Tag Archives: Leaders

Create a Conversation, Not a Presentation

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by John Coleman

When I worked as a consultant, I was perennially guilty of “the great unveil” in presentations—that tendency to want to save key findings for the last moment and then reveal them, expecting a satisfying moment of awe. My team and I would work tirelessly to drive to the right answer to an organization’s problem. We’d craft an intricate presentation, perfecting it right up until minutes or hours before a client meeting, and then we’d triumphantly enter the room with a thick stack of hard copy PowerPoint slides, often still warm from the printer.

But no matter how perfect our presentation looked on the surface, we regularly came across major issues when we were in the room. These one-sided expositions frequently led to anemic conversations. And this hurt our effectiveness as a team and as colleagues and advisers to our clients. Continue reading →

The Real Difference Between Leader and Manager

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by Steve Tobak

In the 19th century, Karl Marx famously called religion “the opium of the people.” In the new millennium, the opium of the people is content. A massive amount of content is generated and consumed daily by a billion people who increasingly resemble addicts or drones in an online collective, depending on your choice of metaphor.

The only real difference between the two opiates is that, today, anyone can create his own personal brand of religion and attract a flock of followers to his blog or Facebook page. No wonder so many who’ve never actually managed an employee or run a business call themselves entrepreneurs and CEOs. They have followers, so they must be leaders. Continue reading →

Using Social Media Without Jeopardizing Your Career

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by Alexandra Samuel

Effective business communicators know that a brisk, bulleted memo is often more effective than a multi-page document, that an executive summary is at least as important as a full report, and that a PowerPoint deck driven by a few key images and bullets works a lot better than a deck that contains a word-for-word transcript of your presentation. We all know that less is more.

Yet even those who have mastered the art of brevity in traditional business communication may have a tough time mastering online communication. Whether it’s email, chat, or a social network, word count isn’t just a matter of style—it’s often a technical requirement. Add to that the expectation that your online voice should sound conversational, engaging, or even funny, and communicating online may be the biggest (and certainly most frequently encountered) writing challenge that we face in business today. Here are some guidelines that can help make those messages productive and satisfying—rather than a liability. Continue reading →

How to Manage a Team of B Players

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by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

In 2004, Greece surprised the world by winning the European Championship, the toughest tournament in international soccer. Despite not even being a dark horse in the competition, and with a team of mostly peripheral and unremarkable players, they overcame France and hosts Portugal (twice) to lift the trophy. Even hardcore soccer fans would be unable to name more than two players in that Greek squad, yet few will forget the remarkable collective achievement of a team that faced odds of 150/1 for winning the trophy.

What allows a team of B players to achieve A+ success? A great deal of scientific evidence suggests that the key determinants are psychological factors — in particular, the leader’s ability to inspire trust, make competent decisions, and create a high-performing culture where the selfish agendas of the individual team members are eclipsed by the group’s goal, so that each person functions like a different organ of the same organism. In the famous words of Vince Lombardi: “Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” This is true for all teams, of course, but if you’re leading a team of B players (people who are just average in terms of competence, talent, or potential), your leadership matters even more. In fact, if you are leading a team of B players, you have to be an A-class leader; otherwise, your team will have no chance. Continue reading →

Can you teach leadership or are you born with it?

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By Carolyn Quinn

The study of leadership goes back as far as Plato – and still it continues to intrigue psychologists, but what makes a good leader?

Around me were bosses from around the world – from Nigeria to the United Arab Emirates.

We were all attending the leadership development programme at the London Management Centre and grappling with the question – are leaders born or made?

The leadership business is a massive money-spinner – a multi-million pound industry.

But I had arrived for my course with a healthy dose of scepticism. “Don’t some of the attendees just go along for a jolly?” I asked our trainer. Continue reading →