This week’s post is by guest writers John Watkins and his partner Caren Hamilton. They will share their diagram of Leadership Grace in next week’s post as Part 2. ******** Integration These days we need all our resources working together to thrive. Our approach to thriving comes from being dazzled by the grace of discovering …

The emergence of the team idea can be traced back to the late 1920s and early 1930s with the now classic Hawthorne Studies. These involved a series of research activities designed to examine in-depth what happened to a group of workers under various conditions. After much analysis, the researchers agreed that the most significant factor …

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.

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 …

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 …

I really didn’t understand what my number one business value (Lead by Faith: Pray for God’s guidance) meant until I had the great privilege to hear Immaculee Ilibagiza speak in person and then read her book called Led by Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide. When I first heard of Immaculee’s story, …

n multiple recent posts, I discussed techniques for building training that is more likely to result in actual learning. And while I believe that effective training is an investment that will yield a very positive ROI for companies, organizations cannot ignore where the majority of actual learning takes place. The majority of learning in an organization is a result of informal interactions. Employees learn by observation and dialogue with peers, leaders, managers and others. They learn limits by watching reactions of their supervisors and the consequences that come with pushing the limits. It is also within these same interactions with peers, leaders and managers that can make or break the learning transfer after a training session. So while training and HR departments are building programs to develop skill sets or improve performance, the real change happens in the culture. And the culture is built by all those interactions and observations that occur "back on the job."

Here are some ideas I drafted for a debate on gender quotas. I would love to have your feedback: I consider myself to be a professional company director. I am chairman of an ASX listed company, sit on another listed board, am on the board of a company that is planning an IPO, and also …