Turning Your Obstacles, Problems, and Even Failures into Leadership Opportunities

No matter how well you plan and train and prepare, sooner or later something will happen with the potential to do serious damage to your organization or team—the business equivalent to a tornado. It can take many forms: a sudden drastic change in your industry or regulatory environment, a disrupted supply chain, a major client that goes into bankruptcy, a degree of involvement in a newsworthy scandal, or throwing all your resources into pursuing a “can’t-miss” opportunity that can—and does, miss.

Whatever the situation, you find yourself staring at uncertainty and problems. There may be no good way to spin the situation, but there is a simple question you can use to convert it into a leadership opportunity: What can we learn from this?

4 Leadership Tips to “Keep It Civil”

An important part of any leader’s job is ensuring that people work together in accord. There are times when that happens naturally, but without strong leadership it’s easy for your team’s goodwill to fall apart under serious disagreement or a time of high stress.

How (and Why) Good Leaders Delegate

One thing I love about the work I do is that it gives me contact with a wide range of leaders. I especially enjoy the opportunity to learn from those whose commitment, drive, and intelligence result in the kind of great leadership we all want to emulate.

They’re a wide-ranging group, but there are a few traits that many of good leaders share. Here’s one near the top of the list: They are masters of delegation.

Fighting Leadership Entitlement by Fostering Self-Respect

In the workplace and elsewhere, those in leadership a position should be thinking about self-respect—both their own and that of others. When everyone maintains a healthy level of self-respect, people are confident in their work. They take risks and innovate. They admit their mistakes. Trust levels tend to be high, and communication and collaboration are smooth.

But self-respect has an evil twin: a sense of entitlement, which often looks like self-respect taken to its furthest extreme. As I speak to groups and travel between engagements, I hear a lot about these people and the harm they do in the workplace. They understand the rules but insist that they should be exempt. They push their way into every conversation, are slow to share credit, and make looking out for themselves—even at the expense of others—a top priority. They may consider themselves special because they’re older, or younger, or have a graduate degree, or came from a higher-status background. But for whatever reason, they’re focused entirely on their own success and have no desire to play by other people’s rules.

6 Leadership Lessons from the Ronda Rousey Loss

It was one of those sporting events that seemed to captivate the world. Even people who didn’t have a clue what UFC stands for were watching and weighing in on Ronda Rousey’s fight with Holly Holm. Rousey entered the night 12-0, a heavy favorite whose last three fights had lasted only a combined 64 seconds!

But Holm, the humble “Preacher’s Daughter,” brought strength, power, stamina, and, most important, a masterfully executed strategy. Rousey came away with her first professional loss in the worst way imaginable, a “lights-out” knockout that left her with enough injuries to warrant a lengthy medical suspension.

It’s not Luck, it’s Leadership Preparation

If you pay attention to how often people talk about luck, you’ll quickly realize that it’s a concept we rely on quite a bit in leadership. Depending on the time and the culture, luck can mean a lot of different things, from a random event to the work of supernatural forces to a lucky object, number, or date.

In contemporary America, we think of luck most often as an event or occurrence that falls outside our control. We love to hear stories of chance and coincidence—the wilder and more improbable, the better.

How Good Leaders Work Well Under Pressure

When I speak at conferences and meetings, every once and awhile I notice one or two people who aren’t participating in the sessions but set up in the hallway or lobby, balancing a phone and laptop and looking grim. If I have a chance to catch up with them later, most often I find it’s a deadline or crisis that’s cropped up unexpectedly.

High-pressure situations can happen anytime, anywhere. Maybe it’s a predictable crunch time that rolls around every quarter or year, maybe a request from an important client on a difficult timetable, maybe an error or an audit or an unexpected staff shortage—or more than one of these together.

Taming the Beast of Employee Distraction Leadership Tips

We live in an age of nonstop distraction. Email pings, social media outlets beckon, news is reported on a 24/7 cycle, and there’s always a new cycle of blogs and websites to catch up on. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole even after a legitimate work-related search and emerge at the end of the work day having spent much of the afternoon wandering around online. The recent rise of productivity systems isn’t a coincidence—unless you have an extraordinary level of discipline, it’s a real challenge to stay focused.

If you’re in charge of a team or an organization, the scope of the challenge is even greater—and the stakes even higher.

3 Time Management Tips for Good Leaders

Ben Franklin understood the importance of time management. In Poor Richard’s Almanac, he writes, “Lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough, always proves little enough.”

We generally think of time management as a day-to-day concern, a way to stay focused so we can cram more to-do items in between meetings. It’s well worth paying attention to, but it’s limited in scope.

Jeremy Kingsley | Leadership Expert, Inspirational Speaker and Best-Selling Author

Tag Archives: Business