Lower turnover… Increased productivity… Both sound great, but what if we still just can’t find anything in the budget for leadership development? I mean, what if we’re not able to actually capture real dollars even if we do have improvements in both the areas we’ve...
If you’re willing to wear that cape that comes with truly leading your team, you know that phrase I shared as we started down this path won’t be one you’ll be using as your own any time soon! That whole idea of “I’m only responsible for what I say, not for what you...
If we really want that strong foundation for leadership communication skills, learning to know each member of our team as well as we possibly can is the best starting point I can suggest. To that end, showing our team members that we’re actually interested in who they are rather than just...
At this point, I feel like I’ve pounded the drum loudly enough about communication being a responsibility we can’t duck if we expect to lead anyone around us. And I think you’re probably on the same page with me that the messages we send as leaders are far more than just what we...
Remember that quote I shared from the Snoopy meme, “I’m only responsible for what I say, not for what you understand,” as we started looking at how important communication is for anyone in a leadership role? While I have seen or heard more than a few folks in supervisory or...
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...
The one responsibility we can’t duck if we want to lead is communication! But that’s never as simple as just saying the right words!
So picture the movie Rush Hour, where Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker first meet and Tucker asks Chan “Do you understand the words that are coming...
I’m guessing you’ve seen it too… Heck, I’ve had it sent directly to me in emails and I’ve had folks say it to me face to face! Most recently, I saw it in a social media meme with a picture of Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoon strip, where Snoopy has a frown and...
Having recently looked at how important it is for each of us to develop self awareness as leaders, let’s get down to business and begin working through ways we can become strategic about building that self-awareness so we’re prepared to deal with the toughest person we’ll ever...
In The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni mentioned that two of the signs were important for every team member to understand if we want them to have a clear picture of how they can engage and why it matters. We’ve already hit on IRRELEVANCE and we’ll touch on something...
Last time I shared the definition of soft skills from the Oxford dictionary, “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.” While I think that provides us with a fairly decent starting point for what soft skills are, I don’t...
An article I recently read on the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website titled In Search of Soft Skills: Why you should teach employees to be more resilient, communicative, and creative opened by stating “Being gifted at performing the technical aspects of a job can take an...
