My favorite part of summer is watching my kids play baseball. My oldest son has played with the same coach for three years. For the first two years, the team was mostly the same players and the team worked well together on and off the field. But this year is a little different. This the first year, the coaches picked players from a draft (no parent requests for a coach) and it is also the first year that some of our players were eligible to participate in a travel team. So the team has only four of the original players. It's an entirely new dynamic.

Your top sales manager has been pursuing the largest sale in history of your company. Do you want it? The company needs the sales. Of course, you will take the business. What a crazy question, you say. But do you know you have the capacity to make the order? There is nothing more damaging than …

If you have a bad apple on your team, is it better to try and salvage the person or just get rid of that person? Clearly, if the person can do the job and just isn’t goofing off, you want to put some energy into coaching that individual to improve his or her performance. Others …

At some one point in our career, many of us wanted to tell our employers, “I quit!”. We may even have fantasized going out in a blaze of glory, like former Jet Blue flight attendant Steve Slater. However, there is a right and a wrong way to transition from one job to another within or …

I received an email some time back that, with my response, suggests a way to think through the question of whether or not to use a prospect research firm. “I was a participant in your recent workshop on Major Gifts and wanted to thank you for an informative and inspiring session. My organization, The XYZ …

People love a good political scandal, and the saga of what may or may not be Congressman Anthony Weiner’s underpants is currently dominating Twitter and the network news circuit. With his story changing by the day, it’s clear the Congressman isn’t done explaining, and that whoever is giving him crisis management advice is going in …

Over the last 20 years numerous business and management authors have identified awareness as a key success factor for leaders. One way to broaden your awareness uses a 4Quadrant approach to frame your perspective, thinking, behavior, decisions, and actions. Unlike the BCG 2×2 matrix, these four quadrants metaphorically capture the four topographies of an organization: …

In response to one of my articles, someone asked me, “Since when did training become part of a company’s success strategy?” Or, something like that. I think it was when companies started giving employees the freedom to control their professional destinies. At least that was when it became necessary. Before then, employees were told every …

One of my coaching clients received feedback that she needed to work on her tone and how she delivered messages. Since these skills are essential leadership skills, she needed new ways to speak more effectively to others. Her first step was to become aware of the specific behaviors that were preventing her from communicating successfully. …

It’s very rare for social enterprises to merge. And when they do, it’s usually because one of them is failing. But let’s consider a situation where impact and sustainability might be enhanced if two successful social enterprises were to merge. Should they?