In one short segment pulled from The Last Dance, Michael Jordan shares these powerful statements:

• “Winning has a price, and leadership has a price. I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right…”
• “Onc...

I can’t remember which commercial it was that coined the phrase “Be like Mike” but I do remember Detective Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) quoting it to chide his partner, Mike Lowrey (Will Smith), in one of the Bad Boys movies… Michael Jordan’s incredible work ethic that I referenced last time was...

In addition to showing humility to every individual on the teams we lead in a way that exemplifies just how much we truly value them as individuals, we need to do everything in our power to earn something from them that can never be bought…

For more than twenty years now, I’ve heard John Maxwell em...

Once we’ve accepted a leadership role, there’s never a shortage of things demanding our time and attention. That’s just part of what we signed up for! That said, one thing we just can’t lose sight of, especially if we want to build the kind of leadership presence we’ve been looking at up until now, ...

Let’s go back to that less than engaging experience I mentioned before where a fellow not named Bret Michaels soured my opinion of every bit of music he and his band had put out during their entire career… He and his band released an EP and five full studio albums before 1983 & 1990 and they had qui...

I’ll be very transparent here, I know my limitations… I'm certain I’ve never even been able to sing as well as Vince Neil (if we can really call what he does now singing), which is a fairly low bar at this point! In fact, I haven’t believed I could sing for more than twenty years - which just happen...

Once we accept that it’s way more than what we say, there’s a lot more we’ll need to consider than just our tone and our body language. If we’re really leading the team members who are counting on us, they’ll be watching what we do when those words aren’t coming out of our mouths just as much as the...

Think back to the scenario I shared as we started digging into the biggest challenges we’re facing in the workplace today where my friend told his students they’d better have a really good excuse for not performing well in his class… He wasn’t just being harsh, he showed up with one good limb even a...

I maintain that I’ve never seen anyone truly value something they didn’t earn… I can’t think of classmates through high school who had some of the fanciest clothing, cars, or whatever but treated those things with very little respect. I remember watching numerous folks party their way through colleg...

Having looked at some of the biggest challenges we’re facing in the workplace today, as well as some of the issues that come from handing out trophies to folks who aren’t even participating, let’s change gears and look at some things we do intentionally as leaders to avoid most of those things in ou...

Let’s assume we’ve accepted our leadership responsibility and we’ve actually following through by doing the work necessary to make sure our team members are indeed measuring the right things so they have a clear picture of their performance AND we’ve provided them with absolute clarity about how tho...

I closed last time with a less than stellar example of how influence, good or bad, can impact the overall direction of a team. And in that particular scenario I detailed, the person who had the influence and did more than his share of steering the ship carried no positional authority at all. If anyt...