Recruiting + Culture Change
If you lead in the service industry and have had the luxury of having enough qualified people to fill the positions you have open, you are doing something- probably many things right. Insufficient staffing levels mean less ability to push costs down as a percentage of revenue. In the restaurant business, the most profitable thing […]
The Inside Story of Conflict
“If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.” – Cheryl Richardson It seems counterintuitive that facing conflict is a method for maintaining inner peace. All outward conflict with others starts as a war inside the self. On one end of the battlefield is the way things are, and on […]
Express Your Inner Coach
You’re probably a leader because you are good at getting things to happen. If you are in a high-level position, then you’ve also been rewarded for your ability to solve problems and to get things done. As you advance in your career, the challenges of leadership pull your time and attention away from what you […]
The “A” Word
Of all the things we manage, coordinating the work of others is one of the most complicated and unpredictable. Not only do we need to ensure that deadlines are met, and that the quality and quantity of work are up to standards, we also have to deal with each team member’s idiosyncrasies and our own […]
What Shared Commitment Sounds Like
For this blog, I wanted to interview someone who has conducted their own experiments sharing leadership. It’s one thing to hear it from a promoter of these concepts and ideas about leadership (that would be me) and another thing to hear it from someone who has taken the concepts and ideas and implemented them in […]
Quality Circles and Shared Leadership
I can remember being a kid in the 60s and 70s, when “Made in Japan” meant cheap and crappy. It was (in addition to being printed on the bottom of cheap merchandise) a metaphor for things that didn’t have integrity. In 1950, an American named William Edwards Deming was working with industries in Japan to […]
Shared Leadership
One simple way to understand the workings of shared leadership is this: Responsibility + Authority = Power The type of power I’m referring to is the power of each person in your organization to be their full and authentic selves—challenging themselves because it feels satisfying. In many organizations, this kind of power is not being […]
What Makes a Meeting Great?
Clowns. I have a good friend, Shawn, who is a professional clown. I had just finished reading a book about The Corporate Jester and I thought of Shawn, and decided to try a little experiment. The jester in a king’s court was an essential function of the kingdom. Kings knew that the pressure on their […]
How Skill Building Really Works: Part Two
In part one, we walked through the four stages of competence: And, we walked through a scenario where you (fictional), led me (also fictional) through the progression of mastering how to read a P&L. If you need a refresher, here is part one. A second model, Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Model was the model that […]
How Skill Building Really Works: Part One
Every leader I know would like more freedom. Sharing leadership has provided me with more freedom. A large part of sharing leadership is developing leaders to share it with. Learning about the Conscious Competence Theory and a related model called the Situational Leadership Model (to explore in Part Two) have helped me develop other leaders […]