Inc.com

Read any editorial page or media on any major topic---the pandemic, the environment, race, police, the election, . . . anything---and people are calling for leadership. In the United States, they often refer to missing leadership from the government, especially the executive branch from local to federal, but I see leadership vacuums in business, education, sports, arts, culture, military, religion, media, . . . everywhere. As a leadership writer, professor, speaker, podcast, coach, entrepreneur, and practitioner, I know and work with a few leadership peers, including globally renowned authors, speakers, etc. Here's an article on top leadership and management experts, Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts: Who makes the list? More important, whom should you be listening to?, not to single out Inc., since any…

I remember helping General Austin co-lead some leadership workshops at West Point. He described a crisis West Point was experiencing that they all knew about---a recent graduate spoke poorly of the institution and community in a way that the media amplified. Then a former teacher---a Colonel---piled on the criticism, prompting questioning from alumni. He asked cadets how they would handle the situation. I read their expressions as caring and determined, but they couldn't figure out what to do. Graduate students in more advanced classes responded with similar uncertainty. What struck me was not that they didn't know what to do---there was no right answer---but that they didn't want to be in a position to handle that crisis. They were glad the Superintendent was handling it.…

Leaders: Seek This Outcome From Your Followers This simple feedback from your followers can tell you how you're leading. By Joshua SpodekAuthor, 'Leadership Step by Step' @spodek One of the great joys and tragedies of leadership is that you'll never exactly how well you led. An engineer can take a test. A baseball player can look at his stats. But leaders have no objective measure. Is that frustrating? It gets more difficult. What few measures we have rely on other people, whose thoughts we can never know. If they say something nice, we'll never know if they meant it or are sparing our feelings. You are the only person you can't see from another person's perspective, yet their perspectives matter in leadership, not yours. How well you think…

Leading Through Emotions Is the Opposite of Manipulation Leading means helping people do what they want, not what they don't want. Thinking otherwise undermines your ability to lead. As a leadership professor, trainer, and author, I have occasion to see people develop leadership skills at all levels. When I describe the difference between leadership and management, they tend to accept that management generally involves behavior and things you can see and measure. Its goal is compliance. Leadership, by contrast, more involves emotions and motivations--things you can't see or measure. Its goal is more about getting people to want to do things. They get that leadership is about emotions. Then when I give them exercises to practice learning others' emotions and behaving and communicating to change…

You'd Fire an Employee Whose Goal was Awareness. Why Accept it for the Environment? If you don't act on your values, are you able to lead? What can you learn? Ridiculous in business Imagine you needed surgery and asked the surgeon who was going to operate on you, "Have you ever done this surgery before?" and he or she said, I haven't done it before, by I'm aware of the procedure. Imagine you were going to hire a new COO, asked his or her operational experience, and he or she said, I haven't worked in operations, but my awareness is high. Would you hire a plumber who never held a wrench but read about them and was aware of what they were for? A programmer who only read about programming? These questions sound ridiculous because…