A simple, bold, inspirational vision can feel almost magical, bringing people throughout a company together around a common goal, developing strategies to achieve a better future. Unfortunately, building a vision has become more associated with a company’s top-level leadership than management. Even as a manager (and aspiring leader), however, there are a number of opportunities to get hands-on experience in shaping vision. Read the full article on hbr.org here to learn more a

Jennifer Porter, an executive and team coach at The Boda Group, recently wrote on HRR.org that leaders and teammates often describe their team as “dysfunctional," their teammates as "annoying," and everyone else as not knowing how to operate effectively. As an experienced team development practitioner, Jennifer knows that these are not accurate or helpful assessments of the situation. Teams are complex systems of individuals who bring different preferences, skills, experience

Over the past year, Ron Ashkenas, Partner Emeritus at Schaffer Consulting, and Brook Manville, Principal of Brook Manville, have been writing the Harvard Business Review Leader’s Handbook — a primer for aspiring leaders who want to take their careers to the next level. Part of the research for the book was interviewing over 40 successful leaders of large corporations, startups, and non-profits on their views about what it takes to become a leader. They explored years of publi

The power of persuasion is critical for any leader and certainly any CLO. Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Management Zoe Chance says there is an art to persuasion: timing your request for when people will be most receptive, giving them an opportunity to take action in that moment, and making it as easy as possible for them to take that action. Zoe says: "I find that a lot of the nicest, smartest, most respectful people have a complete misconception about influence a

The best leaders are coaches too. But what does coaching well entail? Daniel Goleman describes in his recent Korn Ferry Institute article that while clear goals, clear method, and trust result in effective coaching, the trust portion is often overlooked—impacting the effectiveness of coach-coachee relationships early on in the coaching engagement. More important than personality matches for coaching success, researchers have found that a strong working alliance, or trust, is

SoapBox is a software solutions company that builds a culture of healthy communication that helps leaders, managers and employees have one-on-ones, team-meetings, and company-wide conversations about the things that matter most to motivation and performance. In a recent blog article, SoapBox dug into their Question Suggester data to see which questions get used most often to start productive conversations, and posted the top 10 questions asked in real-life one-on-ones by real

We often call bosses who fill up a room with big ego and even bigger heart, who voice hard truths alongside hope, who make us work harder yet feel lighter, “rock stars,” to underscore their popular appeal. Some companies have a few of them; others, a handful. Among actual rock stars, however, there has long been only one Boss—Bruce Springsteen—and he is headed to Broadway this fall. His latest production, an intimate solo show, will combine readings from his recent autobiogra

McKinsey Partners Scott Keller and Mary Meaney are onto ten timeless truths about how the leadership role becomes increasingly demanding as more work is conducted remotely, traditional company boundaries become more porous, freelancers more commonplace, and partnerships more necessary. While technology will solve a number of the resulting operational issues, technological capabilities soon become commoditized. Amid the myriad sources of advice on how to build a top team, Kell

Strategy + Business explains how executive decision-makers can use their minds to transform organizations in an article on the neuroscience of strategic leadership. Click here to watch the video and understand how you can reprogram your brain to think differently. For instance: the more you use your mind to shift activity from the Low Road circuit (focus on problem-solving and expedience) to the High Road circuit (mentalizing and mindfuless which develop strategic leadership)

New CEOs face enormous challenges in setting a strategic direction in today’s volatile environment. To provide some guidance for transitioning CEOs, McKinsey & Company looked at the experiences of roughly 600 exceptional CEOs, (from S&P 500 companies over a recent 10-year period), and found that on average, externally-hired CEOs tend to pull more strategic levers than those who come from within, and outperform their internal counterparts over tenure. Exceptional CEOs were: mo

Simon Sinek, leadership expert, explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change in this innovative and appealing TEDx presentation. Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership—starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?". His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers, and how they all think, act and communicate in the exact same way—which is the complete opposite to everyone else. Watch this video to see

Steve Axelrod, advisor and coach to high-level executives on leadership, organizational dynamics and high-risk executive behavior, talks about How to Lead with an Open Mind in a January article from Chief Executive Magazine. Axelrod describes true open-mindedness as a critical but unappreciated component of CEO leadership, one that hasn't been studied in relation to leadership effectiveness. He discusses the key characteristics of open-mindedness and how it can be cultivated

After a recent conversation with Bill Pasmore at CCL, it struck me that his new book's subtitle: Navigating Churn in the Real World keenly captures the experience many of us have lived through this year—and perhaps the most critical capability required for leaders in 2017. In the CCL whitepaper It’s a New Game: Leading Complex, Continuous Change (PDF), Bill introduces key ideas for leading complex, continuous change, based on the experiences of leaders across a wide range of