Is leadership team humor always humor? Take a look at a common example. Assume you are sitting in a leadership team meeting for a strategic business unit. The senior vice president sitting next to you makes a potentially humorous comment about the senior vice president sitting across the table. When the other team members (including [...]
As an executive, you have inevitably had disagreements with other executives who are peers or direct reports. These differences in perspective are natural parts of business relationships just like they are any other relationships. Research by CPP provides evidence of this with its finding that 85 percent of employees deal with disagreement on a regular [...]
Since I don’t have as much interaction with the board of directors as the CEO, how do I build my credibility with board members? If you have recently assumed the role of a corporate executive that is on the radar of the board (e.g., CISO, CFO or CIO), you have probably asked yourself this question [...]
As Steve stomped down the hall toward the office of the senior vice president (who also happened to be his boss), he was fuming due to a potential change in his responsibilities he had heard about through the grapevine. Once in his boss’s office, he went off on her about how things had changed since [...]
Perhaps you have heard some of these responses from employees at your organization: “I didn’t get it done, because I was buried.” “I didn’t know that’s what you wanted.” “They didn’t follow the process which made us miss the deadline.” Placing the blame on others, producing the wrong deliverable, missing a due date and not [...]
Is it confidence or arrogance that you are seeing in your leaders? An actual example from leadership benchmarking work I did with international executives may help to answer this question. As I exited the elevator at a Fortune 500 company where I was scheduled to interview a leader I had not met, I heard someone [...]
If the cost of hiring the wrong executive is up to 27 times the executive’s annual salary (according to Brad Smart) and the average contribution for someone who is a high fit for an organization is 144 percent greater than an individual who is a low fit (according to CPP), shouldn’t a company ensure that it [...]
According to the National Institute for Advanced Conflict Resolution, up to 30% of a typical leader's time is spent dealing with conflict. Further research found that over 65% of work performance problems are due to strained relationships between employees as opposed to deficiencies in employee skill or motivation, and CEOs and senior vice presidents reported [...]
If you are like most leaders, you will continue to look for ways to become more effective in your work and career. These ways could include a variety of methods such as getting exposure to role models of desired performance or experts in particular fields, taking on stretch assignments to obtain experience in areas where [...]
Whether it is due to poor economic conditions, aggressive competition or a product failure, companies will periodically face adversity which will test the executives who run these organizations. The key consideration is how these individuals should handle such realities. For example, how big of a factor should cutting costs be for organizations that are trying [...]