Ben Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” The 1-2-3 approach reminds leaders to involve their team when making important decisions. Every leader can develop a more effective and efficient team by asking three simple questions. Continue →
Leadership
The Iceberg of Ignorance
“The Iceberg of Ignorance”, a study popularly attributed to consultant Sidney Yoshida concludes: “Only 4% of an organization's front-line problems are known by top management, 9% are known by middle management, 74% by supervisors and 100% by employees..." Although the Yoshida study involved numerous mid-sized organizations, the basic findings tend to be the same in organizations of any size. Continue →
How to Sap the Enthusiasm from Those You Lead
“You won’t believe what they did to us at work today!” I’m sure that you have heard this comment before. You may have even said it yourself. Decision-making is a continual activity within any organization with lots of leaders involved at all levels of the organization. I’ve discovered that poor decision-making can sap the enthusiasm of your people and create poor results for your entire Continue →
Four Excuses that Destroy Effective Leadership
Think of how you might feel if you arrived at work one day and your work-station had been moved. You didn’t know it was going to happen, and you don’t know why it happened. Then you learn that your senior manager had decided they wanted to ‘rearrange’ the seating so it would be easier for them to remember your names, or your faces, and where you sat! Continue →
Skip the RedBull and Energize Your Team with 1-2-3!
A few years ago, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced that they were going to dramatically change their program for purchasing services from our industry. In advance of implementation, they issued a set of “business rules” – hundreds of pages of them! Although these changes surely overwhelmed some of our competitors, we used the 1-2-3 decision-making process to energize our team and tackle Continue →
Decision Making – from Mr. Idea Man to 1-2-3
For years I was the “Mr. Idea Man” in our company. But that’s my job...isn’t it? As the leader of the company, I thought it was my job to generate the ideas and map-out how to implement them. Eventually, I learned that there was a better way to lead my team - a way to increase innovation and manage change at the same time. Continue →
Four Ways to Lead and Motivate Your Team
Finally, let’s explore the final question in the Motivation Survey. Before we dig into today's post, you might want to scan the survey again (click the link in the previous sentence) to refresh yourself on the brief survey. Continue →
What Motivates You?
In the previous blog post we reviewed the first six statements of my motivation survey. Continue →
A Summary of Process and Content
I’ve been writing about this concept of Process and Content™ for several blog posts, and today I’d like to summarize the concepts. This post should provide a good reference piece for this principle. Perhaps most importantly, I’d like to challenge you to apply what you have learned to your personal and business life. John Maxwell describes the greatest gap is the gap between knowing and doing. Continue →
Where Most People Go Wrong With Leadership – and How to Remedy It!
The other day I read a quote by an unknown author, “Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.” Process-oriented parents are preparing their child (the person). However, content-oriented parents are preparing the path (the thing). Continue →