Are You A Servant Leader? Count The Cost

Servant leadership. According to John Ballard, Ph.D. servant leadership was the second most searched leadership style on Google behind transformational leadership. Furthermore The Leadership Quarterly reports that empirical studies of leadership styles only focused n servant leadership 1% of the time. What this means is that people are interested in servant leadership, possibly in even […]

Has Your Staff Ever Pushed You Into Actions You Knew You Shouldn’t Take? The Need For Leadership Conviction

Recently I read an interesting article, “WHY IS IT SO EASY TO GET PEOPLE TO DO BAD THINGS?” http://iheartintelligence.com/2016/04/13/people-do-bad-things/. In the article, the author reviewed the Milgram experiments of the 1960’s. I quote from the author’s review of that study: “Stanley Milgram was a psychologist at Yale University. He started conducting experiments in July of […]

Leadership Nugget #19: Is Consistently Bad Leadership Better Than Sporadically Great Leadership?

Transparency is often defined as the responsibility of the leader to make information, data and even thinking available to employees. But there is another aspect of transparency that is important, possibly more important than sharing information. That additional factor deals with future transparency, the ability of employees to read the leader, also known as predictability. […]

Leadership Nugget # 12: Leadership Quality Replicates Itself

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman published an insightful article in Harvard Business Review that validates what many of us have observed. Excellent leaders tend to cluster. Said another way, excellent leaders develop, over time, other excellent leaders. This is a phenomenon that rings true in our every day observations. We see families that produce children […]

30% of American Leaders Are Considered Great. How Do You Know If You Are?

Few Great Leaders In a 2013 research study Gallup made an interesting observation about American leadership. They reported that in America approximately 100 million people hold full-time jobs. To lead and manage that group, Gallup estimated (using a 10:1 span of control) that 10 million great supervisors were needed. An additional 1 million leaders of […]

The Artist-Leader

Most leadership writers are overly prescriptive about what it takes to be a leader. Lists and recipes abound. Thought leaders suggest they have discovered the “Holy Grail” of leadership that leads to success if only the approach is followed (books and audio-tapes available!). The problem is that leadership is not mechanical and it is not […]