Having looked at the one responsibility we can’t shirk as a leader, as well as what we can expect to happen if we do, let’s take a quick look at some data that makes a strong case for why communication really is so important in leadership… It’s not just some crazy tirade I’m on, that touchy-feely so...
I can hear it now… Somebody read the last post and is pushing back! “Wes, I don’t agree with you… I can’t control how anyone responds to what I tell them, that’s on them. And I certainly can’t help it if they can’t understand the simple words that I say. That’s their problem, not mine!”
Fair enough...
I’m guessing you’ve seen it too… Heck, I’ve had it sent directly to me in emails and I’ve had folks say it to me face to face! Most recently, I saw it in a social media meme with a picture of Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoon strip, where Snoopy has a frown and he’s wearing his sunglasses on his foreh...
In chapter four of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, The Law of Navigation, John Maxwell tells us that “anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course.” When Cindy and I originally developed Building Buy-in Around a Clear Mission and Vision for our Executive Leadership Eli...
In The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni mentioned that two of the signs were important for every team member to understand if we want them to have a clear picture of how they can engage and why it matters. We’ve already hit on IRRELEVANCE and we’ll touch on something that ties to IMM...
Last time I shared the definition of soft skills from the Oxford dictionary, “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.” While I think that provides us with a fairly decent starting point for what soft skills are, I don’t believe it’s quite e...
In early 2019, I received a phone call from a friend asking if I had a few minutes for him to run an idea by me. Since Chris Rollins had done as much to train and mentor me as anyone else I could think of in the four years leading up to that point, I jumped at the chance to provide him with any inpu...
Alexandra Levit, workforce futurist and author of Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workplace of the Future, was quoted in a recent SHRM article as saying “While most people are hired for their technical abilities, their soft skills give them career durability.”
Now that we can answer What Do They Mean by “Soft Skills”?, let’s start building a comparison between Soft Skills and Hard Skills, the impact both types of skills can have in nearly any role, and then we’ll look at how we can ensure any skill development we invest in provides us with a tangible retu...
When Cindy and I work with teams on building stronger and more effective communication into their cultures, The Model of Human Behavior is one of the tools we share because it provides a simple and extremely practical approach that can be implemented right away. As we do this, we emphasize that our ...
In order to become really effective with that idea of Alliance Feedback that I referenced as I closed the last post, and form authentic alliances (relationships) with the team members we’re responsible for leading, we need to develop another essential quality of leadership; we need to become intenti...
I truly believe that one of the most essential qualities of leadership is serving the team we’re leading. Unfortunately, the idea of serving those team members is often mistaken for catering to those team members, which doesn’t serve anyone!
As we worked through that quality of service in the last ...
