Why I Ended Something I Loved—And You Should Too
For the past year, weekends have been strange. During the prior seven years, my wife and two boys and I got up at 5 am on Saturdays and baked 100+ loaves of bread for a growing group of customers in our side business named Noonday Bread. The decision to shut the...
Integrating Leadership Development Into Daily Strategy Deployment
“You know we’re not done yet, right?”
This isn’t exactly what Tom had hoped to hear. But he has a feeling Katie is right. They’re sitting in their conference room immediately after launching the company’s initiative teams. Tom feels pretty good about their work so far. His team had set leadership bench strength goals, assessed their leaders, and carefully engaged each initiative leader in both the task and the development opportunity of their work.
“You mean we could still screw this up?” Tom says with a slight twinkle in his eye.
How To Convert Strategic Initiatives Into Leadership Master Classes
Tom’s team sits, simultaneously sobered and strangely energized. They’re about to deploy their strategy through a variety of key initiatives. They have resolved to use their strategy implementation process to dramatically increase the depth of their leadership bench.
The plain, hard facts stare them in the face. They just mapped their existing team to sort their proven leaders from your potential leaders. They’ve set targets about converting a certain number of potential leaders into proven leaders – and elevating solid team members into the potential leader category. They know they have to do all of this while getting a slate of key projects completed.
The Greatest Leadership Development Opportunity You’re Probably Missing
Tom looks perplexed. His organization just finished building a plan for its next three years.
They had made significant progress. As he said in a meeting earlier in the week, “For the first time in a long time, I think we have a strategy!” But today, as he faces a list of high gain initiatives, Tom realizes his next major obstacle. “How are we going to get all of this done?” he wondered out loud. “We just don’t have the leadership bench we need to make this happen.”
What Role Should a Leader Play in a Planning Meeting?
Have you ever seen leaders play one of these roles in a planning meeting? The Lecturer – In meeting 1, you’re locked in a planning session and the leader is controlling everything. She says too much and says it too strongly. The rest of the leadership team...About the Author
