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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Career Setback or “The Sky Is Falling”

If it hasn’t happened yet, it will. Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, you get; pick one: Demoted, laid off, fired, passed over, or criticized for your execution of a project. What happens next will determine your future for a long, long time. When a career setback happens, it will most likely be very emotional.…

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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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Quiet, Is it Selfish or Scared?

When leading a team and a decision is needed, what happens? Is it silence or negotiation and debate? Let’s assume that you have assembled the right people for the team; you have the subject-matter experts to be able to make the right decisions. But just having the right experts at the table does not guarantee…

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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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2020, Don’t Wimp Out Now

Are you a resolutions person? I’m not a big fan of resolutions. It seems they are just another way to procrastinate what you should have done days, weeks, months, or even years ago. What I prefer to do to celebrate a new year is to evaluate, reinvent, and re-energize my focus and attention. How do…

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You have to be an Executive to be a Leader – NOT!

A collective leadership misperception is that it happens to you as a result of a promotion. Sadly, many executives foster this climate of “ordained leadership” by acting as though they, as executives, are smarter than the masses and are therefore more worthy of making a decision. This culture stifles individual contribution, engagement, job satisfaction, and…

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