A forum on Empowerment, Engagement, Vision and Facilitation for Process Improvement & Change Leaders

Leadership requires you give feedback to your work teams and
their individual members. Effective feedback reinforces team
behaviors that help you reach your business goals.

Here’s a technique, we call the “Feedback Sandwich” that will improve your ability to give effective feedback as a Team Leader.

Many leaders find giving honest, constructive feedback one of the
hardest parts of their job, especially if they are a new leader
giving feedback to former colleagues.

The toughest part of effective feedback is telling your people
about the behaviors you want them to change. What we all know as
“Negative Feedback”. There are two main pitfalls: [click to continue…]

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The Most Important Aspect of planning any Meeting is understanding the Session Objective. “What do we want to have accomplished by the end of this meeting to consider it a success?”

The Session Objective is the “Why” you are having the Meeting…it is your destination.

The Agenda is the “HOW”… the map to get there

One of the biggest challenges to Meeting Effectiveness is we are essentially Creatures of Habit. We do things this way because we have always done things this way … pure and simple.

• In many cases routine meetings are run purely out of Habit and have no clear Session Objective.
• Or if they do have a Session Objective … you don’t need a meeting to accomplish it.

In the average weekly staff meeting for instance - the agenda is often made up of routine standing items. These Agenda Items have always been there and no one has a legitimate reason when you ask the question, “Why?”.

You can create a radical improvement in the quality of these standing meetings by looking at each Agenda Item separately and establishing its Agenda Item Objective. You sit down and examine the Session Objective for each item on the Agenda. It looks like this … [click to continue…]

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This is a record breaking downturn in the US Economy. Wall Street, Housing, unemployment and a host of other indicators of economic health have worsened at record rates … and here you are working every day to keep your Team moving forward despite all the bad news.

How can you adjust our Leadership Style to accomodate the negative environment and the effects this may be having on your team members?

In the Jan 19th edition of Business Week, executive coach/guru Marshall Goldsmith recommends leaders make four specific adjustments these days. Here is my spin on his suggestions:

1) “Judge Less” - Goldsmith says crank up your empathy meter a couple of notches. If anyone on your team is struggling and underperforming, realize their could be contributing factors outside the team. Be more empathetic and tolerant than usual ESPECIALLY if empathy and tolerance are not one of your core skills. [click to continue…]

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When it comes to Leadership Styles … most “experts” end up building “Either/Or Models”.

• Either you are Strategic or you are Operational
• Either you are a Dominator or a Servant

You choose - or more often you take an inventory - which defines your position on the continuum between the two extremes.

These Either/Or exercises are interesting … just like the porridge Goldilocks found to be too hot or too cold. However, Goldilocks can teach us a lesson on how to find that Leadership Style middle ground … that ends up being “Just Right”. (credit: This post inspired by Kaplan & Kaiser article in the 2/09 Harvard Business Review)

Let’s have Goldilocks explain with one of the common Either/Or Models: Dominating vs. Enabling.

You are probably very familiar with this Either / Or, although you may know it by different names than I have given it here. Dominating vs. Enabling goes something like this: “As you reflect upon your own personal Leadership Style are you more likely to …” [click to continue…]

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When you are at work … Leading a Team … what words would you use to describe your relationship with the Team Members?

Does the feeling of a Partnership come up for you? A Partnership where everyone is involved in providing value to the team and the relationship is two-way. This concept flies in the face of the usual “Command and Control” Leadership style.

In most cases, relationships at work involve some sort of power imbalance. The Leader typically has the ability to tell the members of the team what to do, and, in some cases, how to do it. AND “Telling” really only works on the battlefield, where your “troops” are trained to obey no matter what the leaders tell them to do. Telling never really works in business ( or with your kids!) … at least not for long.

Our experience is this …. Relationships at work become much more productive when Leaders build Partnerships with the Team Members.
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A 20 year study recently reported in Time Magazine shows that your Mood can be as contagious as an infectious disease. That’s right … you can “infect” people with your mood.

This phenomenon has been known in behavioral science for decades … a group of people will model the energy and attitude of the dominant member of that group. But this study shows this effect goes much further than just the people you are with at the moment…

Turns out your happiness (or any other mood) can influence the mood of people three degrees of separation away from you. These are people who don’t even know you and have had no contact with you … zero  … and your moods can “infect” even them.

Here are a few more details …

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Here is a great research paper showing that the quality of a person’s social skills is as important as their test scores when it comes to getting a good job. And now we can put a dollar figure on the difference social skills make to your pocket book.

Give yourself a 12 % raise !

This is an important research based finding for Leaders and shows the workplace value of the Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ) popularized by Daniel Goleman. It is also super good news for all of us with teenage children who are popular and simultaneously sporting a GPA less than 3.0 !

This was a very large … long study! The September edition of “Social Science Research” documented the researchers followed 11,000 tenth graders for 10 years. Here is what they found … measurements of skills such as

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In this week’s issue of Business Week, Jack and Suzy Welch took a crack at answering this Age Old Question in their column “The Welchway”.

Here is the Question: Do you really have to be an Extrovert to be a powerful team leader or can a more introverted person rise up the corporate ladder with equal ease. This is a very important question since the world of people is divided pretty equally between the more Extroverted and Introverted Personalities.

Now, Jack Welch says the answer is “YES” … We say “NO” … here’s why …

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Are you charged with building and managing a high performing team in your business and not sure where to start.

Here is a process borrowed from the Executive Coaching world that can bring you tremendous results very quickly … it’s called “3-D Objectives”. The name is due to its focus on three distinct dimensions of performance that are critical to any team’s success:

• Routine Activities
• Problem Solving
• Innovation

Here’s how it Works …

Take some time to sit down with each team member and coach them
until they are clear on their objectives in each of the following
three areas.

Now if you are put off by the term “Coach” - let me reassure you that Coaching is actually a pretty simple process of asking Open Ended Questions and then Listening carefully to the answers. I have included multiple possible questions in this post … in fact, you could just print this off and use it as your “cheat sheet for your own 3-D Objectives sessions with your people.

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*** Dimension 1 - Routine ***
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