Archive for June, 2010

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They Must Leave Better Than They Arrived

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

This has been a mis­sion of ours at Build­ing Cham­pi­ons since the incep­tion of the com­pany back in 1996. Recently, I have been giv­ing this much thought as we are in the process of adding a new mem­ber to our team.

I believe that most lead­ers have a desire to see that the expe­ri­ence they help to cre­ate in their orga­ni­za­tions causes peo­ple to grow. They want their team mem­bers to be bet­ter equipped and more skilled as a result of their time in the orga­ni­za­tion, which will lead them to make a greater dif­fer­ence in their future ventures.

What I am unsure of is how many of us actu­ally do this well.

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Posted in Leadership | 6 Comments »

Just Schedule It

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

If you’re like me, you have expe­ri­enced the frus­tra­tion that comes from com­mit­ting to some­thing, and then miss­ing the dead­line. That “some­thing” could be fin­ish­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion, com­plet­ing a project, writ­ing an overview, or prepar­ing for meeting.

As an Exec­u­tive Coach, I have often observed suc­cess­ful lead­ers deal with the frus­tra­tion that comes from over-committing. It is usu­ally born from a fail­ure to fully assess the amount of time a project will take to complete.

The sce­nario goes some­thing like this:

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Posted in Priority Management | 4 Comments »

Culture

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Daniel shares some obser­va­tions about suc­cess­ful team cul­ture in this follow-up to his recent post, The Mon­day Morn­ing Hud­dle.

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Posted in Vision | 1 Comment »

Don’t Ever Take the Easy Way Out

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Let me put “the easy way out” in the proper context.

Some­times we may use email or tex­ting to deliver bad news or dis­ap­point­ment. We take the “easy way out” when we avoid sit­ting down face to face to work through the conflict.

Another way we avoid con­flict is by allow­ing some­one to deliver a dif­fi­cult mes­sage for us, or ask­ing them to act as our peace­maker in a hos­tile sit­u­a­tion. In most cases, we could have pre­vented the con­flict from get­ting to this stage if we had just taken the ini­tia­tive to deal with it up front in a car­ing and truth­ful way.

Once we send some­one else in to do our bat­tle, the odds of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion dimin­ish greatly.

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Posted in Self-Development | 2 Comments »

Why?

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Do you know the answer to this ques­tion? Dis­cov­er­ing “why” is crit­i­cal to so many areas of our busi­ness and our lives.

We all walk through life hear­ing about what we should do to improve. Still, most of us strug­gle with chang­ing our behavior.

Over the years, I have coached thou­sands of peo­ple in one-on-one or group ses­sions. Most of these coach­ing con­ver­sa­tions revolved around the topic of improve­ment — qual­ity of life, busi­ness results, health, rela­tion­ships, team per­for­mance. Peo­ple typ­i­cally hire a coach because they believe they will have a bet­ter chance of mak­ing the nec­es­sary changes with a coach on their team.

And of course, I agree!

The prob­lem is that almost all of these improved results require improved behav­iors, and behav­ior is not eas­ily changed. If we want to change our behav­ior, we must change our think­ing. And to change our think­ing, we must be able to clearly define “why.”

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Posted in Self-Development | 6 Comments »

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