Taking Over As Leader? Ask a Few Questions

May 24, 2022 | Leadership Development

Are you taking over for a leader who has left the organization? Are you inheriting someone else’s team? Or, are you stepping into a newly created leadership role? Whichever path you’ve taken to your new role, you need to quickly identify how you’re going to best serve your team. Because, let’s face it, you were put into your new role to get things done. Your job is to get things done in a position that someone else had or that was recently created. Either way, your new position title...

Culture Starts at the Top

Mar 29, 2022 | Leadership Development

This past week validated that regardless of what you say you want your company culture to be, what it actually IS is dependent upon you, the leader. Through the various virtual presentations and in-person strategy and group coaching sessions I facilitated this week, each client’s culture and personality came through loud and clear. A few were immediately relaxed and collegial. A few were a bit hesitant initially but quickly engaged and made solid progress. And a few were quiet, distant,...

Drink a Cup of Coffee or Develop a Team Member?

Jan 25, 2022 | Leadership Development

I recently came across a 2018 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that noted companies with fewer than 100 employees, on average, spent only 12 minutes of dedicated training time per employee - during the employee’s entire tenure with them! As pathetic as that is, it’s even more depressing because it dropped from a whopping 13.4 minutes of dedicated training time per employee in 1995. The 2018 report also noted that companies with 100-500 employees invested less than 6 minutes of...

Communicate Changes Before Implementing Changes

Oct 19, 2021 | Leadership Development

Managing change has become a never-ending but essential part of every leader’s job. It’s become ubiquitous. It’s something we, as the ‘recipients’ of change, are begrudgingly accepting more and more often, and it’s therefore something we, as leaders and often the ‘instigators’ of change, need to improve upon. Why? Because we’re still too often forcing our team members to ‘just deal with’ the never-ending changes instead of helping them absorb and adopt the changes. We’re still too often...

It’s Not ‘Return to Work,’ It’s ‘Return to Us’

Sep 21, 2021 | Leadership Development

You have no doubt heard or read others proclaiming: “Stop saying: ‘Return to work’. We’ve been working this whole time! And, we’ve been working longer, harder, and in more challenging ways than ever before!” You know what? They’re right. If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that this past year, regardless of industry, profession, etc., we’ve all had to work harder and more creatively than ever before. So it’s simply wrong to now focus on how to ‘return to work.’ Instead, we need to...