I was sitting in a CEO’s office when he excused himself to take an important call. While he was on the phone, I read through the mission, vision, and values statements hanging on his wall. When he hung up, I asked, “How do these documents influence what happens out there in the office every day?”
All too predictably, he rolled his eyes and chuckled. “Not much.”
My advice to him was to do one of three things:
Continue reading Dangerous Mission Statements
It happens all the time. A client tells me about a difficult situation they’re dealing with and wants to know what to do. It’s a fair question and I’m happy to help. The sad part is that more often than not, the difficult situation could have been avoided altogether. The sadder part is that it will most likely happen again.
Continue reading Making Tomorrow Easier
From the CEO to the low man on the totem pole, every person we hire has some effect on our organizational culture. Obviously, the higher up the ladder, the greater the opportunity for impact. And one lower-tier 
person has a lot more impact in a ten person organization than in a 10,000 person organization.
We hire because we need a skill or capacity. So our focus tends to drift toward the hard skills the position requires. But according to most surveys, lacking the skills to do the job is not the top reason people leave their jobs – voluntarily or involuntarily. Character and soft skills are usually the culprits. Yet there isn’t one perfect model of character and soft skills that fits every organization.
Continue reading Hiring for Culture Fit
“Values” is a buzzword that risks being abused into oblivion. But despite the hype, clarity about what’s important to us is a powerful lever for making us more successful according to our own definition of success.
Whether we’re conscious of them or not, our values (organizational and personal) define our behavior. One of the reasons “values” gets a bad rap is that organizations and individuals often claim values that aren’t reflected in their actions. Don’t tell me you value honesty while describing the neat trick you found for cheating on your taxes. Continue reading Identifying What Matters Most
I consider the most important values of an organization to be those that define how we treat each other. Here’s an example of such values that I developed with one of my clients. 
Perhaps there are some useful points here that you can adopt (or adapt), but be careful: Never claim a value as your own unless you’re willing to live every word of it. Don’t destroy your credibility by saying something’s important that you’re not willing to be held accountable to.
Continue reading Defining How We Treat Each Other
One of the benefits of being a leader is that we have the privilege – and responsibility – of influencing others. When we speak, our followers listen.
But what do they hear?
Often way more than we intended to say. Continue reading Whispering Through a Bullhorn
Like most people, I’m a fan of excellence. But when everything gets labelled “excellent”, 
we devalue the word to where it doesn’t really mean anything. And it certainly doesn’t create the motivation we’re trying to inspire when we use it in our mission, vision, and value statements.
The problem is that no one can be excellent at everything. Continue reading When “Excellent” Isn’t
Paul felt his staff’s productivity was being hampered by constant disruptions 
from other staff members. So he made it a standing agenda item at his weekly staff meetings to remind everyone to consider the impact on the other person before interrupting. Was the issue urgent enough to justify the disruption? He offered tips each week, like collecting non-urgent disruptions and handling them all at once instead of interrupting for each one; or using email instead of text messages if an immediate response wasn’t necessary.
After a couple of months, Paul was frustrated that he wasn’t seeing much change.
Continue reading The Power of Informal Communication
In his 1980 book, Culture’s Consequences, 
social psychologist Geert Hofstede defines Power Distance as one of four dimensions that distinguish one national culture from another. Hofstede would argue that these dimensions don’t apply to organizational cultures, but I believe they do.
Continue reading Power Distance
Leadership is fundamentally about using pooled resources to achieve some purpose. The narrative behind traditional organizational leadership goes something like this:
That approach has served us well for several generations. But as has oft been said, “what got us here won’t get us there”. Continue reading The Changing Narrative of Leadership
