CEOs should consider the following when assigning tasks to leadership team members:
The CEO of a successful organization ensures that they have an inner circle of leaders, or Core Leadership Team, who are individually and collectively clear about their relative strengths and on what the group counts on from each of them to be successful. The exercise below is a structured and straightforward way to make expectations explicit Continue reading
No one leader, and not even any two, has the breadth of competence and depth of capacity to do anything of much significance alone. Successful organizations often have a core leadership team of three to seven top executives who are aligned to accomplish specific goals as a cohesive unit.
The odds of success go way up when the top team has at least three players with different but complementary strengths that are all important to the business and who have:
Core Leadership Group
truly enjoy spending time together.
A Revenue Forecast asserts that a certain amount of revenue will be earned in a certain period of time with a certain probability that the actual revenue earned in the period will be within a certain tolerance of the forecast. For example, management may forecast that there is a 90% chance of actual revenue being not more than 10% less than a forecasted amount.
Generally speaking, the percent probability of revenue from a source is assigned by management based on their judgement in light of their collective past experience with similar revenue generating opportunities in similar circumstances.
Some managers set forecasts equal Expected Value; that is, their revenue forecast equals the sum of potential revenue generating opportunities each multiplied by an assigned probability of occurring. There are several potential problems with this approach that should be considered carefully before proceeding:
Leaders who are in control of their operations compare their organization’s actual performance results to:
In order to increase the odds of engagement, happiness, and high-performance great leaders learn what people they work with like to do and what they are good at doing so they can be aligned with what they want.
Many people want to do something different than what they like and what they are good at because they believe others think that something else is more valued. Continue reading
The following offers a useful way to think about strategy and matters directly related to it:
Whether on campus or in the workplace, effective leadership involves seven disarmingly simple truths, says alumnus Peter F. DiGiammarino ’75. As the Eleanor Bateman Alumni Scholar in Residence for spring 2012, DiGiammarino led two events during which he offered advice on becoming an effective leader.
Peter DiGiammarino makes keynote dinner speech at awards function for Commonwealth College Honors students.
Leaders, he explained, “get loose.” Top leaders break through conventional boundaries to find new solutions to everyday problems. They also follow a set of powerful guidelines, which DiGiammarino breaks into actions driven by seven simple truths that he says can help facilitate change at any level.
These truths are:
1. An organization exists to solve a problem for people.
2. It takes a team. Continue reading
One of the leader’s most important jobs is to get and stay clear about what it is that he or she is counting on from each team member. Once the leader is clear, the message must be communicated to the team member. Often, the leader fails to engage in a rich communication apparently in favor of assuming that team members are somehow supposed to figure out for themselves exactly what is expected of them.
Click the photo below to watch a five-minute video of a supervisor and team member making many common mistakes that make it tough for things to come out right:
The steps detailed in this post make explicit a conversation that otherwise plays-out inside of the heads of those involved. When the conversation is explicit the leader and team member get on the same page and dramatically increase the odds of high-performance and fulfilled expectations.
Contract: Get clear about what you want from each person. Continue reading