I am a goal setter. I set goals at the start of each year, each semester, even every weekend. What do I hope to accomplish? How much? How high? How far? I set goals in my work life, in my personal life, in my musical life, and in my running life. Goals help me stretch; goals help me go beyond where I have gone before. I want to run 250 miles in a month; I want to have a 50% response rate to an interest inventory; I want to reduce my email inbox to zero by Friday. Goals help me focus; goals help me envision success.

In a previous entry, I wrote about internal obstacles [link here]. Now, I’d like to focus on a particularly insidious internal obstacle–goals! It is insidious because Read more

An important task of anyone in middle management is to identify and recruit high quality talent. Entry level staff tend to show up to professional meetings intending to impress, get noticed, and be on the lookout for that next opportunity. The purpose of networking for new professionals is primarily for the individual (which early in one’s career is not a bad thing!). But at some point we realize the value in noticing and identifying people who we would like to work alongside, and our emphasis turns toward Read more

What is your mission statement? How many people in your organization have read it? Understand it? Remember it? BELIEVE IT? And, how many of those who remain after answering those questions have actually adopted it?

Management books universally extol the importance of a mission statement. I have both suffered through mission development exercises as a staff member and been hired to facilitate these sessions. The process goes something like this: a group of senior administrators lock themselves in a room for an extended period of time; they debate, compromise, and craft lofty prose until they finally unveil (white smoke from chimney) their UNIFYING DOCUMENT. Shortly thereafter, they proudly display their statements on websites, placards, and business cards, then sit back and wait for the wisdom to trickle down to the masses. Much to their surprise, little change occurs.

The problem? Most mission statements are too long, too generic, too complex, and

so focused on the organization (not the consumer) that they have little meaning to the people in a position to execute them. Instead, leaders who set aside the mission statement and enact a VALUES-DRIVEN approach are likely Read more

Lost amidst stories about Farmville and Anthony Weiner’s inappropriate tweets is the tremendous potential for digital leadership. The platform, whether LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest, doesn’t matter. Today’s most progressive leaders are recognizing and leveraging the benefits of social media. For those who dismiss digital initiatives as a distraction, it’s time to stop making excuses, learn enough to make informed decisions, and focus on the future.

Social media serves to humanize leaders and reveal authenticity in a way that a biography on an organizational website cannot. Leaders who share values, thoughts, and their personality with their followers can imbue trust and respect over time. The reach and efficiency of communication that social media affords was unthinkable just a few years ago. So why haven’t more leaders taken advantage? Here are a few Read more

People underestimate the power of a good presentation. I’ve delivered public speaking and electronic presentation training to corporate executives, college students, and colleagues for two decades. People have told me they’ve gained business accounts, aced classes, nailed conference presentations, received awards, and landed jobs using presentations that benefitted from the simple, yet powerful, lessons of my training. Presentations matter, and great presentations help distinguish you and serve as

Read more

Every leader needs to surround him/herself with people who will give honest feedback. When a leader heads down a questionable path, when his idea is unrealistic, or when she’s deaf to the pulse of what’s happening, someone needs to fearlessly point out that “the emperor has no clothes.” Sadly, this kind of intervention rarely occurs, and leaders are largely to blame.

As critical as assessment is to developing leadership competency, those in positions of power don’t ask for much of it. Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of the Leadership Challenge, analyzed data from more than 70,000 individuals who completed a thirty-item behavioral inventory and found Read more

Most higher education professionals haven’t had very diverse experiences. They move steadily from an undergraduate degree to Master’s and PhD and settle into a career without ever leaving the sanctity and homogeneity of an institutional setting. As professionals, they travel to conferences, attend educational workshops, and read journals and books, all focused SPECIFICALLY in their discipline. Advancement and praise are afforded to those who further divide the proverbial pie of theories and research relative to their expertise into smaller bits of unexplored terrain. If one takes a “big picture” view, this fairly standard and narrowly focused approach is limiting and can serve as an endless loop of inbreeding that ultimately leads to complacency and ineffectiveness. Consider Steve Jobs’ perspective: “When people don’t have enough experiences, enough dots to connect, they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.”

Here are 5 suggestions designed to give you and your team

a broad range of new perspectives by Read more

Have you ever looked at a situation and asked why something was done a certain way and been met with the stern reply, “Because that’s the way we do things around here” or some variation? Most of us have, and there’s research that sheds some light on the issue.

Harry Harlow was an American psychologist best

known for his controversial social experiments on Rhesus monkeys. In one of his experiments, he placed five monkeys into a cage and hung a banana at the top of the cage, high out of reach. He then placed a stepladder in the cage so that the monkeys could climb up and grab the banana. When the first monkey climbed to the top to reach for the banana, ALL five monkeys were sprayed with freezing cold water. Read more