Few of us wake up in the morning with the intention of being a hero. Instead, we hope to get by without any major stumbling blocks and aim to do what is expected of us. It’s only when confronted with obstacles that threaten to derail our routines and plans that we don the armor and…
Leaders with habitual skepticism are not hard to spot: they suffer with the “not-invented-here” syndrome, habitually skeptical of the ideas of others. I’ve been writing about the types, causes, and ways to defeat skepticism. What I’ve found in my coaching practice is that the best leaders know that they don’t have all the answers—no one…
Can we REALLY defeat skepticism? As I shared in my last post, skepticism is a logical and rational challenge of ideas to get to the reality or truth about a specific issue. But the typical impression we have of skepticism pertains to a close-minded, doubtful, and hard-to-convince mentality. This often stems from a fear of…
Skepticism in leadership takes on several forms; some are advantageous, and some are detrimental. In its truest sense, skepticism is a logical and rational challenge of ideas to get to the reality or truth about a specific issue. Leaders with such a constructive, critical eye possess a positive strength, especially in a fast-paced environment where…
These last few blog posts have been dissecting the elements of trust (Leading with Trust, What Builds Leadership Trust? and 5 Trust Building Skills). If you were to boil down trust to its four most basic and essential components, what would they be? In The Integrity Dividend: Leading by the Power of Your Word by…
I’ve been exploring what builds high leadership trust (Leading with Trust and What Builds Leadership Trust?). Maister, Green and Galford wrote about the elements that build trust in their book The Trusted Advisor (Free Press, 2001). Trustworthy leaders practice and master five key abilities: Listen Well Most leaders only use their listening skills to gather…
In the work I do coaching leaders, everyone purports to have high leadership trust with stakeholders. Surveys, however, show otherwise. The truth is that most leaders could do far more to reinforce an environment of high trust. I think part of the problem is that “trust” is a bit ill-defined and subjective, like “world peace.”…
Are you leading with trust? It is a fact that high-trust organizations constantly outperform others, but oddly enough, few leaders focus on building trust with stakeholders. The leaders I work with are, for the most part, trustworthy. Yet almost everyone could do more to reinforce an environment of high trust in the workplace. There is…
When team members trust one another, engage in healthy conflict around issues, commit to the decisions they make, and hold one another accountable, there’s a pretty good chance they will succeed. And yet… sometimes they don’t. When teams manage the first four dysfunctions of teams that commonly cause project failures, they still might fail. Why…
Accountability is a term that gets overused in the workplace and thus loses some of its power. Here’s a good definition from Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002). “When it comes to teamwork, I define accountability as the willingness of team members to remind one another when they are not living…