Tag: collaboration
Why We are Stuck in the Muck
It seems to me that the conditions for change have become much more challenging in the last 20 years.
Every day brings new stories of extremism growing, disinformation proliferating, inequality widening, and fear simmering. In the midst of growing trends and shrinking standards, the question is:
How do we get ourselves out of this muck?
Perspective
Perspective is the lens through which we experience the world, and it has the power to shape our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Since this blog is entitled, Perspectives and Possibilities, I thought it was about time to share some perspectives on perspective.
Conflict Clarity
“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.” —William James We all face conflicts in life. Conflicts occur then people have different points of view, values, and principles. There is no way we can avoid conflicts. We can develop a healthy attitude toward conflict, however, that enables us to calmly view differences as opportunities for growth. Healthy Read More
Seven Essential Qualities of Leadership
“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” —Laurel Thatcher Ulrich In 1982, my dear friend Dr. Mark Edwards introduced a fair, impartial and objective tool to measure leadership effectiveness. He called it 360 feedback, which is now ubiquitous in organizations throughout the world. The idea is to give leaders the gift of multi-source feedback on critical leadership competencies so that they can understand more clearly how they are perceived by direct reports, peers, and more senior executives. Read More
We
“I still can’t see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.” —Langston Hughes In a recent conversation with Due Quach (pronounced Zway Kwok), the creator and author of Calm Clarity, she shared new content she is developing to integrate lessons from the Johari Window, the Enneagram, and the Calm Clarity Brain 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 framework. It struck me as a brilliant idea to tie these three tools together. The Johari Window is a simple way Read More
Speed of Evolution
“Everyone takes the limits of their own vision for the limits of the world.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
I recently attended a conference on digital acceleration and change leadership. The most shocking and provocative presentation stated that we will experience as much change in the next 20 years as we have experienced in the last 2,000 years.
Power
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” —Abraham Lincoln
In the face of tremendous adversity throughout the world, many communities have responded with incredible resilience. The real test of our humanity is what happens when we are given power.
Grow Grow
“Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers, ‘Grow! Grow!'” —Talmud
My grandkids were born prematurely at 26.5 weeks. Ezra weighed a whopping 2 pounds, and Annie weighed a fragile 1.5 pounds.
Tribes and Teams
“Before the rise of the nation-state, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.” —Robert Reich When I conduct teambuilding sessions, I often start by administering a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) so that I can understand the different personality styles on the team. The idea is to identify and leverage differences to achieve optimal performance. The MBTI has a continuum Read More
The Masses and the Margins
“And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence.” —Plato, Republic, VI, 508 I worked in inmate rehabilitation for eight years in Read More
Gauging Gurus
As Lao Tzu suggests, “when a person crowns himself as a guru, he is not.”
We should always be able to ask and answer: At what level are the people we entrust with power operating? In this post, I share my guide to evaluating leaders, gurus, and practitioners.
The Rudder and the Soul
The executive function represents the highest level of mental competence. It is the ability to plan ahead, anticipate consequences, derive abstract meaning, and arrive at appropriate judgments.
Read my assessment of the various competencies necessary for strong leadership and find out how Donald Trump’s skills stack up against my criteria.