Letting people stay in their comfort zone has a bad press; more people recommend setting stretch goals for your people so that they develop. These two ideas are actually complementary, as the simple chart shows. The inner or comfort zone represents the set of skills and tasks that a person has mastered; they’re comfortable doing…
Category Archives: leadership
A quick tip on how to shorten your meetings
Meetings take up a lot of the working day. Sometimes it feels like all of it. Going through all the ways to make meetings better could fill a book in itself. In this mail I’d like to focus on one idea to shorten meetings. How often have you found yourself in a meeting where the…
Delegate tasks effectively – a quick guide
You got to where you are because you’re excellent at what you do. Now you face the challenge that you have more to do than you can deal with, so you need to delegate tasks to other people. People who may not match your skill and enthusiasm levels. In his book The Tao of Coaching,…
How to Give Feedback
This is a refresh of the article Giving Feedback that I blogged back in 2007. Giving feedback is a lot more challenging in practice than it seems. It requires attitude, timing and technique. Let’s look at attitude first: What’s the purpose in giving someone feedback? To let off steam? Then, I button my lips. To…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 9
The second path to curiosity for leadership is to view things from another person’s perspective. It’s a common pitfall not to do this. In a recent coaching conversation, a manger was telling me about how one of their direct reports had turned hostile and rude. They couldn’t understand why. As we talked further, it became…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 8
Managers have answers; leaders ask questions. Lawyers only ask a question (in court) when they already know the answer; leaders ask questions to which they don’t have the answer. They are curious. This curiosity pays dividends. By asking questions, leaders engage their followers and tap into the knowledge and experience of their team. They have…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Intermezzo
When I started this series on the leadership of letting go, I thought there might be four or five entries in it. The I decided to drop my preconceptions and my planning and allow the series to emerge, piece by puzzling piece. If there is a piece of the puzzle that you’d like me to…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 7
When leaders operate under the illusion of control, it’s a sign that their ego is running the show. Sometimes this is a good thing (it reminds them to get to a meeting on time), sometimes it leaves no space for a good way to emerge to meet their current challenge. However, this show running…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 6
In Part 3 of “The Leadership of Letting Go” I touched on the role of trust in leadership. People want to be able to trust, and be trusted by, their leaders. This demands that leaders be authentic. One roadblock on the road to authenticity is that what we say may not match what we really…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 5
Leadership is increasingly challenging: more demands in less time. Upping the number of hours doesn’t help either since the time to recharge and be fresh for the next day’s challenges gets eaten away. During the rest of the week, we look at some simple tools that leaders can use to help them let go of…
