Leadership, a Journey Without End

The common denominators of respected leaders are they never stop learning, and they never stop teaching. Leadership takes a significant commitment to the journey of others. It is fraught with setbacks, mistakes, tough decisions, and pride. The unwavering leadership commitment is to help others take risks, make mistakes, do things wrong, and from all that…

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Pandemic – Marketing Needs to Talk!

Like you, I have received several emails, seen numerous Facebook and Twitter posts on how banks and credit unions are handling the Coronavirus. Typically these posts and emails start with something like, “We care about your safety…” and then they talk about how they are making banking safe by cleaning their branches and protecting their…

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How Passion Impacts your Presence

When people watch you day to day, they get a pretty good idea of how you feel about your life, your choices, and your job.  It doesn’t take long for someone to figure out if you LOVE what you are doing.  Recently I had distinct experiences where I could tell who loved what they were…

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Sometimes you gotta get “Prickly”

The biggest threat to a team or organization is complacency. The minute a team is okay with the status quo, all growth, innovation, and improvement stops. One symptom of complacency is groupthink. This situation occurs when everyone sits in a meeting in silence, and the robotic bobble-heads begin to bob with every agenda item. We’ve…

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Leading with Good Intentions

A coworker does something we don’t understand or agree with, what do we do? We write a story in our head. We create scenarios on what we think the intentions of this person were. We create a story with little real evidence, only perception, “intuition,” or assumption. Typically these stories are negative. Usually, these perceptions…

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Meetings Leadership for Effectiveness and Efficiency

Often leadership is fraught with perils, and timing is everything. A successful meeting requires the following: An agenda Time management Quality discourse Conflict resolution Defined next steps with firm deadlines Since a leader’s schedule is heavily weighted with meetings, knowing meeting skills can make the difference between walking out of a session frustrated, feeling like…

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Managing your Boss – Risky Business

One of the toughest jobs a leader can take on is leading horizontally and leading up. Leading without authority or the power of title is a critical skill that all great leaders have learned. Even a CEO has to, at times, lead the board of directors or the Chairperson needs to lead shareholders. To develop…

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The Struggle and Joy of Peer-to-Peer Coaching

By Mollie Otieno, a Learning and Development expert Peer-to-peer coaching is scary. Peer coaching often reveals a lot of our own insecurities. What will my team member think about me?  Will they still like me? What if they someday become my boss, will they seek to avenge my coaching efforts?  Am I putting my job…

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