Apr 18, 2023

Expectations of others and the role they play in our leadership paradigms



Those who lead inherit expectations from their team or organization. Some of those expectations are critical: Building healthy teams; serving one's staff; removing barriers; clarifying what is important and so on. All supervisors and leaders have an unwritten contractwith those they lead around these key issues. Leaders ought to pay close attention to those leadership traits that promote clarity,...

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Mar 09, 2023

Don't allow these issues to derail your great leadership




It is possible to have effective leadership skills and still undermine one's leadership. And this is not only a risk for young leaders for often for leaders that have seen significant success. 


Hubris. This should be obvious, but it isn't always! Success breeds confidence, and that confidence can cause us to overestimate our wisdom and underestimate our need for counsel. This can creep up on us...
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Jan 17, 2022

Three gifts every supervisor can give to their staff


 


Leaders come bearing gifts to their staff. They set the culture of the organization in positive and sometimes negative ways. The best leaders create a culture of clarity, development and optimism that we can accomplish our mission. All three of these are positive gifts to the staff they lead.


The gift of clarity is helping everyone be crystal clear as to what we are about and what our focus needs...
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Feb 04, 2019

A strategic exercise for every team or organizational leader in seven steps


Leaders assume that they know what they are doing. And in a general sense that is probably true. It is easy, however, to be so general in our direction that we miss the opportunities that a laser like focus could provide. General direction yields general results while focused direction yields focused results. So how do we move from the first to the second.

There is a simple strategic exercise that...
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Sep 25, 2018

When there is not adequate organizational clarity


If there is one thing that many organizations lack it is crystal clear clarity about who they are, what they want to accomplish and how they are going to get there. This is especially true of non-profits and ministries as the profit motive is not the driving factor. In fact, clarity is the glue that holds the organization together as it grows. In my consulting with numerous non-profits I have...
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Jul 16, 2016

Good leaders focus, notice but don't always fix


Good leaders are always focused - on a few critical areas that if they do not drive themselves the organization will not thrive and move forward. This is not as easy as it sounds. First one has to determine what those few critical areas are. Second, it takes a great deal of discipline for leaders to focus and not be distracted by many lesser things that need to wait so that the critical issues are...
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Jul 09, 2016

Our personal joy and happiness are always a matter of focus


There is one critical difference between those people who live with great happiness and those who live with great unhappiness. The former focus on the blessings in their lives while the latter focus on the deficits in their lives. It is a matter of focus and it makes the difference between a life of joy and a life of unhappiness.

Our personal happiness is not dependent on our life circumstances....
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