Sally is a solid, results-oriented employee who has a high level of knowledge, good skills, extensive experience, and a positive, can-do attitude. She has worked for several organizations in administrative support positions during her 20-plus year career. Carolyn is the office manager and manages a team of six people in the largest branch office of [...]
What Makes A Great Company?
What do you think makes for a great company? A great organization? Is it the vision of the CEO or founder? The team you work with directly and the special relationship you all have? The customers or clients you serve? The product or service you create or deliver? What is it that makes someplace a [...]
Lessons in Leadership – The Staff Development Champ
Jane has built a highly successful treasury management client services operation for a large multi-state bank. One of her core values is staff development. Once one of her new hires has developed their basic skills they have opportunities to serve on task forces, take on new project assignments, help develop new products and services, suggest [...]
Sustainability Part III
Change does not happen easily and painlessly because the status quo is strongly attractive to both individuals and organizations. We are driven to think and act by how we view the world around us. We look for information, interpret events, see opportunities, and make choices based upon our mental model or perception of reality. Information [...]
Relationships
Your success as a leader will be built on a foundation of two things: (1) your ability to get things done or accomplish tasks, and (2) your ability to forge and sustain positive relationships with other people. True leadership means focusing on both tasks and relationships. No matter how driven, focused, and hardworking you may [...]
Managing AND Leading
One of the difficulties with writing about leadership and management is that the two terms are often used interchangeably. Whether you are a first-line supervisor in a ten-person shop or the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, you will be both a manager and a leader. Some of the time you will be managing and [...]
Sally Helgesen On Leading In 24/7
Today I had the pleasure of hearing Sally Helgesen share her thoughts in a session called “Leading in 24/7: Six Key Trends Transforming Organizations.” I’ve been a fan of her research, writing, and speaking for a number of years, ever since I read her wonderful book The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building [...]
Expectations – Part 3
This is the third of 3 posts on “Expectations” What kinds of expectations do you think your boss has of you? What are the things you generally do to keep your boss “in the loop”? As we noted in Chapter 1, some of the expectations a manager might have of you as their subordinate might [...]
Expectations – Part 2
This is the second of 3 posts on the topic of “Expectations”. Where do our expectations come from? Why do we expect one person to be successful and expect another person to fail? Why do we expect some people to accomplish less than others? The issue can be both simple and complex. All of [...]
Expectations – Part 1
This is the first of 3 posts on the topic of “Expectations”. What do you “expect” of your key relationships – those employees, co-workers, boss, spouse, family in your life? Do you expect those relationships to be relatively positive most of the time? Do you expect your employees to perform well on a consistent basis? [...]
