Originally published February 4, 2021 on Forbes At your best, you choose love. You feel fear, or anxiety, or selfishness, or anger, or hate. But you choose love. You choose love because you’ve chosen fear and anxiety before. And it paralyzed you. You choose love because you’ve chosen selfishness before. And it isolated you. You…
Originally published January 27, 2021 on Forbes Good leaders know that alignment is critical in building successful teams. Unfortunately, many of them don’t do it often enough. Frequently leaders adopt a one-and-done, event-based mentality, for example, aligning at yearly or quarterly strategy meetings. While alignment should certainly happen at regular strategy meetings, it should also…
Originally published November 17, 2020 on Forbes [Spoiler alert: Yes!! If you don’t you’re dead in this economy.] I debated this question with the COO of medium-sized technology firm recently. His take was that while leadership at every level sounded nice, in reality it was impractical and unwise. His argument surrounded five reasons: Some people…
Originally published November 13, 2020 on Forbes A global pandemic is raging. Racial tensions are smoldering. Economic inequality is increasing. An environmental crisis is looming. And a partisan chasm in the US is widening. The challenges we’re facing didn’t just show up this year or even the over the last four years. They’ve been simmering…
Transformations don’t fail. Top teams fail to deliver transformation.
Building a stellar team is one of the toughest things to do in business.
Last year, after reading my writing on responsible leadership, Patagonia executives reached out to ask if I’d look at Yvon Chouinard’s new book, The Future of the Responsible Company. I thought it was excellent. We need more leaders with Chouinard’s guts and more companies with Patagonia’s constancy of purpose. I ended up reading his other two books as well and writing about it in Forbes. Full article below.
Strong senior leadership teams (SLTs) are the heart of successful organizations. In competitive and fast-paced environments they collectively sense the future and drive performance. For a variety of reasons SLTs are difficult to develop. They’re frequently filled with strong personalities and complicated politics. Increasingly, they’re geographically dispersed. Their work together is often long-term, complex, and ill-defined. All of which leads members to gravitate toward the more familiar and immediate work of running their own organizations over the work of the SLT. Despite the potential value of SLTs, they commonly end up defaulting into loosely-connected info-sharing groups rather than cohesive direction-setting teams.
Life is uncertain. Whether in the business world or at home, we feel an increasing loss of control over our future, and find ourselves paralyzed by indecision. Fear prevents people from taking chances and making game-changing moves. Anything other than the status quo appears inherently risky and reckless.
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