Last month’s article was about how to be a compassionate leader. Almost all the challenges that keep you from being a compassionate leader involve judging others. Diane Berke1 writes, “The major block to compassion is the judgment in our minds.” Here …
Reducing defensiveness
How to Lead with Compassion
You are meeting with several of your direct reports who have just told you that the division’s latest acquisition is not going well. Key leaders of the acquired company are not cooperating and they’re finding that the culture is so …
Genuine Curiosity
If you want to get all the information out on the table so you can make the best decision possible, you need to be genuinely curious. That means asking genuine questions.
Unfortunately, many leaders think they are demonstrating genuine curiosity, …
Leading from Every Chair
Most leaders still cling to the one-leader-in-a-room approach because we have difficulty imagining a better alternative. We think leadership is based on control, and that prevents us from realizing the benefits of shared leadership.
For example, we think our role …
Escalating Disagreements with Peers
What do you do when you and a peer need to agree on a decision and you can’t? You’ve probably been in this situation. Both you and your peer have strong views on the topic, the stakes are high for …
Does Your Team have Solid Structures?
Just as a building’s structure creates support for activities to occur within the building, so too do team structures create support for a team’s activities that help it accomplish its goals.
When most people hear the word structure, they think …
Focus on Mindset, not Decision Rules
When people first learn about the Mutual Learning approach, they often assume that they will need to make decisions by consensus. It isn’t so. The difference between being a Mutual Learning leader and a unilateral controlling leader is not the …
How to Deal with Dilemmas
A dilemma is a special kind of problem. When you are in a dilemma, every alternative solution is unacceptable. For those of us in the United States, we are watching a large-scale economic dilemma play out. If the federal government …
State Views and Ask Genuine Questions
My thirteen-year-old daughter is sitting next to me while I’m writing this article. She has seen me work with clients, by sitting in a public workshop and hearing about the ground rule State Views and Ask Genuine Questions, one of …
Facing Your Inner Critic
We all have an inner critic living inside us who speaks up at times, in varying degrees, negatively evaluating our own actions and those of others. As leaders we have many opportunities to deal with our inner critic. We might …
