As a leader, one thing you must be vigilant about is keeping an eye out for any process or culture creep which might lead to complacency or a disconnect with the present-day realities found just outside your office walls. While there are many examples in today’s headlines of organizations which have drifted so far off-course that it’s hard to see a viable turnaround in their near future, few illustrate the risks and fallout from such situations as the ensuing drama around the capsizing of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the coast of Italy.

In the piece “Seven Tips for Becoming a Better Boss”, leaders from several organizations which were recently recognized as being one of the “Best Small Workplaces of 2011” share what they found to be the key steps which were behind their organization’s success and positive workplace environment.

In light of the actions of the Costa Concordia captain and his superiors, this piece ironically also reveals how the current culture and workplace attitudes at Costa Cruises set into motion actions which not only lead to this fatal maritime disaster, but which also played a role in defining how their employees responded to this crisis.

Consider, for example, the following three lessons these leaders ascribe as being key to their collective success as an organization, and how the Costa Cruises leadership’s failure to do the same has now cast some serious doubt about the future viability of their organization. Click here to continue reading »

How do we stop or curb drama in the workplace? That’s the basis of the conversation I had with Marlene Chism in the fifth episode of my leadership podcast series, “Leadership Biz Cafe”.

Marlene is a speaker, author and founder of The Stop Your Drama Methodology, an eight-part empowerment process to increase clarity and improve productivity and personal effectiveness. Marlene has a master’s degree in HR Development from Webster University and is the author of “Success is a Given: Reading the Signs While Reinventing Your Life”, as well as recently published “Stop Workplace Drama – Train Your Team to Have No Complaints, No Excuses and No Regrets”

Over the course of our conversation about how to manage workplace drama, Marlene and I discuss the following:

• Learning to appreciate the difference between the drama that arises at work and the drama that comes out from your reaction to that situation.
• How a lack of clarity leads to workplace conflict and what we can do to regain clarity when our perspective about what’s going on around us becomes obscured.
• How to identify the gap between your goals and where your team is and the relationship this gap has in creating drama in the workplace.
• Why we need to take responsibility for what we can control in order to resolve workplace conflict.
• That workplace drama in itself isn’t the real problem; that it’s something more personal and more within our control that we can address.

As I mentioned at the end of the show, Click here to continue reading »

Why do the goals that you’ve set out for your team to accomplish matter?

At first, the answer to this question might seem obvious – the goals you’ve established are meant to ensure your organization’s continued profitability, to increase or sustain your market share, create a new demand for your products or services, and so forth.

And yet, if we examine this answer closer, it becomes clear that the measures above are merely the outcomes of your organization’s shared efforts and not the real driving force which motivates your employees to contribute their full talents and abilities. For that, employees require something deeper and more meaningful – a noble cause which they are internally driven to rally around and bring to fruition.

Our noble cause is that shared purpose that allows us to move past focusing only on the ‘how’ and seeking to answer the ‘why’, fostering a deeper sense of meaning in what we do and an understanding of how our efforts can impact others beyond our office walls.

It’s the reason why some companies have managed to thrive and expand their market base despite the uncertainties present in today’s global economy, because they’re not simply Click here to continue reading »

As the new year continues to chug along, there’s been a noticeable amount of discussion going on in trying to decipher or anticipate what businesses can expect over the course of the next 12 months. In what’s sure to be music to the ears of many leaders and their employees, most business pundits are putting forth predictions of a turnaround year, with the focus shifting from recovery back to growth.

Whether these predictions turn out to be true or not, one thing that there’s little doubt about is that an organization’s chances for growth and prosperity is tied to their ability to attract and retain employees who can help them to achieve their goals.

Of course, in light of the need for quicker responses to market changes and more innovative thinking, leaders need to look beyond the familiar, tried-and-true selection variables used both to locate new talent, as well as gauge leadership potentials within their ranks.

As I’ve discussed several times here on my blog, it’s becoming clear that Click here to continue reading »