Leader as Listener
Listening is one of the core leadership skills. It is a skill that can be developed and honed. It creates amazing benefits. How often do you find yourself listening to others? What are you listening for? What are you learning? How do you listen in a way that creates benefits? Listening starts with listening to ourselves and, over time, developing our Personal Mastery (Senge, 2006). There are...
How are You Adapting Your Leadership for the Knowledge Era?
For over 16 years I have been providing leadership and organizational consulting to organizational leaders, business owners and individuals looking to enhance their professional development. Over those years I have seen the speed at which change is occurring accelerate. Where the prior command and control or top-down management worked to a certain degree before, it no longer provides...
What Would a Deeper Understanding Mean for You and Your Organization?
Last week, after having returned from two weeks on campus at the magical Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC, I spent a good part of this week applying the on-campus learning. This was done in refining my Capstone Proposal for an engaged, action-oriented research project with a client’s organization along with the related Ethics Review application. While these documents are initial drafts...
Learning from Experience – An Act of Reflection
How often do you take the chance to reflect on your leadership? How important do you see that learning is to your leadership? Learning about yourself? Learning about others? Learning skills to be more resilient, creative, and innovative? The concept of reflection is not new. However, we often overlook it or kid ourselves into thinking that we do it already. We need time to do this. Reflection...
What is Customer-Centricity and Why is it Important?
What I want to focus on today is the concept of customer centricity and the related values based leadership. I want to look at what these are and why they’re important. Many of my clients come to me because they want to engage their clients more and they want to know how to lead their team in a way that helps them also engage with the clients in the way that they feel is successful. The...
Leadership – a practice and an evolution. What are you doing to consciously grow your leadership?
Leadership is a practice, one that evolves as we increase our awareness, reflect, try something new, and apply our learning therefrom. Today, I wanted to share a bit about my own evolution with the practice of leadership. I am hoping you might garner a golden nugget or two that applies to your leadership. Leadership has evolved for me as I imagine it has for many of you who are reading this...
Want to be more creative?
Want to be more creative? Many of us would say that we are not very creative and look to those who are creative as talented or gifted, born with the innate ability to be creative. In reality, we are all born with this ability and have the capacity to uncover and build upon it. Creativity is the act of producing through use of imaginative skill. It does not necessarily mean inventing something...