If you want to play a bigger role in the evolution of your company’s growth and success, there’s a mandatory step in the process: shake up your own thinking! Steve Miller, former CEO of Shell Oil Co., was well known for shaking things up. As Shell was rebranding in Europe, he invited a group of employees [...]
How to influence and impact others virtually. In the past year, I’ve shared plenty of content about how to lead remote teams. It was an important topic before 2020, but the pandemic made it mandatory. What I haven’t talked much about is how remote team members can stand out from their counterparts and become more [...]
In 2018, we made the decision to remodel our kitchen. Now we’re in the middle of another renovation…but not by choice. As I’m sure you know, Mother Nature was not kind to those of us in Texas last month. Ice. Snow. Prolonged periods of subfreezing temperatures. (I’m trying to avoid the word “unprecedented,” but it [...]
It’s safe to say that leadership training and professional development look very different today than they did in February. (Apparently pandemics have that effect.) But as I switched my keynotes and presentations to a remote format during the last six months, I have made some important discoveries. Here are a few things I’ve found that [...]
As someone who coaches, advises and speaks to leaders for a living, I do my best to arm them with insights and strategies to handle our volatile, uncertain, and always-on world. Now, with leadership conferences and workshops cancelled due to the global pandemic, it’s time for me to demonstrate that I practice what I preach. [...]
Last week while having dinner with a group of friends, our discussion turned to work. What came next was an interesting conversation about why anyone today would even want to be a leader. One friend shared that she was utterly exhausted by the endless cycle of new demands and the constant flood of in-box messages. [...]
I recently listened to a Harvard Business Review podcast called “The Anxious Achievers.” (Wow, there’s a phrase I can relate to!) Besides loving the title of that program, I have been drawn to the idea that we need to change the way we think about managing our stress and anxiety. Steve Cuss, author of “Managing [...]
We leaders are, by definition, doers. We finish. We deliver. We get results. And we love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with crossing things off our “to-do” lists. The tougher the task, the better we like it. We revel in being the person others come to with impossible tasks, and we somehow make them [...]
Avid gardeners know from experience that accelerating the growth of a tree…requires pruning it. To make it grow bigger, you have to cut it back. That counterintuitive principle also applies to professionals. If we want remarkable business growth, we need the courage to prune things back, our schedules, our projects, and our commitments. We must [...]
We can all look back on the choices we made as leaders and think of plenty of things we'd do differently. Hindsight is 20/20, right? That's especially true for me as a leadership speaker, reflecting on my time as an operations executive a decade ago. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm proud of what [...]