How Can You Create a Culture of Candor?

Culture of candor

One of the biggest challenges that any leader faces is to ensure that employees feel comfortable speaking up when they have difficult issues to discuss Although such topics that are difficult to talk about, they can have a significant impact on the workplace, such issues as harassment, discrimination, or concerns about the company's culture.

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12 Tips for Supercharging Your Leadership Credibility

Some of the best leaders that I ever had were not my direct managers. One such individual was an Executive VP and Chief Legal counsel at the first company I worked for. Because I was single at the time and didn’t really know anyone, I frequently stayed late in the evenings to catch up on my work.

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Are You Undermining Your Leadership Credibility?

I have had the opportunity to coach a number of different leaders. Sometimes I am asked to observe how a leader interacts with their team members and then provide the leader with feedback about the impact of their behavior on the team. When I observe a lack of engagement in a leader’s meeting, I interview team members to discover the reasons for their lack of engagement in team meetings.

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11 Pitfalls to Avoid in Difficult Conversations

Recently, I was asked to observe a Home Owners Association board meeting and to provide feedback about what the board members could do to have more effective meetings. From the outset, it was obvious that the entire group of individuals had never received any type of business communication training. More than anything, I was shocked

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Do You Bail Your People Out? Rescue Management Diminishes Employee Accountability

I recently had a VP tell me that she had assigned one of her directors the task of doing a comparability study of their company’s compensation and benefits vis-à-vis other companies in their industry.  After the director had completed the study, the VP grilled the director on his findings.  The director had a difficult time answering the questions that she asked and came across as lacking in confidence. The VP was then faced with a dilemma: should she make the presentation to the Board of Trustees herself or should she run the risk of allowing the director to make the...

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Do You Empower Your People? 10 Strategies for Empowering Others

When I was in my first job in corporate America, I had a one-of-a-kind manager. The first thing he did when meeting with me was to ask me what I wanted to become and what my vision of my future career looked like. I really hadn’t given it much thought, and so I candidly told him so. Always abounding in patience, he began by asking me a series of well-thought out questions that made me think.

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