I recently attended a meeting sponsored by Women’s Weekly, an organization that connects high accomplishing women in the Washington, D.C. area. Judith Wilson founded the organization, herself a highly accomplished leader in the D.C. business and nonprofit communities. The title of the meeting was Break Your Own Rules, as the principal speaker...
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Ideas & Advice
Learning from an Entrepreneur
For this weeks post, I am writing about Jim Garland’s talk with Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business students a few weeks ago, titled “The Freedom of the Entrepreneur.” Jim is CEO of Sharp Details and is an accomplished executive and entrepreneur. While the subject and talk was directed at aspiring...
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Great Leadership and a Winning Culture
In this week’s post, I share thoughts from Mike Crowley, a senior executive who leads with his heart. He has high standards and the discipline required to in today’s very competitive business world. What is special about Mike’s leadership is his strong support of his people. He puts his confidence in them, which...
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Time Tested and Proven Leadership
This past week, I attended a luncheon meeting of the Loyola Club in Washington, DC, and took away several insights I’d like to share. For context, the Loyola Club’s members are those who have been educated by the Jesuits. There are 28 Jesuit universities and 57 high schools in the...
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What’s Your Strategy as a New Boss?
I hope these ideas are helpful for those of you who are new in your role as a boss, as well as for current bosses, about how best to invest your time and energy to maximize the long-term success of your company or team. Last week, a friend called me...
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Conversations Are the Work of a Leader
I have been writing about feedback and feedforward, stay interviews and related topics – essentially our communication with our team members and all co-workers. There is no question that communication is critically important. In fact, we often hear that good communication could cure many of the problems that exist, not...
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Exceptional Leadership by Women
I had the good fortune this week to attend the Women in Philanthropy and Leadership (WiPL) Annual Conference sponsored by Coastal Carolina University, and would like to share my takeaways with you. Wow! WiPL was created to help leverage the impact women and their contributions of time, talent and resources...
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Empathy Helps Us Be Effective Leaders
I am continue to receive appreciative emails about our discussion this past month about purposeful conversations with our external and our internal clients (colleagues, team members and other co-workers). Ideally, these conversations are on an on-going basis throughout the year and in a sense are informal “stay” interviews. Through these...
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Helping Our People (and Asking for Their Help)
For the past three weeks, I have written about the “stay” interview and, really, the importance of having meaningful conversations with the people with whom we work—our colleagues and team members. I have received more appreciative feedback about this theme than I remember from past leadership posts. This has hit...
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Using Silence to Gain Deeper Information: More about the “Stay” Interview and Communicating with Our People
I sure have a hit a positive cord with my post on January 7th about a “stay” interview, i.e., having individual conversations with our people asking purposeful questions about what they like about our work and our company and about their ideas for improvement. As I mentioned in last Monday’s...
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