Finding clarity in a purpose that fulfills us through even the toughest issues we deal with as leaders will require a definite answer to the question Why do you do what you do? Like the vast majority of people I know, the field I ended up in for the bulk of my adult life had very little to do...

If we’re going to get serious about defining a crystal-clear purpose that drives us to serve the team members who are counting on us through even the worst of times, we need to understand why we do what we do. Before we dig into that though, I want you to think back to when you were just a...

If we’re going to earn the kind of buy-in that yields the 57 percent increase in discretionary effort and 20 percent improvement in individual performance detailed in the Harvard Business Review article I referenced multiple times throughout What’s Killing Your Profitability?,...

Any time I’m talking with a business owner, an executive, or really anyone with responsibility for attracting and retaining great team members, I share a critical lesson I learned early on during my time working in behavior based safety: people rarely shy away from tasks due difficulty,...

If someone as driven as the friend I mentioned before can lose some motivation or feel burnout when they don’t feel like they’re making a meaningful impact, I’m convinced anyone with any level of leadership responsibility will too - sooner or later! And if business owners and...

If we think back to how we started this look at Leadership Misunderstood, the biggest myths we’ve taken aim at here were few but extremely common:

• People automatically follow a business owner, executive, manager (or whatever other title you want to insert here) because their paycheck...

As we started down this path, I shared a piece of John Maxwell’s story about how he learned that influence was far more important than a title or position when it came to getting anyone to follow you. And let’s be honest: if no one is following, we ain’t leading!

To provide a...

Now that we’ve identified a few of the most common misconceptions (or myths) around how leadership impacts EVERY organization and we’ve connected the dots on how productivity and profitability come into play for nonprofits and public sector organizations just as much as they do for...

I see or hear something every couple of months that gets me all riled up and on a soapbox calling attention to the stark differences between managing a group of people and actually leading a team. One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve seen is that those two words, leading and managing, can...

If we wanna stop leaving all that profit on the table, we’ve got to take action. The hard part though, as I just shared, often boils down to what we can or cannot dedicate our resources to - or at least that’s what I hear from folks in leadership roles quite frequently. If we only had...

I wrapped up last time by mentioning that we’d soon work through some “simple things” that we can each do to EARN engagement from the teams we’re leading, and more specifically, some actual steps we can take to put those things into practice. Here’s the thing: just...

Any way we slice it, recruiting great candidates to join our team comes with a price tag! When we’re forced to recruit constantly because the business is growing, it’s hard enough - especially in a world where those great candidates are hard to come by… But if our voluntary...