Year: 2018

Many of us wonder how better to motivate and influence the people around us. It’s a question I am regularly asked by clients who want to lean in to their leadership, but who aren’t quite sure how to do it.It is an important question, and the answer, I believe, is that people are most drawn to and influenced by a leader's personal authority. If you want to be a great leader (not a bully) and bring out the best in others while being authentic to yourself, you will need to develop that personal authority. It is something a person can carry even if they are not in an obvious position of power; even if they don’t have situational authority over anyone. It's not simple, but the first step, for nearly everyone,…

Strong cognitive skills--those that can be measured with IQ tests, for instance--are always in demand in the marketplace. However, new research by economists finds that employers are also increasingly searching for applicants with other strengths: "non-cognitive" soft skills such as teamwork, collaboration, and oral and written communication skills.This is a strong affirmation for the leaders I know who have been putting in the work to strengthen their self-knowledge, listening skills, executive presence and other aspects of emotional intelligence."Strong cognitive skills are increasingly a necessary — but not a sufficient — condition for obtaining a good, high-paying job," says David J. Deming, an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. "You also need to have social skills." One reason for this, he suggests, is that in many jobs there is…

How many times do you leave a one-on-one meeting or conversation with your boss or coworker feeling unsure about just what their motivations were, or what kind of impact you made? “What did they really think about what I had to say?” you might ask yourself. “I wish they weren't so hard to read.” How often do you go over the meeting in your mind, creating a “what if?” scenario, or coming up with stories of what just happened, before deciding to just move on and hope for the best?Situations like this are common at organizations and they are also avoidable, when leaders practice and encourage transparency by being clear, honest and forthright. Transparency in business means sharing information with others, including sharing the impact of others’ words and actions. It can be difficult to…

I recently attended a talk for human resource leaders that brought in Hitendra Wadhwa, a very popular professor at Columbia Business School and founder of the Institute for Personal Leadership (IPL). Wadhwa is a mathematician who has made a study of what makes a great leader. It didn’t surprise me that this scholar found that great leadership comes from the person you are inside, rather than being imposed from the outside, but I was excited to learn that his research offers some quantifying evidence to back up that philosophy, which I share. Letting your inner self be your "guiding light," as Wadhwa eloquently put it, is easy to say, but it's not always clear to each of us how we can bring that about. Wadhwa proposed paying attention to five key aspects of self. I'll…

Reading books is good for you. Even Oprah says so.(Writing books is, too, even if while you're doing it you're not sure if you'll ever finish. Ahem.)Late last summer I finished writing my first book. Among other benefits, that experience gave me even more respect for book authors than I had before. Writing is hard work. Putting your ideas and words out into the world for others to read—and perhaps criticize—is also a challenge. So one of my goals in the New Year, now that I'm done writing my first book, is to read more of other people's books. It’s sometimes hard to carve out time for book reading but I notice that when I do, what I get from a good book reverberates in my life far beyond the time…