Leader's Beacon

Front Line Leadership Tips for Supervisors, Team Leaders and Managers Sports coaching vs the Voodoo approach Historically, trainers and coaches rely on the trickle down method of impacting an organization: train or coach the boss and then everyone who reports to that person will change their behavior and the organization will benefit. Or sometimes the [...]

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It being New Year’s time again, Bill George recently blogged about “Five Resolutions for Aspiring Leaders.” He talked about things you can do to develop yourself, beyond what you do in your direct job: such as finding a mentor, setting up a mastermind type group with other emerging and aspiring leaders,volunteering in the community in [...]

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Whenever a leader is within the sightline of his or her employees, communication is occuring. What message is your face and body language communicating without you even having to open your mouth? Communication continues to be a problem for virtually every organization. You would think that after recognizing the problem for this long we would [...]

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It’s been a smart idea for years. When good employees leave your organization for greener pastures and the departure is amicable, why not keep in contact? You never know, some may find that that grass isn’t, in fact, greener and that your firm was a pretty good place to work after all. A recent WSJ [...]

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Reading about Steve Jobs’ management style is like reading about exactly how you are not supposed to manage people. He openly and viciously criticized the work of employees and then would take some of those ideas and present them as his own. When he couldn’t persuade or seduce someone into doing what he wanted he [...]

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The BBC’s Katty Kay and ABC’s Claire Shipman co-authored a book a couple of years back called Womenomics. In it they cite, among other things, a number of companies where the presence of women in among top leadership had a positive effect on the firm’s financial success. For example: Accounting firm Ernst & Young’s research [...]

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There isn’t much news lately about the NBA, other than the whole lockout fiasco and I don’t feel like getting into that mess. However, I happened to read that Shaquille O’Neal is about to release his autobiography, and news outlets are buzzing about the fact that in the book Shaq revisits his feud with former [...]

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Some of the organizations I work with are facing an interesting paradox: On the one hand the culture/satisfaction survey results aren’t where management would like to see them. On the other hand, the feedback I’m receiving says that employees care deeply about the organization and its success. How can these two seemingly opposite data points [...]

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In a perfect world, leaders take the blame, but share the credit. Too bad the world is far from perfect. Oftentimes leaders take more than their fair share of credit, but hardly any blame. Why is that? Do leaders think they are invisible to blame but are always responsible for a company’s success? Listen, just [...]

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Experience is the best teacher. Learning from your mistakes is powerful. Innovation requires taking risks. But how much tolerance should leaders have for repeated mistakes? What is the difference between someone on the learning curve versus an employee who is incompetent? This subject came up when I was chatting with the senior leader at one [...]

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Back in the 90′s the Royal Bank of Canada had a series of TV commercials touting the theme, “Building a Better Bank, One Customer at a Time.” The message, as I recall, was that RBC treats each customer as a unique individual and strives to win them over, one-at-a-time. I frequently refer to this ad [...]

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Ah, Mark Zuckerberg. The brainchild behind the product that everyone wishes they created. Okay, when you think of a leader, Mark Zuckerberg is probably not the first person you would automatically draw inspiration from. He’s not the best speaker, wears t-shirts no matter the occasion, and gives mediocre interviews. And as a result there are [...]

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Front line supervisors and managers can place employees in a prison of performance by affixing a label. Once the label is attached to the person it can prevent the leader from seeing the potential for the individual. If the label is troublemaker, then the supervisor or manager might be reinforcing the very behaviour they would [...]

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When I say the word ‘ambitious,’ who is the first person that comes to mind? Is it the political leader who will stop at nothing to win an election? The CEO who aggressively pursues expansion plans, regardless of the economic climate? Maybe it makes you think of your favorite NFL quarterback whose competitiveness kept them [...]

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Some organizations, especially ones that are more bureaucratic can begin to develop a culture where the punishment for mistakes exceeds the praise for success. Organizations can get bogged down because employees are focused on playing it safe, fearing career-limiting consequences for making mistakes. In sporting terms, they play defense more than offence. This hiding tendency [...]

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Everyone gets stuck in a rut. It happens to us all whether we are presidents, students, managers, baseball players, or stay-at-home parents. We might have days, weeks, or even months, where we feel like we’ve lost our focus, take longer than necessary to achieve goals, or simply become disconnected from our work. It’s not a [...]

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