There are so many ways that effective top down leadership can reduce and even eliminate the profitability killers in our businesses, and we’ll start unpacking some simple strategies for dealing several of the highest risk areas soon, but one way we can ensure we achieve the best possible results acr...

I believe we all know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.

Our actions can be the very definition of insanity if we’re not taking the time to reflect on the choices we make in our defining moments of leadership.  

Considering man...

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’m gonna stress this one more time… There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to promoting within an organization. And therefore, offering our team members with career development opportunities (that are indeed appealing to them) and building a busin...

Some of the benefits of promoting from within are how we show the individual being promoted that we value their contribution, that we’re willing to invest in their career development, and that we see them as part of our business succession plan. But don’t think for a minute that internal promotions ...

As we look at ways to be intentional about providing growth opportunities for the folks on our teams so they experience true career development, we have even more reason to include them as we create our long range succession plans! One thing is for sure though; it’s no longer as simple as giving our...

If we really want to be sure we’re providing our team members with career advancement opportunities, in an actual pursuit of happiness, rather than making them feel like no good deed goes unpunished by promoting them into a role that they have no interest in, we’d better be intention about knowing w...

Near the end of a recent lesson in our Leading At The Next Level program, I shared something I had found in a Bloomberg.com article that ties right in with what the point we closed with last time; career advancement is not a one-size-fits-all proposition!

Certain jobs attract people with predicta...

There’s one important thing we’ll have to do if we want to have any hope of creating a succession plan where the right people are in the right seats on our bus… We’ve got to know our team; I mean really know them! We need to understand how we can communicate with them most effectively, we need to kn...

Did you read the subject line and sing the next phrase in your head? I kinda still am… But unlike the wheels on the bus that go round and round, the seats on our organization’s bus absolutely should not! And if we want to get really serious about the business succession planning we looked at last ti...

Career development is critical for each and every one of us! And like I shared last time, a poor leader will never build a great team. Great people may be part of that organization, at least for a while, but poor leadership will never change a group with great people into a great team. As individual...

Right on the heels of our eighth annual LIVE2LEAD:Harrisonburg event, I noticed a social post from a large manufacturing company that we do a fair amount of work with, calling attention to “National Career Development Month.” Seeing that from quite a few organizations I’ve been employed with over th...

Doris Kearns Goodwin is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator.

Doris offers key leadership insights gleaned from her decades of experience as a presidential historian, public speaker and Pulitzer-Prize winning author. Through leadership lessons learn...