Before we turn the corner and begin working through some skills we can each hone to lead our teams more effectively, and in turn yield higher engagement and stronger profit margins, let’s circle back to where I left off last time after my time on the ole soap box about being countable...

In The 17 Indispensable Laws of Teamwork, John Maxwell coined the idea of “countability” in chapter 9. He explains the Law of Countability by saying that “Teammates must be able to count on each other when it counts!” And if we ever want to be known as a bridge builder,...

I closed last time with a less than stellar example of how influence, good or bad, can impact the overall direction of a team. And in that particular scenario I detailed, the person who had the influence and did more than his share of steering the ship carried no positional authority at all. If...

If we were having this conversation face to face, I’m guessing you’d reply to what I shared last time by saying something like, “Alright Wes, if everything really does rise and fall on leadership, but you’re telling me it requires more than the carrot and stick status-quo,...

OK, so maybe teamwork can make the dream work with regards to helping drive profitability in our organizations… And maybe employee engagement and teamwork are directly correlated with one another… But how do these fairly fluffy ideas become reality and who’s responsible for...

A few years back, I did a series of lessons in our Leading At The Next Level program combining some things that stuck out to me when I re-read John Maxwell’s book, The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, with several experiences I had lived through in my own career since reading it for the...

An article I recently read on the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website titled In Search of Soft Skills: Why you should teach employees to be more resilient, communicative, and creative opened by stating “Being gifted at performing the technical aspects of a job can take an...

In his Forbes.com article titled Here Are The Top 5 Soft Skills I Look For In Candidates, Mark Pena opens by saying, “In an automating workforce, soft skills are the irreplaceably human element of work - and the thing employers are desperate to find.”

I can’t count the number of...

So last time we looked at why it’s important for someone in a leadership role to develop emotional intelligence... Whether that’s us in the role or it’s the leader we report to, not understanding what causes those highest emotional moments can drive quite the wedge between folks...

Had last week not been quite as packed as it was, we would have wrapped up this final response to Why is Effective Communication Important? and now be starting digging into Communication Skills in the Workplace. I could run through the list of craziness that’s packed the last 10 days or so...

I closed the last post by bringing up one of the biggest challenges I’ve seen organization’s struggle with in determining whether or not they make an investment into the new skills someone will need as they transition into a role with leadership responsibility. When we’re...

Be it a job we didn’t get, a performance issue in our department, or we just busted our tail on a patch of ice in the parking lot, a fairly natural inclination is to look for someone we can assign the blame to. And in many cases, we’ve even built fancy processes to guide us in doing...