Published in SmartBrief on Leadership June 14,2021 This past November, James daSilva’s piece "How Can Office Politics Work for You Instead of Against You?" highlighted a problematic aspect of office politics: Although office politics is not a zero-sum game, how do you deal with people who act like it is? We’ve all...
Leadership success stories about superstar managers, brilliant visionaries, and transformative role models proliferate in the media to a point where it appears that industry leaders are minted every moment, and the exceptions are almost the norm. We are subliminally encouraged to emulate their glory. Inspirational stories can help motivate us...
Are today’s leaders introspective? Self-reflective? Perhaps. But do they regularly concern themselves with what qualities they might be lacking, or second-guess the positive traits they possess? Probably not. People of influence have not reached success by falling into the weakness trap. They instead focus on leveraging their inherent gifts. One...
The show “Shark Tank,” like much of the media, perpetuates the myth that you have to be aggressive, assertive, even confrontational to advance your career and become a leader; that thoughtfulness, politeness, and the inability to summarize an important idea in less than a minute are crippling diseases; and that...
Every process in life can be plagued by distractions, those seductive avenues that lure you outside the framework of viable action, and march you down some futile or non-productive course. The process of identifying the best of your true self and your personal virtues can be derailed by side paths that lead...
As we search for ways to increase our chances for success and career fulfillment, society and the media steep us all in the makeover movement, preaching at every turn that we are not good enough. Like crawling caterpillars, we are in desperate need of some remarkable transformation. (“And just by fortunate...
“Are you a tough boss?” asked an interviewer of John L. Weinberg, senior partner and de facto CEO of Goldman Sachs. A former Marine, Weinberg was a blunt-speaking, unabashed, and self-driven man who knew that most of Goldman’s employees sought to work as hard and as wisely as he himself...
The most effective leaders know how to teach their employees the value of one powerful quality, one that most likely helped them rise to the top themselves: Discipline. The great sports coaches are transparent examples of this. Teaching and emphasizing discipline to prepare for the contests to come is what...
