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Quietly Firing the Quiet Quitters
Last month we wrote about The Great Resignation and the employee engagement challenges that have arisen post-Covid. But let’s quit discussing that and start quietly talking about quitting… “Quiet quitting” is a catchy and popular buzz phrase to describe employees who are disengaged from their jobs and who do the least amount of work to…
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New CEOs – Do Only the Things Only You Can Do
Being a CEO is tough. But…what do they actually do, anyway? Aren’t all of the other people at the company doing all of the actual work? Maybe so, but we still need CEOs. According to a McKinsey study, the things that CEOs do create 45 percent – almost half – of a company’s performance results….
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Functional Teams are Good; Ultra-Functional even Better
Working with teams of people to accomplish a common business goal can be frustrating and perplexing – with the threat of dysfunction and meltdown ever-present. And the added complexity of today’s remote, Zoom-centric teams as a result of the pandemic hasn’t made the task any easier. Yet creating healthy and functional teams is one of…
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Leadership Amid Chaos
If you thought business decision-making was already hard, how about decision-making when there is no actual solution – yet a decision still has to be made? Yes, that’s VUCA again, tying back to our blog post last month about a “VUCA world” (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). In the book Leaders Make the Future, author…
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Google’s Leadership Test – 5-minutes and 13 questions
What if you could identify in 5-minutes whether or not someone had the potential to be a great leader at your company? It might sound far-fetched, but when Google thinks they can do just that by asking only 13 short questions, it’s worth paying attention. Identifying leadership talent and putting that talent in the right…
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Danger in the Power Grid – of Leadership
Would you stay silent if you knew your boss was making a decision that would have terrible consequences? If you were a South Korean co-pilot in 1997, you just might. In fact, you might even go down with the plane rather than question your captain. Power is often unequally distributed in societies and also within…
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After-Action Review – Final Presentation
There is a discrepancy between what we experience and what we remember from an experience. According to the Peak-End Rule, conceived by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman1 and his collaborator Amos Tversky, “people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end…”2 rather…
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Business Simulations as Leadership Observation Labs
A quote often attributed to Plato states, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” And when the play takes place within the serious gaming of business simulations, the discoveries and insights can be extremely useful in leadership development. Business simulations provide a fast-moving backdrop…
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Corporate Culture and Other Immeasurable Things.
In response to the recent Wells Fargo fiasco, Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, says that setting corporate values is not enough to guide good behavior and decision-making. You need to also measure the behavior you’re looking for. People don’t do what you expect (listen to the customer, respect diversity, develop employees), but what you…
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“Sandpaper” Leadership – The Importance of Grit in Business
Accomplishing anything worthwhile in life requires determination and tenacity. But is there another level of “courageous persistence” that can offset a lack of pure talent? The characteristics of grit and resilience have been getting a lot of attention in business and in education. Recently, some of our international clients have made resilience a focus of…