Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of people engaging in what I call “ain’t it awful” conversations. Believe me, I understand that with things going on like the terror attacks around the world, the controversial Presidential campaigns in the United States, and even the weather, it is easy to slip into a negative mindset. But hand-wringing […]
Learning from Failure
“Success is not forever and failure isn’t fatal” is one of my favorite quotes from my friend Don Shula, former head coach of the Miami Dolphins football team and my coauthor on the book Everyone’s a Coach. This philosophy drove a great deal of Coach Shula’s behavior during his long career as the winningest head […]
Make it a Summer of Learning
If you want to be a great leader, you must make personal growth a conscious choice and a continuous journey. In the book I wrote with Mark Miller, Great Leaders Grow, we say that growing to a leader is like oxygen to a deep sea diver: without it, you die. Not a physical death, of […]
Hello, My Name is Ken—and I’m an Egomaniac
I want to share a method for getting your ego out of the way and clear your path to becoming a servant leader. There are two sides of the human ego that can cause trouble. One is false pride—when you think more of yourself than you should. When this occurs, you spend most of your […]
Applying Servant Leadership
Continuing with the servant leader theme, I want to share a real-life example that I experienced. To help you realize that servant leadership can occur in any organization, consider what happened when I visited the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). When you mention the DMV, most people would say it’s a government bureaucracy that often […]
The Visionary Role of the Servant Leader
I love the saying “A river without banks is a large puddle.” The banks permit the river to flow and give it direction. In my last post I explained that the visionary part of servant leadership is about providing clear direction. If people don’t have a compelling vision to serve, they can’t work toward a […]
Understanding Servant Leadership
I’m spending a lot of time lately thinking and writing about servant leadership. Although much has been said and written about the topic, I still run into people who don’t quite understand the concept. They tend to think it is about the inmates running the prison, or a leader who tries to please everyone, or […]
The Wrapping Up Conversation: A Great Idea for New Managers
I’ve written many times about the importance of managers working with each direct report to set smart goals, to praise progress and goal achievement, and to redirect when performance is falling short. In our new First-time Manager program, we train managers how to have conversations around these three secrets—goal setting, praising, and redirecting—from my book […]
Listening: An Essential Skill for New Managers
Looking over the comments from my last post, I am reminded that the key to being an effective manager is building good relationships. And the key to good relationships is communication. Management takes place mostly through conversations. Several of you mentioned the challenge of having conversations with direct reports who were once your peers. In […]
First-Time Manager Challenge: Providing Feedback and Re-Direction
Today is a big day for our company—we are officially releasing our new First-time Manager program based on the essential secrets of The New One Minute Manager. It’s a great one-day program designed to address some of the key challenges people face when they step into a leadership role for the first time—including how to […]