jerry Sandusky. Sadly, the report confirmed everyone’s worst fears. Everybody knew it and worked together to sweep it under the rug. We see enough aberrant behavior on the part of people in leadership positions that it seems worth asking the question – how do you stay clear about the fact that you’re a manager and not royalty? Here are three ideas:

Leadership, Leadership Lessons

Leadership Lessons from the UVA Controversy

Early last month, I had the opportunity to be in a small group conversation with the president of one of the world’s great private universities. During the session, one of us asked the president what issue she was most concerned about and she immediately answered that it was the pressures on the pubic university system in the United States. She told us that her friends and colleagues leading those schools were facing enormous challenges such as the fiscal conditions of the states that support them and the rapidly changing nature of how learning is delivered.

Just a few weeks later, a lot of what she was talking about played out in dramatic fashion at the University of Virginia. In case you missed it, here’s the quick summary. Over the course of several months, Helen Dragas, the chair of the University’s Board of Visitors, privately solicited the support of other members of the Board to force the recently hired president of UVA, Teresa Sullivan, out of her job. Dragas and others on the Board had concluded that Sullivan was not moving quickly enough to position UVA for a different future. Sullivan was apparently blindsided when Dragas told her that the Board was prepared to vote her out and gave her the opportunity to resign. It’s clear that the broader UVA community was blindsided. Faculty, students, alumni and state legislators rallied around Sullivan and two weeks after the Board forced her resignation, they voted to reinstate Sullivan as president.

There are so many leadership lessons and issues in this case that it’s impossible to address them all in one blog post so I’ll just focus on how Dragas handled this situation from beginning to end.

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