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 out of my mouth?” How ...
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 he’s wearing his sunglasses on his foreh...
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 be required to lead.
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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 that ties to IMM...
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 believe it’s quite e...
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 employee o...
In his Forbes.com article titled Here Are The Top 5 Soft Skills I Look For In Candidates, Mark Pena opens by saying, “In an automating workforce, soft skills are the irreplaceably human element of work - and the thing employers are desperate to find.”
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard th...
In order to become really effective with that idea of Alliance Feedback that I referenced as I closed the last post, and form authentic alliances (relationships) with the team members we’re responsible for leading, we need to develop another essential quality of leadership; we need to become intenti...
In the last post, we looked at a few things that will stand out in the behaviors of the more DRIVEN folks when their emotions are running full speed ahead. We also looked at what we may want to consider doing, at least when it’s within our control, in order to ease some of the tension in the situati...
Once we understand the framework for accurately picking up on the emotions of the person we’re interacting with, by recognizing and understanding their behaviors, we can begin honing the fourth component of emotional intelligence - relationship development.
Let’s be honest, building strong relation...
In unpacking the first two components of emotional intelligence, self-awareness and self-management, I referenced the research William Marston did almost 100 years ago as he prepared to write The Emotions of Normal People. Before we dive into the third component, I want you to really think about the...
Many of us intuitively recognize where we’re strong and where we have blind spots. Experience can serve as an amazing teacher IF we’re willing to analyze it and we’re willing to take action based on what we learn from analyzing it. The challenge someone who’s as impatient as I tend to be can run int...
