Leading Effectively e-Newsletter - 2005 Archive Abstracts
December 2005 Issue: Too Much of a Good Thing: Beware of Your StrengthsPlay to your strengths. Leverage your skills. If you've been successful, keep doing what you're doing. Sounds like solid advice, right? Not exactly, according to the Center for Creative Leadership. Over-emphasis of strengths can skew your leadership ability and limit your long-term potential. Instead, effective leaders operate with a realistic view of both strengths and limitations, finding ways to develop the skills and behaviors that will provide the most beneficial impact. This issue of Leading Effectively introduces you to the risks of over-playing your strong suit and offers a more balanced approach to development.
- Strength or Weakness? A Reality Check
- Own Your Strengths: Avoid the Damage of Distortion
- A Leadership Gap: When Strengths Don't Meet the Need
- Essential Leadership: Critical Skills, Part I
- Essential Leadership: Critical Skills, Part II
- Principles of Leadership Poll Results
In early October, more than 150 leaders from around the world gathered in Jersey City, N.J., for the Center for Creative Leadership's seventh annual Friends of the Center Leadership Conference. Participants learned about the art of effective leadership from some of the most prominent names in the field - including Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, and David Gergen, an adviser to four U.S. presidents. Other speakers at the event delved into the mental aspects of consistent high performance and what leaders can learn from actors. This issue of Leading Effectively shares ideas and insights from the conference's five keynote speakers.
- Giuliani's Six Principles of Leadership
- Gergen: What the Best U.S. Presidents Have in Common
- Making Connections: Developing Leadership Presence
- Mental Management: Exploring the Keys to Consistent Performance
- Getting Clear: Understanding Your Life's Work
- Leading in Times of Transition Poll Results
Change is constant. Rarely do we get accustomed to one change before we must adapt to another. This rapid pace of change creates particular challenges for today's leaders, requiring them to focus simultaneously on managing the business and providing effective leadership for their employees. More often than not, it is the focus on the people side that loses out. Adapted from CCL's newest book, Leading With Authenticity in Times of Transition by Kerry Bunker and Michael Wakefield, this issue of Leading Effectively will help you find a more balanced, effective approach to leadership.
- The New Reality: Extraordinary Times Are Ordinary
- 12 Leader Competencies: What It Takes In Times of Transition
- The Inner Leader: The Personal Side of Transition
- Trust Me: Communication Is Key
- What's Your Response?
- Developing the Strategic Leader Poll Results
Strategic leadership is the never-ending effort to create sustainable competitive advantage for your organization. This month in Leading Effectively, we build on previous articles in the March 2005 issue that set the framework for understanding strategic leadership. Here, we offer tools and ideas for assessing and improving your strategic leadership capacity and that of your organization.
- Strategic Thinking: Beyond Analysis
- Strategic Acting: Transforming Thinking Into Doing
- Strategic Influencing: Creating Clarity, Commitment and Synergy
- It Takes Two: Business Strategy Plus Leadership Strategy
- Monday Morning Tools: A Strategic SWOT
- Leadership & Health Poll Results
Long hours. Travel. Pressure. No wonder the stress of the job can take a toll on a leader's health. Exercise, good nutrition and healthy habits can easily fall to the wayside. But, beyond the benefits touted by doctors and fitness experts, consider this: Being healthy can help you become a better leader. This month in Leading Effectively, we'll talk about the latest research connecting exercise and leadership. We'll also offer suggestions for making better health a priority - whatever shape you're in.
- Leaders Suffer: Stress Takes A Toll
- Cost & Benefit: Exercise Puts You In The Black
- Foster Fitness: Cultures that Promote Good Health
- A Leader's Guide to Better Health
- Identity Poll Results
Finding common ground among co-workers isn't easy. Many managers are asking: "How do I lead when everyone seems so different?" Today, organizations - including their suppliers, customers and partners - are increasingly diverse, representing very different perspectives and cultures. While such interaction has many advantages, leaders also need strategies for navigating the challenges associated with religious, ethnic, cultural, gender and racial differences. This month, Leading Effectively breaks away from traditional discussions of "diversity in the workplace" and explores how individual identity affects the leadership dynamic at work.
- Identity Heft
- Identity and Conflict: A Leader's Role
- Understanding Diversity: Begin By Listening
- Tension Triggers: What Sets Off Identity Conflict?
- For Example: Identity Differences At Work
Talent management. Since the late 1990s, the concept of employing, leveraging and developing talent has been a hot topic in HR circles. But what does "talent management" have to do with you? And what does it have to do with leadership? In this issue of Leading Effectively, you'll find out what talent management is and why developing leadership talent is a crucial factor in the talent equation. You'll also learn why every manager has a role to play as both a leader and a learner.
- Talent Management: What's New and Why It Matters
- The Role of Leadership Talent
- Not In HR? Not Off the Hook!
- Spotlight on You: Growing Your Talent as a Leader
- Building Your Team's Morale, Pride and Spirit Poll Results
Team spirit is not just for high schools and sports fans. Building team spirit, morale and pride at work enhances productivity and efficiency and leads to tangible economic and relational benefits. This issue of Leading Effectively explains how morale, pride and spirit can make a positive difference at work. Based on the book Building Your Team's Morale, Pride and Spirit by CCL's Gene Klann, the following articles offer a range of ideas and activities that will help boost your team's energy and productivity.
- Morale, Pride and Spirit: Make A Difference
- Twelve Tips for Building Morale, Pride and Spirit
- More Than A Party
- Troubleshooting: How to Handle Opposition
- Conflict in the Workplace Poll Results
Conflict at work is inevitable - but how we handle it can make the difference between effective resolution and disaster. This issue of Leading Effectively focuses on constructive ways to respond to conflict with your boss, direct reports and peers. We help you to see how your behavior might play a role in conflicts, and we provide tips for making changes.
- Conflict: Constructive or Destructive?
- What's Your Role?
- Conflict and Power: Bosses, Peers and Direct Reports
- A Positive Response: 7 Ways to Make Conflict Productive
- Monday Morning Tools: Hold a Conflict Resolution Session
- March Poll Results: Becoming a Strategic Leader
March 2005: Becoming a Strategic Leader
Have you been told you need to be "more strategic" in your current job or to get a promotion? Is your organization faltering when it comes to connecting the vision and mission with the daily demands of the work? Do you struggle to balance short-term and long-term pressures? These are some of the challenges managers commonly face.
In this issue of Leading Effectively, based on the new CCL publication Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization's Enduring Success, we start you on the path to becoming a more strategic leader. We'll follow up with a future issue that offers additional insight into how you can strengthen your ability to lead strategically and foster strategic leadership in your teams and organizations.
- Strategic Leadership: Beyond Setting Direction
- Making Strategic Leadership Work
- Strategy as a Learning Process
- Culture Clues: Does Your Organization Foster Strategic Leadership?
- Monday Morning Tools: Question It
- February Poll Results: Emerging Leaders research study
February 2005: Generations at Work
Today's workplace is populated with employees who span five generations. For leaders, the imperative to understand and to motivate employees ranging from their 20s to their 70s and beyond has never been greater. In this issue of Leading Effectively, we help you separate fiction from reality when it comes to generational differences in the workplace. We also offer suggestions for developing and retaining next generation leaders.
- Generation Gap: Fact or Fiction?
- What They Want: A Generational View
- Learning and Development: Same or Different?
- By the Numbers: Demographics Set the Pace
- Building Bench Strength: Ways to Prepare (and Keep) Tomorrow's Leaders
January 2005: Finding Your Balance
Balance is more than how you spend your time. It's about how you live your life. In this month's issue of Leading Effectively, CCL's Joan Gurvis and Gordon Patterson suggest that finding your balance is a matter of choice — and offer guidance on aligning your behavior with what you believe is really important.
