Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

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You Must Decide (Increasing Your Leadership Capacity Series — Step 6 of 8)

Friday, January 27th, 2012

One thing that will hold a leader and his lead­er­ship team back is the inabil­ity to make sound and timely deci­sions. We will not only suf­fer pro­fes­sion­ally but the emo­tional drain and stress that comes from hav­ing too many deci­sions pend­ing can really take its toll on us. Note: This post is part of a series on Increas­ing Your Lead­er­ship Capac­ity. Click here for the pre­vi­ous step.

A few years back, our past COO and Exec­u­tive Coach, Dan Meub, shared a great anal­ogy with me. He said that I needed to envi­sion that I was sit­ting in the mid­dle of an octa­gon shaped room. Each wall had a door, and each door was open. Each of those open doors allowed for the heat in the room to escape — my energy was escap­ing out all of the doors. He coached me that I needed to close the doors in a more timely fash­ion. The les­son stuck and since that time I have coached many lead­ers to improve their deci­sion mak­ing abil­ity by “clos­ing the doors.”

Here are 5 steps to help you make bet­ter and more timely deci­sions.
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You Need a Road Map (Increasing Your Leadership Capacity Series — Step 5 of 8)

Friday, January 20th, 2012

One thing that hin­ders our abil­ity to increase our lead­er­ship capac­ity is a lack of clar­ity. This lack of clar­ity can show itself in so many ways. We can lack clar­ity on our company’s pur­pose, our pri­mary prod­ucts, our key dif­fer­en­tia­tors, who on our teams are best equipped to do what, where our strate­gic wins can be found, what plans we may have com­mit­ted to in times past and who is doing what and when in order for us to exe­cute with excel­lence. Some­times lead­ers even have a lack of clar­ity around why in the heck they started lead­ing this thing at some point in the past. Just typ­ing this causes me angst! Note: This post is part of a series on Increas­ing Your Lead­er­ship Capac­ity. Click here for the pre­vi­ous step.

Now I don’t think that all lead­ers are strug­gling with con­fu­sion around every­thing I just listed, but I do know that I, along with many busi­ness lead­ers I have coached over the years, have found them­selves not lead­ing with excel­lence because we have lacked clar­ity on at least one of them at some point.

So what can you do if you find your­self stuck with very lit­tle time, energy and clar­ity as to how to build your and your team’s lead­er­ship capac­ity? Here are four spe­cific musts do’s that can absolutely increase your level of pas­sion and your direc­tion which will enable you to con­tinue to grow your capac­ity.
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Be Hungry and Humble (Increasing Your Leadership Capacity Series — Step 4 of 8)

Friday, January 13th, 2012

Increas­ing our lead­er­ship capac­ity requires more than just knowl­edge. It truly requires us to be fully engaged and pas­sion­ate in the cause. We must change and grow, which means we must enter into the uncom­fort­able zone. As lead­ers, we need to always start with our­selves when we want to make an orga­ni­za­tion improve. The ques­tion of “how must I change or adapt in order for this ini­tia­tive or improve­ment to take root” is a great start­ing point. Note: This post is part of a series on Increas­ing Your Lead­er­ship Capac­ity. Click here for the pre­vi­ous step.

This step comes from a les­son our Build­ing Cham­pi­ons lead­er­ship team learned a few years back dur­ing a part­ner plan­ning and con­nec­tion ses­sion with our friends at Patrick Lencioni’s com­pany, The Table Group. Patrick shared that one of their con­vic­tions was to be hum­ble and hungry.

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6 Steps to Improve Your Thinking (Increasing Your Leadership Capacity Series — Step 3 of 8)

Friday, January 6th, 2012

As we work on how to best increase our lead­er­ship capac­ity, we must be aware of how our think­ing either helps or hin­ders our lead­er­ship effec­tive­ness. You see, our think­ing impacts our beliefs, our beliefs impact our actions, and our actions impact our results. Note: This post is part of a series on Increas­ing Your Lead­er­ship Capac­ity. Click here for the pre­vi­ous step.

As an exec­u­tive coach at Build­ing Cham­pi­ons, I have seen count­less break­throughs with busi­ness lead­ers as the result of them work­ing to improve how they think.
Here are 6 tips for you to improve your think­ing.
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8 Steps to Increase Your Leadership Capacity (Series)

Friday, December 16th, 2011

This topic is front and cen­ter for me right now as the CEO of Build­ing Cham­pi­ons. I know that we must be very inten­tional with how we tap into and develop those that are on the team. They all have gifts, tal­ents and pas­sions that if inten­tion­ally devel­oped will enable them to help the orga­ni­za­tion grow in the years ahead.

So many times, lead­ers will make the mis­take of look­ing exter­nally for this needed capac­ity before really exam­in­ing who on the team has the poten­tial to fit the need and already under­stands the DNA and lingo of their culture.

Over the next sev­eral weeks, I will share one step per post to help you grow your lead­er­ship capac­ity and expand your organization’s reach and effectiveness.

Step #1 — Own Your Role
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