My seminar, “How to lead people so they want you to lead them again,” and the General Assembly seminar coming up August 23, “Lead the way: Effective Leadership Techniques,” teach you how to inspire people. I talk about it in a work context, but the principles and techniques apply everywhere. I want to specify what I mean by inspiration because many people don’t get to feel that inspired. You can[…] Keep reading →
You have too many tasks to do to keep track of and running out of time. What do you do? I hope you’ve developed a strategy not to lose your composure. Many people do. Here is my strategy. I don’t claim it’s the best strategy, but it keeps me calm and lets me finish things. I hope it works for you. First, I list my tasks. The tasks are never[…] Keep reading →
How many of the people in leadership positions over you do you think led well? Think of all the teachers, professors, coaches, Presidents, Congress-members, and so on. I’d bet no more than a few stand out as excellent. If your way to improve your leadership skills—presumably one of your best ways to get promoted, more responsibility, more pay, and so on—is to try to act like leaders you know, you[…] Keep reading →
Most leadership books teach high-level principles and so-called “laws.” I’ve read books that tell the reader to create purpose or meaning for their followers, or to engage them, without describing how to do those things. Leadership is experiential. We gain high-level principles from experience, not the other way around. High-level instruction like that doesn’t help people learn to lead. It helps the people who need it most least. It’s like[…] Keep reading →
Within the first few steps of this morning’s run, I could tell I didn’t have the energy I normally did. I kept running anyway. I don’t know why sometimes my body has less energy. Sometimes my legs feel like lead. Other times I have tons of energy. I haven’t done a long run, nor pushed myself hard on the rowing machine lately. I surfed earlier this week, which takes a[…] Keep reading →
If you’ve sat in a traffic jam on a highway, you’ve thought to yourself “If they only built an extra lane, I could pass all this congestion. Why don’t they build an extra lane to this highway? Or build an alternative route?” This type of questioning led to building many new roads and widening many existing ones for decades. Eventually people realized the flaws in that thinking. University of Toronto[…] Keep reading →
Following up yesterday’s post about conversational mistakes, here’s another I see all the time. This one is more serious than yesterday’s for two reasons. First, it will more likely kill a conversation. Second, people who do it seem unable to stop themselves, even when they realize the problem. It affects all types of conversations, but I’ll describe it in the context of my Meaningful Connection exercise. It goes like this:[…] Keep reading →
I see the following conversational mistake a lot. While it doesn’t necessarily kill a conversation, if you want to have great conversations, it helps to know what you’re doing. If you’re reading this blog, with the phrase “If you want extraordinary performance, know extraordinary performers” on the top left of the home page, you probably want to perform extraordinarily. It came up when I was coaching a friend on Meaningful[…] Keep reading →
Kids often say things more clearly than adults. Actually, I think I should credit the insight below as much to inquiry-driven project-based learning as to the innocence of youth. Context: When I visited Science Leadership Academy last winter, a student led a tour of the school. A question came up about school uniforms, which the school didn’t have. During the discussion on the topic, someone asked if any problems ever[…] Keep reading →