LeadershipNow 140: December 2015 Compilation

Here are a selection of tweets from December 2015 that you might have missed:

• Validate your beliefs by @scedmonds
• The Founder of TOMS on Reimagining the Company’s Mission
• Emotional Awareness by @RCKahn
• Sometimes You Have to Look Back to Move Forward by @LollyDaskal
• Leadership Beliefs: Are Yours Helping You Lead? by @KateNasser
• I interviewed the most successful people alive — here’s what I learned via @FortuneMagazine
• How to Create a Dynamic Strategic Plan in an Unpredictable World by @JesseLynStoner
• Easy = True by @TomAsacker
• The Economist Films - The World in 2016
• From @JohnBaldoni 3 Questions To Help You Win Your Next Argument
• Good Read: 5 Daily Habits to Improve Your Quality of Life by @Mark_Sanborn
• 5 Mindset Shifts to Promote Connection by @DrToddWHall
• Executives, Protect Your Alone Time by @sbkaufman and @carolyn_greg
• From @WallyBock How to be successful even if you’re smart
• 20 Questions for Business Leaders via @stratandbiz
• 15 Qualities The Most Successful Leaders Have by @BrianKDodd
• How Entrepreneur Robert Mondavi Changed Wine Forever by @tracybyrnes via @Entrepreneur
• FT: How to deal with ‘toxic’ workers
• A Failure to Act: The Leader’s 5 Most Damaging Inactions by Scott Mautz
• How to Orchestrate Your Attitude by @SkipPrichard
• Disciplines of a Learning Organization: Peter Senge by @Tnvora
• From @JohnBaldoni Using Fear To Trump Reason
• I in Leadership by Nigel Nicholson via @LBS
• The Need for Entrepreneurial Leadership by Randel Carlock via @INSEADKnowledge
• You Might Have a Dysfunctional Team If... by @bradlomenick
• From @JohnBaldoni When You Present, Inform Don't Educate
• Here's How Leaders Create Healthy Organizational Culture by @PaulJSohn The importance of language
• MITSloan Mgmt Review @mitsmr: Evaluating your personal knowledge infrastructure
• From @WallyBock Improving those conversations about performance
• FT: Review: The Refusal of Work by David Frayne
• You always want to be the market leader. If you can’t say that, shrink the market segment until you can. @SteveTobak
• 20 Questions for Business Leaders via @stratandbiz
• Renewable Leadership by @StrategicMonk
• Lead Change Group: Four Pillars of Self Leadership by @AlanDUtley
• How to Increase Leaders' Moral Authority by David Dubois via @INSEADKnowledge
• Four Steps to Manage Your Crucial Conversations by Steve Knight, via @INSEADKnowledge

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:16 PM
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Leadership Lessons from the Wright Brothers

THE WRIGHT BROTHERS were born into an exciting period of American history. A time of great progress. Life-changing progress.

It was their character that served them well in pursuing their passion for manned flight. The genius of the Wright brothers wasn’t just that they invented a plane. It is that they figured out how to control it—how to fly it. David McCullough captures this well in one of the best leadership books of 2015. The quotes in this post are from his book, The Wright Brothers.

Their story provides us with many lessons for leaders. It’s a story of the possibilities that show themselves when we approach life from the right perspective.

Courage
Their mission was exciting but it was dangerous. They were putting their lives at risk. “But the brothers, ever conscious of the risks involved, had already decided they must never fly together. That way, if one were to be killed, the other could still carry on the work.”

Determination
Their courage was driven by their belief and confidence in what they were doing. They knew how to deal with failure. Failure informed the process and thus spurred them on. Impossible problems are solved with hard work and attention to detail. In the beginning, they got little support from others. They were ridiculed by neighbors and the establishment in Washington D.C. Their time at Kitty Hawk was physically challenging as they dealt with the elements—the mosquitoes, the heat, the winds—but they persisted. They were highly-disciplined and focused. They were motivated by their work and found joy in it. Thus they were able to keep a proper perspective on either external criticisms or adulation.

Life-Long Learning
Although neither brother went to college or even finished high school, they were well educated. Their father, Bishop Wright, who was an itinerant minister, kept the house well stocked with books. He “heartily championed the limitless value of reading,” and insisted that the children learn to use the English language properly. “He was never overly concerned about his children’s attendance at school. If one or the other of them chose to miss a day or two for some project or interest he thought worthy, it was all right. And certainly, he ranked reading as worthy.” It was a book from their family library, Animal Mechanism, that sparked Wilbur’s interest in “aerial locomotion.” Reading fueled their curiosity about nearly everything—Wilbur especially so. They never stopped learning.

Communication
The brother knew how to communicate their ideas clearly and effectively. Because of how they were brought up, their command of the English language was impressive. Wilbur was “an exceptional public speaker and lucid writer.” When he spoke in public, “his remarks were invariably articulate, to the point, and quite memorable.” “His vocabulary and use of language were of the highest order, due in large measure to standards long insisted upon by his father.”

Teamwork
The brothers worked well together and played to each other’s strengths. They understood each other. “Not that things always went smoothly. They could be highly demanding and critical of each other, disagree to the point of shouting ‘something terrible.’ At times, after an hour or more of heated argument, they would find themselves as far from agreement as when they started, except that each had changed to the other’s original position.” It was their way of working out the solutions to the problems they faced.

Character
It was their character that tied all of their strengths together. French aviator Léon Delagrange wrote, “Wilber Wright is the best example of strength of character that I have ever seen. In spite of the sarcastic remarks and the mockery, in spite of the traps set up from everywhere all these years, he has not faltered.” Their character shaped their attitude and approach to life. And it was formed in the home by their father. Describing Bishop Wright, McCullough writes: “From wide reading and observations of life, he had acquired what seemed an inexhaustible supply of advice on behavior, habits good and bad, things to be aware of in life, goals to strive for. He lectured on dress, cleanliness, economy. At home, he preached courage and good character—‘good mettle,’ as he would say—worthy purpose and perseverance. Providing guidelines he understood to be part of a father’s duty.”

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:49 PM
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The Best Leadership Books of 2015

AS LEADERS it’s easy to get caught up in the moment. It’s hard to take the long-term view when we have to do the mundane. Learning to take the longer view is not easy. A long-term approach helps to take us out of our comfort zones because it connects us with a larger story. How in the midst of the mundane, the glut of information, and the tyranny of the now, can we remember that we are part of a larger—very human—story?

From Everybody Matters which helps us to look at those we lead as family to Becoming Steve Jobs that looks at the development of a leader as a life-long process, the following books help us to do just that. Lead the larger story.

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The Lean CEO: Leading the Way to World-Class Excellence
by Jacob Stoller

Lean is not just a manufacturing system. It is a way of thinking about people that applies to any organization. Lean is a culture. It’s not a directive. It’s a way of thinking. It is about being open and humble. It’s about diversity of thought and understanding that good ideas come from anywhere. The Lean CEO gets to the heart of what it means to lead from anywhere. (Blog Post)

Return on Character: The Real Reason Leaders and Their Companies Win
by Fred Kiel

In Return on Character, Fred Kiel has put numbers to the notion that good leadership aimed at promoting the common good, not just individual, winner-take-all acquisition can be good business. (Blog Post)

Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family
by Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia

Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia tell how Barry-Wehmiller envisioned and implemented a new kind of business culture—a culture that puts people first and cares for employees like family—and turned it into years of highly profitable growth in a tough market. (Blog Post)

H3 Leadership: Stay Hungry. Be Humble. Always Hustle.
by Brad Lomenick

Brad Lomenick reflects on his leadership journey in H3 Leadership. Building on three H’s— Humble (Who am I?), Hungry (Where do I want to go?), and Hustle (How will I get there)—he gives us 20 habits to build our leadership on. The result is a very practical and challenging guidebook. (Blog Post)

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life
by Bernard Roth

The Achievement Habit is a book about life. Bernard Roth has woven together wide variety of insights to help us to design our life and leadership. Using design thinking we can transform our behavior and relationships. Stop wishing, start doing, and take command of your life with the ideas presented here. (Blog Post)

A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden

Typically we look at a constraint as a negative. A problem to be solved. But what if a constraint was the gift that opened up previously unimagined possibilities? What if a constraint was the gift that took you to the next level? We can choose to use a constraint as an impetus to explore something new and arrive at a breakthrough. Not in spite of the constraint, but because of it. (Blog Post)

Triggers: Creating Behavior Change That Lasts—Becoming the Person You Want to Be
by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter

Marshall Goldsmith explains in Triggers the kinds of things in our environment that derail us from becoming the kind of leader, co-worker, parent, or spouse that we want to be. He illuminates an aspect of self-awareness that is so vital to a leader’s success. By creating an awareness of our environment and identifying our own triggers we can be a force for adding value in other people’s lives by triggering something good in others. (Blog Post)

Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time
by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Leadership BS is a compendium of human nature. It describes well the hypocrisy in all of us. We don’t always meet our own standards. We don’t always reward what we say we value. The real world doesn’t behave as it should. Leadership BS is an important book because it is a dose of reality. It is important for the questions it raises. (Blog Post)

You Win in the Locker Room First: The 7 C's to Build a Winning Team in Business, Sports, and Life
by Jon Gordon and Mike Smith

Jon Gordon and NFL coach Mike Smith describe how to transform a mediocre team into a winning one. You Win in the Locker Room First provides leaders of all fields with a practical framework and real world examples to build a great culture, lead with the right mindset and approach, create strong relationships, improve teamwork, execute at a higher level, and avoid the pitfalls that sabotage far too many leaders and organizations.

Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations
by Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone

“Teams are not strictly practical responses to immediate challenges and situations. Teams are at the heart of what it means to be human,” write Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone. This book brings together both the best practices of today and the past, with the latest scientific research, to show leaders in every field how to build the dynamic, robust, and great teams they will need in order to compete in this new world.

Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock

Laszlo Bock shares how Google does it. Frequently unconventional, the ideas do resonate and beg to be tried in your organization. How does Google balance creativity and structure? If you’re comfortable with the amount of freedom you’ve given your employees, says Bock, you haven’t gone far enough.

5 Gears: How to Be Present and Productive When There Is Never Enough Time
by Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram

“Every day, millions of people are negatively impacted by the inability of a person to connect appropriately and to be present.” So much drama is created when we don’t know how to shift gears and become present. 5 Gears offers an extremely valuable metaphor for identifying which gear you are in and finding the right gear at the right time in order to connect fully with others. The 5 Gears model gives you language to communicate which gear you are in to yourself and others, and to understand where others are at so that you can be more fully present. (Blog Post)




Biographies:

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

Becoming Steve Jobs looks at Jobs as a work in progress. “Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths.” And we can too.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance

Elon Musk is one of the most successful and important entrepreneurs in the world. Vance has written a fair portrait of Musk so far. That Musk is extremely persistent is clearly seen. At the same time he is very hard to work with. Comparisons with Steve Jobs are not off the mark.

Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist
by Niall Ferguson

Kissinger: 1923-1968 is the first volume in a two-volume biography. He was one of the most important foreign policy theorists and secretaries of state that America ever produced. Whether you agree with Kissinger or not, Ferguson provides interesting insights into the man and his thinking.

The Wright Brothers
by David McCullough

The Wright brothers were more than just a couple of bicycle mechanics. They were convicted, determined and communicated well. They were a model of authenticity. They were basically self-taught with a well developed love of reading. Their character made their success very likely.


Related Interest:
Best Leadership Books of 2014
Best Leadership Books of 2013
Best Leadership Books of 2012

Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:54 AM
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7 Coaching Skills that You Need as a Leader

Whether you like it or not – if you are a leader, you are a coach.
—Joseph Grenny

Coaching exerts enormous leverage.

People struggle at work and at home. No one leaves their problems at the door when they come to work. And it affects their performance. Coaching is critical. Developing people is or should be a top priority of leaders.

Coaching doesn’t mean fixing people. It is developing a relationship that allows you to help people break through from one level of performance to another. It is unlocking potential.

Michael Simpson writes in Unlocking Potential that coaching is built on four principles:

Building Trust: “Simply being in a position of authority does not make you a trusted coach. Your concern for the person you are coaching must be based on genuine and good intent. Your integrity must be inviolable. Your determination to keep confidences must be unshakable.” These are issues of your character.

Tapping Potential: “When a coach helps a person challenge their paradigms, they can more readily take responsibility for their life or situation. When they learn to align their paradigms to reality, many of the barriers to realizing their potential begin to fall.” “Potential suppressed by years of self-defensiveness, self-betrayal, or self-denial.”

Creating Commitment: You can’t make people commit, “But you can create the conditions where people commit to goals they themselves want to achieve.” This is done primarily by asking powerful coaching questions.

Executing Goals: “All successful coaching conversations need to link directly to actually meeting key performance indicators, measures, and objectives.”

Coaching is a skill with its own set of competencies. Simpson gives seven:

1. Build Trust: Character and competence are foundational to building trust. As you demonstrate character and competence you can begin to expect it of others and build a culture of trustworthiness.
2. Challenge Paradigms: “An individual that believes they can’t improve is not coachable—until that paradigm changes, you’ll go nowhere….Your task is to challenge them firmly and gently.”
3. Seek Strategic Clarity: “With the coach’s help, the individual should choose personal goals and be completely clear about them with measureable endpoints. Without strategic clarity, coaching becomes aimless and endless.”
4. Execute Flawlessly: “Execution may be the toughest challenge of all—the coach can help individuals to actually set, prioritize, and achieve their goals and help to hold them accountable.”
5. Give Effective Feedback: “Give feedback that helps create awareness, focus on actions, and achieve the results that people want with whom you’re coaching.”
6. Tap into Talent: “Most people underestimate their own talents. As a coach you need to know how to help people tap into the unique and vast reserve of the talents they already have.”
7. Move the Middle: “The biggest opportunity for performance improvement in any organization is to help ‘move the middle,’ among those performers who are good, but not yet great.”

Simpson provides you with the essential questions and approach behind each of these skills. One of the benefits of coaching is that it also helps you to develop you. It holds you to a higher standard.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:33 PM
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Are You Trading Influence for Attention?

PEGGY NOONAN brought up some great thoughts in her editorial, A Rash Leader in a Grave Time that would be good for us to consider in any time.

She was referring to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, but too frequently we see the tendency of leaders in all walks of life, to use their “mouth as a blunt instrument” whenever they feel they are in the right, have a just cause, want to get attention, or simply want to put their foot down. Their comments may not be as flamboyant as Donald Trump’s, but they are just as dismissive. Some people find that to be an admirable quality in a leader, until of course, they don’t. When the leader steps on their toes, then the undisciplined rhetoric comes across as contemptuous.

Noonan says that the problem arises when a leader “doesn’t think it through, doesn’t anticipate legitimate pushback, doesn’t try to persuade, only declares.” It is disrespectful and shows a lack of self- and situational-awareness on the part of the leader.

A good leader has a self-awareness of the kind that helps them to understand their impact on others. A good leader seeks to influence and connect with everyone they touch and not just those ardent supporters in their camp. The goal isn’t to just whip up the troops but to gain converts. A leader’s rhetoric may point out differences but with the goal of ultimately bringing reconciliation. Noonan states, “one thing an effective leader must always do is know what can be misunderstood and guard against it, what can be misconstrued and used to paint you—and your followers—as bigoted. Leaders try hard not to let that happen. It is the due diligence of politics.” It’s the due diligence of leaders everywhere.

She uses the word politesse in this regard. In a time when grabbing attention is more important than civility, politesse it not a practical value. Taking the time to be civil or polite and to polish our words is a luxury we can’t afford or we may miss adding our voice to what’s trending. The pressure to respond doesn’t often leave us the time to be thoughtful, measured, and disciplined on our approach. We have to fight the forces that would intimidate us.

That doesn’t mean we can’t be remarkable in our speech. Noonan encourages, “It is possible for candidates to be vivid but careful, dramatic but responsible.”

Politesse is a word that implies sacrifice which is at the core of good leadership. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our raw emotions for disciplined thought; our efficient bluntness for long-term understanding.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 03:11 PM
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5 Leadership Lessons: Players First

Players First is a biographical leadership guide from the University of Kentucky head basketball coach John Calipari. Although geared towards coaching and college basketball, the lessons and approaches are easily applicable to any other leadership situation.

His Players First philosophy is summed up this way: “I coach for the names on the backs of the jerseys—not just the front. My players. They are sent to me by their fathers, their mothers, their grandmothers, their aunts—whoever in this world raised them and loves them. Others look at their NBA bodies and consider them lucky. Future millionaires, just stopping through before they cash in. That’s not what I see. They’re kids, some of them as young as seventeen years old. They all need me in a different way. Some want my affection, others my approval. It’s a burden to be responsible for other people’s children, sometimes a heavy burden.”

From this mindset comes this key point that any leader could ask. “If I’m struggling with a player, it’s where I ask myself: How would I want my own son treated?”

These ideas are worth considering in your own leadership situation:

 There’s not a coach time and a not-coach time. I’m always their coach. If I just walk away, or I look too busy or preoccupied, they don’t know, as a seventeen-year-old or eighteen-year-old, what that means. They wonder, Why did he do that? I don’t want them to think for a moment that I don’t care about them. I don’t want them to have a second’s worth of doubt.

 The art of coaching at this level is about convincing great athletes to change. First we have to get them to accept what they’re not good at. My assistant coaches and I use the word “surrender.” Surrender to our instruction. Surrender to physical conditioning. If you’re delusional and see yourself one way while the rest of the world see something else, let it go. Believe what we’re telling you. Some player will say, “You just don’t understand my game.” But we do. Believe me, we get it. We’re just not liking it.

You have to be strong willed. You can’t have a mental picture of yourself that’s not accurate.

 The best players I’ve coached have a demeanor about them that never moves. They have a calmness. You can’t read the score on their faces. They’ll get emotional, they’ll play with fire, but their demeanor will never be one of rage or anger. Physiology-wise, rage and anger are related to fear. Hook a guy up to wires and look at his brain, and that’s what you’ll find. [W]hen you play with a sense of rage, you don’t respond well to being challenged. [When the game is turning against you], you have no calm inner core to bring you back.

 Part of coaching is acting. It’s true of any kind of leadership, whether you’re a CEO, an army general, or a father. Part of the job is that you don’t reveal your apprehensions. I don’t ever go into games thinking we’re going to lose, but of course I get anxious.

Along the same lines is this note sent to a player:

Alex, work hard to improve your body language. Body language is a facial expression, slouching, dropping your head, how you sand, how you sit, how you speak. Begin today. God created you as a winner and he has big plans for you. Work with him. Be the best. When you feel like you want to drop your head, lift it up. When you feel like slouching your body, stand up straight. When you want to frown or have a sour face, smile. When you feel like complaining, encourage someone else. When someone corrects you, thank God because they care.

 We can’t have kids whose main thing is that they want respect. I respected you enough to give you a place in a heck of a basketball program and put you with other kids I think you’re going to love. You need to be able to give respect. I look for how kids act in front of the people raising them. If they disrespect their mothers or fathers or grandmothers, that’s it. I’m no longer interested.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:58 PM
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The Gift that Keeps on Giving

LEADERSHIP is stewardship. It requires a long term perspective.

It is difficult because it is fundamentally a process of reconciliation; a process of bringing a community of people together towards a common purpose. It is service.

Stewardship requires that the organizational leaders put leadership in the hands of every member of the organization. It gives them ownership of the future. As leaders, it is where we can contribute the most good for society as a whole. It’s good stewardship.

In Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia’s remarkable book, Everybody Matters, they explain the idea this way:

So many American businesses destroy lives every day, but we make a lot of money, and then we feel really good when we write a check to the United Way for $1 million. But I believe we are creating the need for the United Way in the first place by destroying the lives of people who create the wealth that enable us to give. I believe the greatest charity is what we could do at work every day to take care of the people entrusted to us.

The greatest gift, the greatest charity we can give back to society is to be truly human leaders who treat the people under our leadership with profound respect and care and not as objects for our success and wealth. In other words, we need to see ourselves as stewards of the lives we have been given an opportunity to lead and influence.

As a leader, ask everyone you influence, “How can I serve you?”

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:52 PM
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How the World’s Best Leaders Enhance Their Productivity and Effectiveness

The world’s best leaders know how to get things done by skillfully utilizing the talents of the people around them. One of the best examples of this is the relationship successful leaders enjoy with their high-performing executive assistants.

Leaders know how to choose the right person for the job. As Jim Collins wrote in his book Good to Great, leaders start by getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats.

In my book The CEO’s Secret Weapon: How Great Leaders and Their Assistants Maximize Productivity and Effectiveness, I interviewed global business leaders such as Richard Branson, Donald Trump, Steve Forbes, John Chambers, and others, who repeatedly demonstrated this knack of hiring the right person who could operate as a seamless extension of the executive. In the case of these business leaders, all their assistants have been with them well over 20 years, and sometimes, over 30 years. Donald Trump told me, “I have good instincts but I always believe every hire is a gamble.” Knowing yourself, your work habits and your work style are key. In discussing hiring his assistant, Norma Foerderer, who was with him over 25 years before she retired, Trump told me, “I needed someone strong because I work quickly and am demanding because of that. I also needed a straight shooter—someone who will tell it like it is. I’m that way and I can’t have someone who isn’t. Every boss appreciates someone who is honest with them.”

So, how do these global business icons manage to get so much done through the smart use of their assistants? Here are some suggestions for how can you do the same in your business:

Give Them Access: Give your assistant complete access to you. Let them learn by observing your decision-making process, your moods, why you like or dislike something. This perspective will give them a compass for how to act on your behalf. Confident of what you would want, they won’t hesitate to act as your proxy.

Give Them Autonomy: Great leaders know when to become immersed in the details and when they should let someone else take the lead. If you’ve hired the right person, let them do their job. Trust them. Don’t second-guess what they do. As General Patton reportedly said, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” In the case of exceptional executive assistants, you don’t even need to do that. Simply share your vision with them and trust their experience, skills, and creativity to take it from there.

Give Them Confidence: When you trust people, you build their confidence and encourage initiative. I was fortunate in my positions as assistant to successful business leaders such as peak performance strategist, Tony Robbins, to be allowed considerable latitude in how I did my job. Then the job becomes exciting because you care for it and run it as you would your own business. Richard Branson’s former assistant, Penni Pike, told me that after many years of working in close quarters with Branson, one day he told her to take all his most important papers and move back to the houseboat from where they worked earlier. She said that while it felt strange to be away from him in the beginning, it came to feel like she was running her own business. In fact, the experience I gained through being trusted by my bosses and working independently, gave me considerable confidence when I started my own business because decision making and going out on a limb were not new to me.

Give Them Kudos: Management consultant Peter Drucker told me he didn’t have much interest in discussing assistants with me because his focus was on strategy and assistants don’t create strategy. If he were alive today, I think Mr. Drucker would be pleasantly surprised to see the role many assistants are playing in helping their executives define strategy because of the strategic position an assistant to a leader occupies in an organization. The assistant is often privy to information that would never make it to the ears of the CEO unless the assistant told them. Who is doing or saying what, how employees are reacting to new directives, much of this is communicated to the CEO by their assistant, whose finger is on the pulse of the organization. Smart leaders take note of their assistant’s recommendations. Management guru Marshall Goldsmith commented in my book, “Executives should get in the habit of asking their assistants, ‘How can I be a better partner in our relationship’, then listen, learn and act on the assistant’s ideas.”

Give Them Respect: Every top influential business leader I’ve had the privilege of knowing or hearing about, shows courtesy and consideration to their assistant – in public and private. They don’t disrespect their assistant and they don’t let others disrespect their assistant. I remember, as a young assistant, telling my CEO boss that someone had been rude to me. My boss immediately called him saying that when I called, this person needed to speak to me as if he were speaking to my boss. That experience taught me that a boss backs up his people. As much as the assistant “has the boss’ back”, the boss should do the same.

Give Them Gratitude: Acknowledge the immense job your assistant is doing on your behalf. Time after time, great business leaders have told me they could never do what they do without their assistant. As Ken Blanchard remarked in my book, “Assistants give you the capacity to do so much more.” Remember to express your thanks, show consideration and once in a while, look for ways to reward them.

Develop these habits and you will have learned some of the secrets that for generations have enabled exceptional leaders to function at optimum levels, working effectively with their exceptional assistants.

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Jan Jones is the author of The CEO’s Secret Weapon: How Great Leaders and Their Assistants Maximize Productivity and Effectiveness. She is President of Jan Jones Worldwide, a speakers bureau that evolved from her experience as executive assistant to personal development icon, Tony Robbins and ten years as exclusive representative for small business visionary, Michael Gerber. For more information: theceossecretweapon.com

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:24 AM
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First Look: Leadership Books for December 2015

Here's a look at some of the best leadership books to be released in December.

  Go Slow to Go Fast: Tools to Disrupt Incumbent Strategy & Behavior to WIN your Competitive Landscape by Damian D."Skipper" Pitts
  Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way by Joseph Michelli
  Navigating Chaos: How to Find Certainty in Uncertain Situations by Jeff Boss
  Organize Tomorrow Today: 8 Ways to Retrain Your Mind to Optimize Performance at Work and in Life by Jason Selk and Tom Bartow with Matthew Rudy
  Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy



For bulk orders call 1-800-423-8273



Build your leadership library with these specials on over 100 titles. All titles are at least 40% off the list price and are available only in limited quantities.


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Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:33 PM
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