Are leaders born or made? One could argue for either position.

The real issue is that all leaders can improve. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or a high-potential team member, you can boost your performance in five crucial leadership areas.

More than half a million business books deal with leadership acumen, but studying the most respected experts’ ideas reveals a consensus on the foremost roles required for effectiveness. (photo courtesy renjith krishnan/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

In The Leadership Code, Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman have synthesized current thinking on leadership and developed a framework that blends idealism with realism. They’ve distilled leadership into five core rules, regardless of one’s industry or business environment:

Having a framework for the most essential leadership skills will help you avoid quick fixes and business-book fads. While the scope of leadership may seem overwhelming, five golden rules provide much-needed focus. It’s easy to get lost if you pursue the wrong priorities.

This article summarizes the five essential rules for leadership effectiveness and provides a framework that covers the entire leadership landscape, so that you can focus on the best ways to develop your talent.
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This is a brief synopsis of an 1800 & 950-word article and Article Nuggets*, suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

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• Five Golden Rules
• Rule 1: Shape the future
• Rule 2: Make things happen
• Rule 3: Engage today’s talent
• Rule 4: Build the next generation
• Rule 5: Invest in yourself
• A Review of Leadership Theories
• Understanding the Five Roles
• Personal Proficiency

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Why do we admire celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and Bill Clinton?

They make you feel like you’re the most important person in the room.

They excel at listening—a skill that separates great personalities from the near-great. (photo courtesy Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

When you meet Clinton for the first time, he says something positive to acknowledge you. His listening skills are laser-focused on the person he’s with. We spend 80 percent of our waking time on four communications tasks:

1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Speaking
4. Listening

While listening accounts for 50 percent of our communications, we pay little attention to this important process and tend to take it for granted. We erroneously assume that listening is a passive activity and that everyone knows how to listen.

In fact, most of us find it hard to maintain the prolonged concentration required for truly effective listening. To be a good listener, you need to adopt proactive habits.

This article provides suggestions on how to become a better listener.

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This is a brief synopsis of an 800-word article and Article Nuggets,*suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

The complete article includes these important concepts:

• Listening, but Not Hearing
• Why Don’t We Listen?
• Test Your Listening Skills
• 9 Keys to Better Listening

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“So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work.” ~ Peter Drucker

As any fan of The Office can attest, negative managerial behavior severely affects employees’ work lives. Managers’ day-to-day and moment-to-moment actions also create a ripple effect, directly facilitating or impeding the organization’s ability to function. (photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

The best managers recognize their power to influence and strive to build teams with great inner work lives. In The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Harvard Business Press, 2011), Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer describe how people with great inner work lives have:

• Consistently positive emotions
• Strong motivation
• Favorable perceptions of the organization, their work and their colleagues

The worst managers undermine others’ inner work lives, often unwittingly. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees at seven companies, Amabile and Kramer found surprising results on the factors that affect performance.

What matters most is forward momentum in meaningful work—in a word, progress. Managers who recognize the need for even small wins set the stage for high performance.

But surveys of CEOs and project leaders reveal that 95 percent fundamentally misunderstand the need for this critical motivator.

This is a brief synopsis of an 1300 & 800-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

The complete 1300-word article includes these important concepts:

•  What Really Motivates Us?
• Facilitating Progress
  • Catalysts
  • Nourishers
• Dealing with Setbacks
• Inhibitors
• Toxins
• The Daily Progress Checklist
• Discovering Your Inner Work Life

“In a culture that sometimes equates work with suffering, it is revolutionary to suggest that the best inward sign of vocation is deep gladness—revolutionary but true.” ~ Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

People prefer leisure to work—no surprise there. What is surprising is that they report more optimal feelings of being “in the zone” when engaged in work.

This strange, yet revealing, paradox may contribute to why many U.S. retirees experience depression and ultimately return to work.

While we clearly associate leisure with pleasure, we seem to have an unwarranted prejudice against work: We automatically associate it with pain. This belief is so deeply rooted that it distorts our perceptions of actual experiences. It’s a learned response that severely limits our potential for happiness at work.

To achieve professional satisfaction, you must experience—and consciously record—the positive emotions you feel on the job. When we fail to recognize pleasurable moments at work, focusing solely on the negative, we miss out on experiencing more happiness and satisfaction. Each of us must find ways to extract more meaning and fulfillment from the “daily grind.”

This article provides suggestions on how to make work more like play.

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This is a brief synopsis of a 800-word article and Article Nuggets*, suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

The complete article includes these important concepts:

•  Finding Flow
• Action Steps
• Lifelong Learning
• Making Work More Like Play

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(Photo by photostock, freedigitalphotos.net)

Baby Boomers are lingering in the workplace. Economic uncertainty has caused many to remain on the job.

The younger Gen X and Gen Y are growing impatient to ascend to leadership responsibilities, and new graduates are knocking at HR’s door in record numbers.

Until we see the inevitable changing of the guard over the next decade, the workplace will be inhabited by a multigenerational stew. Learning how to work, live and play together is crucial.

Baby Boomers occupy most positions of power and responsibility on organizational charts. Most of today’s corporate management practices still reflect the systems and values of their predecessors, the veterans.

Gen Xers and Millennials aren’t interested in “the way things have always been done.” Rather, they’re single-mindedly focused on what it takes to reach their perceived career destination.

This group shuns past definitions of success: climbing the company ladder and earning the rewards that come with greater responsibility. The company ladder, in their view, is irrelevant.

This article summarizes the four main ways generations differ at work, a must-read at any age.
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This is a brief synopsis of an 1800 & 900-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

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• Who Are the Generations?
• How Are They Different?
• Clash Point #1: How We View Work
• Clash Point #2: Communications
• Clash Point #3: Meetings
• Clash Point #4: Learning
• Issues You Can’t Ignore

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first-person pronoun, links

“We hear a great deal of talk about the midlife crisis of the executive. It is mostly boredom.” ~ Peter Drucker, management expert

At some point in your career, you may sense a creeping malaise. You’re no longer enthusiastic about the day ahead. Perhaps you’re experiencing a mid-career crisis—the sudden realization that you’re no longer a rising star.

After 20 years of all-too-familiar work, you’re good at your job, but you’re not learning or contributing as much. You seldom feel the challenge or particularly satisfied, yet bills must be paid, bosses remain unpleasant, projects fail, and work stagnates.

You try to focus on your true values and the reasons you initially chose your line of work. But the daily grind has somehow taken over, and your work life has been reduced to reports, data, meetings and managing difficult coworkers.

You may think about switching jobs, but this presents additional risks. A “grass is greener” mentality often leads to disappointments, similar to changing seats on the Titanic.

Welcome to the mid-career challenge. A new career may mean a loss of seniority, lower pay, a geographic move and a new set of problems that closely resemble those you’ve left behind. But staying in a job that seems to be going nowhere, filled with mind-numbing work, means resigning yourself to a lack of growth and meaning.

This article about mid-career challenge asks questions to explore your values and three key personal-development components with your coach or mentor, to rekindle your drive.

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This is a brief synopsis of a 900-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

The complete article includes these important concepts:

• Before Jumping Ship…
• Values in Action
• Know and Manage Yourself
• Update Your Identity

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Leading people and organizations is fundamentally more complicated than it was 20 years ago—and it’s not getting any easier. Economic and global uncertainties, along with innovative technologies, complicate efforts to run a business.

Businesses are also becoming more intrinsically complex. It’s harder to predict outcomes because intricate systems interact in unexpected ways.

Interpreting data also proves more challenging because:

1. The degree of complexity may lie beyond our cognitive limits.
2. Past behavior may not predict future actions.
3. In a complex system, an outlier may have a disproportionate impact.

Staying on track is much easier with a guide or checklist. Michael Useem, a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of  The Leadership Moment, has published The Leader’s Checklist to create a clear roadmap for navigating any situation. Key questions help customize the list to fit specific needs.

This article summarizes the leader’s checklist for clarity for managing complex organizations.
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This is a brief synopsis of a 1800 & 1000-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

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• Complicated Versus Complex
• Managerial Blindness
• Real Cooperation
• 12 Leader Checkpoints

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