The following is a guest post by Jason Monaghan.

Doritos and effective leadership. Not an easy combination to draw a lesson from, right?

You might be surprised.

If you watched the Doritos commercial during the Super Bowl then you realize that their ingenious use of language and video led you to an engaging conclusion: that Doritos are better than, well, most things. We can learn a valuable lesson about effective leadership through their messaging and how it translates to everyday life.

Leadership is much like the techniques used in Doritos’ Super Bowl commercial. Effective leadership is the process of developing a space where people can use their creativity to fill in the blanks and develop new products and services for the market. You provide the vision and the team collaborates to drive that vision home. The Doritos Ad campaign accomplished this in the following three ways: Click here to continue reading »”How Is Leadership Like The Doritos Super Bowl Ad?”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the importance of leaders taking time off work and going on vacation, a piece which I’m happy to share has been picked up by the American Management Association (AMA) and is now featured on their website. Since publishing that piece, I’ve received a number of emails from my readers and had conversations with various friends and acquaintances where they shared how vacation time is viewed by their bosses and their organizations.

While these discussions have inspired some future posts I’ll be writing for my blog, they also got me thinking about the other side of this vacation time equation. Namely, how leaders and their organizations can benefit from the downtime that inevitably arises when employees are away on vacation.

When members of your team go away on vacation, it’s only natural to feel some concern over how their time away from work might slow down certain efforts or limit the number of people available to address an unexpected problem or failure. Given today’s current work environment where Click here to continue reading »”How Leaders Can Take Advantage of the Summer Downtime”

Opportunity.

It’s one of a handful of words which on its own can inspire hope and the sense that we might be one step closer to reaching those personal goals we set out for ourselves.

Opportunities also serve as the driving force that pushes organizations into pursuing new territory, in the hopes of discovering potential new markets for their products/services to boost stagnant or declining revenue shares.

It’s no doubt the reason why we find it so hard to say “No” to new opportunities because of the inherent belief that any opportunity which crosses our path is an open door leading us one step closer to our objectives.

Although we spend so much time talking about seeking opportunities, we rarely consider the importance or value of the quality of the opportunities we’re offered. That’s why most of us approach opportunities from the vantage point of “if we don’t accept it or if we pass this up, what will we lose?”

Perhaps a better question we should ask ourselves when such opportunities arise is Click here to continue reading »”Do You Have A Healthy Relationship With Opportunity?”

Recently, I read a wonderful post by fellow leadership blogger Gwyn Teatro where she wrote about what Jazz can teach leaders about the value of improvisation in their organizations. Being a big fan of this musical genre (one of my daughters’ drawings found on my site is of the blue cat mascot from our city’s famous Jazz festival), her piece really resonated with me and it also got me thinking about some of the other lessons that Jazz offers to the field of leadership.

Granted, for some Jazz can sound like a mass of contradictions, especially in those sections where the various musicians play their own variations/motifs. And yet, if we focus less on the separate elements and instead listen to the piece as a whole, there’s a definite connectedness that can be heard despite these individual expressions.

I think this is where the Jazz analogy plays well in terms of today’s business world. For the last few decades, we’ve been used to the classical orchestra model of leadership – with a single conductor at the helm directing all the players to create and repeat the same message over and over. However, what many businesses are beginning to discover now is that it’s no longer feasible or desirable to maintain such rigidity of structure; that what’s needed instead is a greater fluidity and movement where the message can change and ebb and flow.

With this in mind, here are three lessons Jazz offers on how to keep your leadership in step with today’s ever-changing world: Click here to continue reading »”3 Steps To Help Get Your Leadership Groove On”