Leadership & Management are Inseparable

Are you making the mistaking of treating leadership and management as synonyms? We talk a lot about leadership in Sword Tips because Exkalibur is all about helping you “pull the sword from the stone through understanding rather than strength” by focusing on the leadership principles and practices that distinguish high performance companies.

[pullquote]Leadership involves plumbing as well as poetry.[/pullquote]

But it’s easy to forget that the adage about leaders “doing the right things” … and managers “doing the things right” … is not meant to set those roles apart, rather to emphasize that they are two sides of the same coin, essential roles that must be performed by a successful leader. How many times have we seen leaders who are completely surprised by the disappointing outcomes they’re not managing? (more…)

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3 Simple Keys to Productive Meetings

A recent NY Times interview with Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Chegg, a firm that rents textbooks online and by mail, brought some valuable but simple tips about meeting discipline to mind.

 

1. Leave technology on the other side of the door.

Be present, engage in hearty conversation.

Phones, texting, communicating outside of the room is not invited or allowed. (Yeah, I know … you’re thinking … I don’t do this, do I?)

Seriously?

(more…)

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After Action Reviews = Successful Execution

In an article entitled Five Ways Pixar Makes Better Decisions, Tom Davenport, a Babson College professor, refers to what I call “after action reviews” as a critical element of the creative decision-making used at Pixar.

In my earlier post, Powerful After Action Reviews, you can learn more about this concept, built and nurtured by the US Army.

Pixar uses the concept of “Dailies”

For Pixar, Davenport reminds us how movie makers use “dailies” to review their work in progress, showing movies to other filmmakers every few month to solicit critical insights that often make the movies better.

Nothing we couldn’t accomplish with a Daily Huddle, right? (more…)

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Change is exhausting!

Many of us accept that the only thing that doesn’t change is change itself. Our world is buffeted on all sides by change … kids grow up, technology abounds, friends move away, the list is endless.

Dan Heath at Fast Company describes a recent experience with subjects who were offered either chocolate chip cookies … or radishes. (If you’ve even been cut from a sports team, you’ll know how the radishes felt!). You can also see a short video there explaining the experiment. (more…)

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