Handling negative situations

To feel better, feel worse.

How hard is it to keep that sunny outlook going when you are surrounded by negative people?

For some reason, we feel we should be above this, that we can maintain our personal dignity despite the environment conspiring to press all our buttons.

Can we actually escape it?

I wonder. Many people learn to not react. That gets you part of the way. It also avoids escalation. In the words of my daughter, a closed mouth gathers no foot.

Click to read more ...

Walking the talk

Had any courageous conversations lately?

Leadership is mostly about managing change. It is easy to lead from the front when you’ve got a following breeze. It’s when you run out of wind that it gets tough: your business slumps; office politics take a turn for the worse; there’s a problem with your best client; you top sales team is getting poached.

These are normal business issues but sorting them out can mean changing the way things are done. Unfortunately, that also often means changing behavior – either yours or someone else’s.

Click to read more ...

Why you need to collaborate

It’s not just good for everyone else

Collaboration gets a lot of traction in management commentary. Wherever your look, we are encouraged to form alliances. Even Harvard Business Review recently devoted an entire issue to it. Everyone, it seems, wants to work together.

Teamwork, as collaboration was once known, has always been a key to success. What has shifted is the preparedness for greater collaboration across traditional boundaries.

Diversity has been acknowledged – not for its political correctness but for the fact that cross-fertilization of opinion and perspective leads to more robust decisions.

Click to read more ...

Want a more collaborative enterprise?

Make a simple start: encourage joint responsibility.

Collaboration might be the buzz word of the moment but “command and control” is still around in management behavior. It sort of goes with the territory. If you are in charge, you figure you have to lead from the front.

It’s a hard model to break. Even if you practice that core management skill – effective delegation – you invariably just delegate the right to command and control to some other person.

You tell them what you want, give them the responsibility and the requisite power and let them get on with it. Individual responsibility, rather than shared responsibility, is often embedded in business culture. This kind of delegation perpetuates it.

Try something different.

Click to read more ...

Diversity: It's not just about race and gender

What about smart and dumb? 

The case for more diversity in management is well-researched. Teams that encourage minority opinions regularly make better decisions than those with a narrow view.

That should be no surprise. Anyone who has stress-tested a “great idea” knows it will be more robust if it’s intensely critiqued. While technical ability and relevant knowledge play a big part in effective management, its openness and enquiry that fine-tune successful decisions.

Click to read more ...