Last time, I shared an example that I hoped would help make the case for the clear difference between managing and leading an organization. One is just as important as the other and neither can be overlooked, but we cannot mistakenly consider those two very different actions to be one in the same! T...

The entire time I was in manufacturing, nearly twenty years, the facility I worked in held a meeting each Tuesday afternoon that was often referred to as The Leadership Team Meeting. The plant manager led this meeting and each of the department managers participated, reviewing the metrics they were ...

I closed last time by promising to share what I learned a few years ago about the origin of soft skills so let’s dive right in!

Many of the civilian folks I’ve interacted with for the majority of my life have had the perception that people in the military, especially those in commanding roles, are ...

Now that we have a solid definition of servant leadership to work from, and we’ve looked at some servant leadership practices that will help us meet the needs of our team members based on their own behavioral style, let’s close the loop with some final thoughts on how we can move this from being jus...

Having looked ways we can truly serve the needs of our team members with each of the first three behavioral styles - DRIVEN, INSPIRING, and SUPPORTIVE - to this point, let’s close the loop with the final 25% of the population; the ones who tend to be Reserved and Task-Oriented. Please understand tha...

I remember seeing a Marriott commercial a while back that closed by saying something along the lines of “we treat our guests like we’d want to be treated.” Ties right in with what nearly all of us know as The Golden Rule, huh? Around that same time, a friend of mine had shared something he experienc...

With a solid foundation of Defining Servant Leadership in place, we can now focus our attention on making sure we’re serving the team we’re leading in a way that really matters to them! This WILL NOT be a one-size-fits-all approach…

Before we start down that path though, I’d like to share something...

When I trained teams on behavior-based safety across North America, a point we always covered was that you can’t see someone’s attitude or their emotions but we can get a solid read on their attitude and their emotions by observing their behavior. Today as Cindy and I provide Strategic Leadership Co...

As I dug a bit deeper into the SHRM article I referenced last time, I liked how they tied servant leadership back to early Eastern culture citing Laozi, a 5th century Chinese philosopher as suggesting that “when the best leaders finished their work, their people would say ‘we did it ourselves.’” Tha...

So now that we’ve established that not everyone defines servant leadership the same way, let’s build a little bit stronger foundation for all that this idea really involves before we start studying some characteristics we can work to incorporate into our own leadership styles or examples we learn fr...

I’ve heard the term servant leadership thrown around for years; I’m guessing you have too… That said, the entire time I’ve been operating under my own idea of what it meant. Truth be told, I certainly didn’t come up with the picture in my head of what servant leadership looks like all by myself. Lik...

We started down this path by looking at some Essential Qualities of Leadership, then we looked at just how critical Leadership in Management really is, and we’ve worked through several Qualities of a Bad Leader - which I believe provide us with great insight on what NOT to do! Let’s look at one fina...