(or on the folly of rewarding A while hoping for A)
“Do you guys have email addresses?” our waitress asked. It was Thursday, and my colleague and I were partaking in 60-cent Boneless Wings Day. After delivering a sarcastic “No” I inquired why she was asking so bluntly. She wanted us to enroll in the Buffalo [...]
(or on the folly of rewarding A while hoping for A)
“Do you guys have email addresses?” our waitress asked. It was Thursday, and my colleague and I were partaking in 60-cent Boneless Wings Day. After delivering a sarcastic “No” I inquired why she was asking so bluntly. She wanted us to enroll in the Buffalo [...]
Bob Sutton laments his label as “the asshole guy.” But, some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have labels thrust upon them. Sutton published The No Asshole Rule a few years ago, in which he revealed the costs of keeping asshole employees and the benefits of ditching them. In Good Boss Bad Boss, he [...]
O’Toole (1996) reminds us that leading change and instituting values is not a dictatorial process. Inclusion and participation are vital elements of leadership, particularly when leading an infusion of values. Joas (2000) claims that values develop from the shared experience of an individual or group. Perhaps another way to look at is in that values [...]
Wally Bock is a fixture in the online leadership community. So when Wally offered to send me a review copy of Ruthless Focus: How to Use Key Core Strategies to Grow Your Business, I was excited (and to be honest, flattered). Wally co-authored the book with Thomas Hall, who had been researching companies that experienced [...]
Too often leaders are unsure of just how to unfreeze an organization and create change ready followers. Many leaders start by casting a grand vision of what the new organization looks like. However, followers, still frozen in their ways, do not receive this new vision because they have yet to see why change is necessary. [...]
Clever people dream up intriguing new products or services, they develop new processes that bring their organization to new levels. They are the organizations competitive edge. They are crucial to an organization’s success…but they come with their own unique set of challenges. In Clever, authors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones revel how clever people are overly [...]
A few weeks ago I got into a conversation about whether situational leadership was more appropriate for top-level or front-line leadership. I argued that situational leadership is most appropriate for front-line leadership. To be more specific, I believe that the front-line is about management and situational leadership is about how to manage, not necessarily lead, [...]
Liz Wiseman is president of The Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development center headquartered in Silicon Valley. She advises senior executives and leads strategy and leadership forums for executive teams worldwide. A former executive at Oracle Corporation, she worked as the Vice President of Oracle University and as the global leader for Human Resource [...]
What is the difference between a competent leader and am extraordinary executive? This is the question Richard Davis proposes to answer in The Intangibles of Leadership. Davis argues that intelligence, pedigree and training are all important…but there is more to it than that. Davis cites research, case studies and his own experience as a management psychologist [...]
Kurt Lewin (1951), organizational theorist of “three phases” fame, also developed the concept of force fields in change. Lewin basically asserts that there are forces that drive change or progress toward a goal (helping forces) and forces that drive resistance to change (hindering forces). The difference in resistance to change vs. readiness to change lies [...]
About
David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab, a community of resources dedicated to promoting the practice of leadership theory. He is an executive coach, a sought-after speaker and an adjunct professor of business at several universities.