June Leadership Development Carnival—Commencement Edition
by Miki Saxon
Jennifer Miller, author of The People Equation, is host for the June edition of the Leadership Development Carnival. She tagged it Commencement Edition in honor of the potential represented by the Class of 2011. My quick sampling of the different categories tells me it offers a well-rounded meal no matter what you are looking for.
First up, it’s regular Leadership Development Carnival host Dan McCarthy, with 10 Ways to Get More Candid Feedback (and 5 ways if you really can’t handle the truth) from his blog Great Leadership.
Management
Sharlyn Lauby from HR Bartender serves up solid advice on a way to enhance your company’s performance review process in Should Employees Do Self-Appraisals?
I’m not sure what the trophy would look like for this award, but Jane Perdue at Get Your Leadership Big On has a great list of what a manager would need to do to earn top honors in 10 Ways to Win Bad Boss of the Year.
Over at Learning Curves, Lakshman Rajagopalan asks the tough (but necessary) questions of prospective managers in Why do you want to become a Manager?
Robert Tanner finds that he’s gleaned wisdom, emotional intelligence, and leadership lessons from Colin Powell in Revisiting Colin Powell’s 13 Rules of Leadership . As Robert says in the post, “The truth never goes out of style!” Read it on his blog Management is a Journey.
Miki Saxon from Mapping Company Success takes on the issue of Positional Deafness, remarking, “I’ve never understood why managers expect workers who were consistently ignored and shut down to suddenly start contributing because they receive a promotion.”
From the Fortune Group Blog and Andy Klein comes this thought: are some managers too wrapped up in being “needed” to properly develop their people? Andy says, “The best managers don’t make people dependent on them; they create an entity that will function in their absence”. See his thoughts on Effective Managers Must overcome the Emotional Need to be Needed.
Enda Larkin gives us a list of 7 typical managerial mistakes in What are the Most Common Mistakes that Managers Make? on his blog HTC Consult.
Adi Gaskell uncovers research that doesn’t paint managers in a very good light, so he offers a balancing perspective with In Defense of Management at The Management Blog | Chartered Management Institute.
Team Development
Mary Jo Asmus of Aspire –CS highlights the process of a leader skilled in developing his team. See the guidelines he used to launch a very creative, hands-on team development project in Six Tips to Help Your Team Learn.
At John Spence’s Achieving Business Excellence blog, John outlines the HPT competency models he uses when working with teams. See more via How to Build a High Performance Team (HPT).
Dave Doran, who is an executive coach and writes at The S4P Blog , offers How to Develop a Pre-Coaching Ritual. This post is geared towards external coaches, but could easily be used for leaders coaching an employee in a one-to-one setting.
Rosaria Hawkins draws an interesting connection between being “lost” and developing leaders. In her post Lost: The Key to True Learning, she says: “It’s been said that true learning occurs when we are lost—in a liminal place, where nothing works, where old methods, strategies and knowledge just don’t cut it. How can we, as leaders, tap into this potent developmental space?” See more at The Mindful Leadership Blog.
Michael Cardus explores the 4th phase of building high performance teams, inquiring, Accountability to the Team; When does that happen? on his blog Create Learning Team-Building Blog.
Using an analogy of tending plant life, Will Lukang identifies five things leaders must do to “grow” future leaders in Planting the Seeds for Leaders of Tomorrow at Will’s Blog .
“The use of the word team has greatly diluted what teamwork is really about. And along the way, the cult of teamwork has created skepticism, mistrust–and even guilt–among employees.” Because of this, Jim Taggart wants to rock the teamwork boat in his post Rethinking Teams: Getting Over the Guilt Complex. See more at the ChangingWinds blog.
Over at Management Excellence, Art Petty gives us plenty to contemplate about the challenges of developing a high-performing team in It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Team to Succeed.
Organizational Culture
In his travels Mark Stelzner meets some interesting people. Fortunately for us, he gleans wisdom from these unlikely sources and shares it in 4 Reasons Change is So Damn Hard at Inflexion Advisors.
Linda Fisher Thornton asks, “How are curiosity and imagination related to ethics and business leadership?” Read Curiosity and Imagination Necessary Ingredients in Ethical Business on her blog Leading in Context to see her answers.
John Kotter contributes to a Forbes.com blog called Change Leadership and submitted the post Throw Out Your Strategy? Not So Fast. It’s about how leaders can preserve a strategy they’ve worked hard to develop while they take a step back and focus on getting people in their organization to feel a renewed sense of urgency about the strategy.
Weaving social media use into an existing company’s culture is still presenting a challenge for many, even if they have a policy in place. According to Mark Bennett of Talented Apps, it’s because Social Media Policy: Only Just the Start. “The more you can determine a specific business performance measure that you can connect to the purported benefits of social media, the better” offers Mark.
Bob Lieberman likens executives resistant to a change initiative to encountering an elephant on the road– “if it wants to block the road, you’re sunk”. And this, he asserts, spells trouble for a change effort that’s not supported at the top of the organization. His post The Elephant In The Road appears on his blog Cultivating Creativity – Developing Leaders for the Creative Economy .
Read how Chery Gegelman of Giana Consulting was inspired to write the post Discover THE Solution after hearing presentations from executives from Coca-Cola and Chick-fil-A. Chery’s post highlights the value of strategic partnerships.
Leadership
You’re Not the Boss of Me is the name of Gwyn Teatro’s blog and in Going First Gwyn discusses what it means to be a leader and (bonus!) offers up some of her favorite leadership blogs.
The post Spotted: A Leader Without Title narrates a short encounter with a leader who needed no title to lead, causing Tanmay Vora to wonder, “what if well-bred, educated professionals stop looking at their jobs as a ‘transaction’ and start treating it as a ‘service’?” Learn more at QAspire Blog.
The post It Takes Courage and Character to Unify People by Don Shapiro appears on the multi-contributor site Lead Change Group Blog – Leaders Growing Leaders. In it, Don writes about the importance of unity and courage contrasted against division and fear. “The crisis we face today isn’t about techniques, methods and attributes of good leaders. We face a crisis of courage and character.”
Lisa Petrilli of C-Level Strategies shares insights from the recent CEO Connection Boot Camp regarding the most pressing issues on CEOs’ minds today in her post Four Priorities Keeping CEOs Up at Night.
In Leadership Guru Reality Check, Brett Simmons of Bret L. Simmons – Positive Organizational Behavior implores us to be wary of the impressively packaged books touting the next leadership “guru”. To be serious about the practice of leadership, he advocates getting to know the true heavy-hitters in the leadership development discipline.
Jason Price draws upon lessons learned in carpentry to define the two key aspects of leadership in Cutting Boards and Building the Leader Within at his One Money Design blog.
David Burkus of Leader Lab muses about the merit of making the distinction between “leadership” and “management” in Toward a New Kind of Distinction.
Personal Effectiveness
Miriam Gomberg sees a connection between customer service and leadership. She writes “I believe that great leaders do what is right without asking for anything in return and the post The Meaning of Customer Service: Pay it Forward embodies the sentiment well.” Find out about the leadership/customer service connection at Miriam Gomberg.
David Wentworth contributes to the Institute for Corporate Productivity’s TrendWatcher site and offers up ways that leaders can incorporate mobile learning into their daily practices in Mobile Learning Anywhere Anytime
Jason Seiden’s 10 Great Ways to Get Focused… Fast! is a quick hit-list of ways to help you “get yourself grounded, focused, and ready to crush”. See it at My blog is profersonal (yes, that’s the correct spelling)
On Utpal Writes, being open and willing to admit what you do (and don’t) know is the way to being “self cognizant” says Utpal Vaishnav . He urges readers to Know Thyself Better! to develop their leadership skills.
In his post Why Going Back Doesn’t Work Eric Pennington explains why going back is rarely a good plan of action-in work and life. “Revisionism gives us the luxury of telling ourselves lies”, he tells us on his blog Epic Living and gives us 7 reasons why he believes this to be true.
The entry by Bill Matthies is succinct, yet thought-provoking: “Management is often thought of as one telling others what to do but do we give enough thought to what we should do?” Check out his unique blog format at Business Wisdom: Words to Manage By in the post Personal SWOT? in which your comments form the bulk of the post.
Steve Roesler of All Things Workplace wonders Is Everyone Coachable? See his list of 5 traits you must possess to be a viable candidate for coaching.
So there you have it— yet another excellent round-up of leadership essays. Oh, and one more—my entry is Following. It’s the New Leadership, which was inspired by my first in-person attendance at a TEDx event.
Image credit: Great Leadership
