Trust Among Co-Workers, Especially Among Management and Staff Third is trust. Communication is easy; trust is hard. I’ll bet next week’s grocery money that someone who you know and trust may have fumbled their communication about something to you, yet, because there was high trust between you, you still got their meaning.     The...Read More

Appreciation When Work Is Done Well People want to feel appreciated when they do their work well. This is about so much more than money. In fact, unless you are working with mercenaries whose primary motivation is money (e.g., many sales people, just-passing-through CEO’s, etc.), money is not a motivator by its presence, but it...Read More

The Covid-19 pandemic has cast into stark relief the fact that, in this increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, THE key to competitive advantage is the organization’s culture. So, what makes someplace a great place to work? Based on my experience, there are five things. And I don’t care what kind of organization...Read More

One way to judge someone’s leadership maturity is based on the maturity they show in taking responsibility and the maturity they show in engaging others, be they subordinates, superiors, peers, customers, vendors or others.  Adapting a Control/Responsibility Matrix presented by Seth Godin[1], we’ll present our “Leadership Maturity Matrix,” identifying four different leadership personas, representing different...Read More

Based on over 4-decades of observational research, I can confidently assert that intellectual laziness is an all-too-common leadership fail. It is a myth that managers manage by the numbers.  So many leaders that I’ve observed in action simply were not skilled thinkers, having little understanding of data, statistical methods, empirical analysis, and probabilistic decision-making.  In...Read More

I’m writing this in May 2021.  It varies, but the global COVID-19 pandemic caused much of the world to push pause on “normal” life and go into and stay in emergency mode since March 2020, or earlier.  Thankfully, amazingly safe and effective vaccines now allow us to realistically envision a return to “normal.”  That said,...Read More

Do you think it is possible for an organization to be Agile if its leader is not Agile? This question is a little deeper than you might think. Do you think it is possible for someone to be a leader of an Agile organization if they are not personally Agile in the leadership of their...Read More

Part 7—Interdependence & Series Wrap-Up In Part 1 of this 7-part series of posts we looked at VUCA, where the term originated, what it means, and how it relates to Agile leadership.  The speed and interdependence of events in today’s world will ultimately overwhelm the time-honored processes and culture we’ve so far built.  Once comforting...Read More

Part 6—Price Factor Equalization In Part 1 of this 7-part series of posts we looked at VUCA, where the term originated, what it means, and how it relates to Agile leadership.  The speed and interdependence of events in today’s world will ultimately overwhelm the time-honored processes and culture we’ve so far built.  Once comforting constants...Read More

Part 5—The Butterfly Effect In Part 1 of this 7-part series of posts we looked at VUCA, where the term originated, what it means, and how it relates to Agile leadership.  The speed and interdependence of events in today’s world will ultimately overwhelm the time-honored processes and culture we’ve so far built.  Once comforting constants...Read More