Long-term relationships and marriages end and part ways for many reasons. Rarely do they end for no reason. If the reasons are not clear and understood by both parties, including the one choosing to leave, grudges and guilt will destroy good memories. The bad breakup could end up as baggage...
Bosses, Do you know what’s really going on in your organizations? According to the Speak Truth to Power Survey I fielded last month, no. You’re often not hearing what your people really think. According to my unscientific-but-interesting poll, almost half your potential workforce (48%) indicated...
Innovation so often happens in the unplanned places. This is something of a conundrum for many leaders whose manufacturing B-School heritage tells them that everything should be planned out, documented and accounted for. Innovation – like its sister creativity – cannot be planned, budgeted, shoved into a “retreat” or predicted. It happens in the shower and in the in-between spaces of life and work.
Leading innovation is difficult because you have to risk looking like a fool. But when the great leader looks beneath the surface of the failures innovative playtime produces, they often discover that in those failures are seeds of success. Sometimes it’s a specific idea that results, sometimes it’s just reenergized employees, which can pay back in employee creativity, retention and improved customer service.
Innovation is a personal skill too. Here are three things you can do to create space for innovation in your life.
“Can you talk about a failure you had and what you learned from it?” It was a harmless question from an attendee at a CEO roundtable event I was speaking at a few weeks ago. I shared about the time I got fired from my position as region president for a Fortune 500 company. After I was done telling...
Contributed by CEO Coach Henna Inam There is a large space between having power and being powerful. Women have historically had a love hate relationship with power. Personally, I am one of them. In some situations in my corporate career, I was in positions of great power but had a hard time...
I’ve been self-employed for a decade (more if you look closely), but it wasn’t until this year that I became an entrepreneur and began to see my leadership style shift closer to authenticity. What’s the change and why is it affecting my leadership style and character? Unlike a self-employed person...
Only a few hours after the announcement that Marissa Mayer, formerly of Google, was Yahoo!’s new – pregnant - CEO, many female commenters on the web added new dimensions to the “Motherhood Penalty” and immediately started imagining how she might fail. “Thank you, Marissa Mayer. Now don’t mess...
When I was a young attorney, I attended a real estate closing with a female real estate partner in my office. She had been practicing for years, had successfully navigated the pressure cooker of working in a large law firm, was on several prestigious boards, and had a cache of clients willing to...
