I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Leadership is HARD! I’m not suggesting that it’s complicated or difficult, just that it nearly always brings a heavy mental and emotional burden. Fulfilling our own responsibilities is often a complicated task in itself but accepting responsibility for the ...
Leading with a clear purpose, whether that’s drawing from the power of having a clear purpose for why and how we lead the team members who are counting on us or through how we provide that same kind of clear purpose for each individual on the team, is often some of the most important work we’ll do f...
If we’re going to earn the kind of buy-in that yields the 57 percent increase in discretionary effort and 20 percent improvement in individual performance detailed in the Harvard Business Review article I referenced multiple times throughout What’s Killing Your Profitability?, there’s no better way ...
As we looked at how the power of having a clear purpose can help leaders navigate some of the toughests scenarios they’ll face, I suggested that they’ll also need to provide at least as much specificity for the team members they lead and shared how my son accepted a position for five dollars less pe...
If we’re going to lead with a clear purpose, providing the oh-so-necessary clarity for the team members who are counting on us, having a firm grasp on a purpose of our own that truly is rewarding can be the difference maker when we need to push through the tough times - and there will most definitel...
Just for the sake of setting a foundation, let’s assume we - as the leader of our team - have an incredibly clear purpose that gets us out of bed each morning, ready to charge hell with a water pistol! Let’s also assume that having that kind of clarity personally allows us to be able to detail the s...
If someone as driven as the friend I mentioned before can lose some motivation or feel burnout when they don’t feel like they’re making a meaningful impact, I’m convinced anyone with any level of leadership responsibility will too - sooner or later! And if business owners and leaders need a clear pu...
If you really think about the challenge my friend shared with me in running one of his businesses, I’m betting you can relate! To that end, I think it’s safe to assume we’ve all felt that way at some point regardless of the role we’re in. In chapter eight of What’s Killing Your Profitability?, I emp...
During a phone call with a lifelong friend, I heard one of the most unique combinations of passion and despair that I can remember. He shared how he felt like he was just going through the motions in one aspect of his professional life, grinding his teeth through each project he completed, but const...
If we think back to how we started this look at Leadership Misunderstood, the biggest myths we’ve taken aim at here were few but extremely common:
- People automatically follow a business owner, executive, manager (or whatever other title you want to insert here) because their paycheck depends on i...
As we started down this path, I shared a piece of John Maxwell’s story about how he learned that influence was far more important than a title or position when it came to getting anyone to follow you. And let’s be honest: if no one is following, we ain’t leading!
To provide a personal response to D...
Now that we’ve identified a few of the most common misconceptions (or myths) around how leadership impacts EVERY organization and we’ve connected the dots on how productivity and profitability come into play for nonprofits and public sector organizations just as much as they do for those of us over ...
