How To Play The Best Supporting Role In Meetings

How To Play The Best Supporting Role In Meetings

the one thing you must do to keep your organization from becoming a soap opera is to keep your focus on your most important external mission – the problem you solve in the world.

Why New Leaders Must Not Let Their Predecessors Distract Them

Why New Leaders Must Not Let Their Predecessors Distract Them

Pay attention. It’s an essential choice for an executive onboarding into a new role – what you and others pay attention to. Focusing on your predecessor’s mistakes is a distraction from your call to action and is especially painful for your predecessor’s supporters....

Why Letting Others Win Arguments Is So Empowering

Why Letting Others Win Arguments Is So Empowering

Letting others win arguments is empowering because it positively reinforces what you’ve asked them to do. It all goes back to the ABC’s of behavior modification – Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence. It’s easy to tell people you want to hear their perspective...

Why The Right Level Of Customer Service Is A Strategic Choice

Why The Right Level Of Customer Service Is A Strategic Choice

While different organizations provide different levels of service—from dismissive to reluctant to systematic to reactive to anticipatory—the most effective do it by choice. They understand the return on their service investment and invest appropriately. For those...

When And How To Tell, Co-Create Or Delegate

When And How To Tell, Co-Create Or Delegate

First, understand the difference between the three. Then, tell for compliance. Co-create for commitment. Delegate for accountability.   Tell In Bryan Smith’s Tell – Sell – Test – Consult – Co-create framework for persuading others, Telling is one-way...

How You Manage Differences Can Change Levels Of Compliance

How You Manage Differences Can Change Levels Of Compliance

Not all compliance is equal. There are meaningful differences between open and passive-aggressive non-compliance, minimal, and supportive compliance. You can move some people from one to another by helping them adjust their attitudes with careful management of...

How A Favor Bank Mindset Can Improve Networking

How A Favor Bank Mindset Can Improve Networking

The most tactically effective networkers approach every conversation with clear objectives for what they want out of those conversations. But the most effective networkers over time approach those same conversations with the objective of helping others.

How Leading Questions Help Leaders Lead

How Leading Questions Help Leaders Lead

Before you object to leading questions per se, generally discouraged in direct questioning in a court of law or by neutral journalists, consider their appropriateness as a leadership tool. If a leader directs someone to do something, the best they can hope for is compliance. If they ask completely open questions, they might get any answer. But, if they ask leading questions, they can lead their followers to get to the right answer and direction themselves.