Leadership and Staffing
High performing teams consistently fare better than their competitors, especially when the pressure is on.
In business today, effective influence is essential. Want your ideas implemented? You must influence others to act on them. Want more clients? You must influence people to buy from you. Want more advancement or responsibility? You must influence executives to see the value you offer. And to be an effective leader you must be able to influence others. In all respects, being able to influence others is the ultimate power tool.
You are the manager of a big company and you know your business. Each day, you make important decisions regarding money, policy and strategy. You’re in total control. Without warning, you are confronted with a major crisis: an earthquake, a fire or a reputational risk. Now you find yourself uncertain and unsure. You don’t know what to do and you realize that everybody is looking to you for guidance—and the decision you are about to make will directly affect the survival of your company.
When you walk into the lab, you can feel the tension building. Even though you enjoy your work, interacting with your boss is affecting your overall job satisfaction. You are facing a dilemma: start looking for another job or endure the conflict.
Keeping middle managers happy with their supervisors is the key to retaining the lower-level workers they manage and avoiding expensive turnover costs, according to a Vanderbilt University study.
Melvin Gordon, longtime CEO of Chicago-based Tootsie Roll Industries, died this week at the age of 95. He ran the candy maker for more than 50 years and never technically retired, becoming the oldest serving CEO of any business listed on either U.S. stock exchange.
Every turn of the calendar people make New Year’s resolutions. Every election politicians say that the government leaders need to be held accountable. And every year organizations tell their leaders, “We need to hold our people to their words and actions.” Yet—just like New Year’s resolutions—these scenarios for accountability fall drastically short, as the mirror of accountability is often blurry with ego.
Domination and submission, survival of the fittest, constant adaption to change - the wilderness and the corporate world have many similarities. The more detailed the look into each world, its routines, rules and ways of communication, the more obvious it becomes how beneficial it would be if the corporate world could learn from nature. In some areas, such as product engineering it is already happening, but in the area of personal development of leadership and teamwork skills this opportunity is still sadly missed.
If you take a look at history and some of the greatest achievements ever made, you’ll find that the people who made those breakthroughs were a little off.
