Management - Leadership

Several years ago when I began coaching, I was taught that it was important to focus closely on the language choices made by clients. For example, clients who said they would try to change a behavi...

Dear Madeleine, What’s the best way to give correction to a sensitive top performer? I have a senior person on my team who is good at her job and takes great pride in performance excellence. But wh...

One of the reasons Nokia lost the smartphone battle, despite holding a strong position before the iPhone came along, was its lack of speed and inability to react to changing circumstances.

Strategic and organizational factors are what separate successful big-company innovators from the rest of the field. A McKinsey Quarterly article.

Performance appraisals often say more about the giver than about the recipient.

"It all depends on who you're working with." That was the feedback from team members to a recent survey about the state of collaboration within our department. The feedback was consistent that coll...

I was recently coaching a client who had been identified by his organization as a top performer. During our first call, we talked about the things he initially wanted to focus on for his profession...

Before doing so, executives should ask themselves two sets of questions. A McKinsey Quarterly article.

Earlier this month, I noticed that a few of my Facebook friends were posting a link to a Wall Street Journal post titled What Do Workers Want from the Boss? The article describes the results of a G...

Transformational change is still hard, according to a new survey. But a focus on communicating, leading by example, engaging employees, and continuously improving can triple the odds of success. A McKinsey & Company article.

Dear Madeleine, I’ve got a member of my team who has “retired in place.” No matter what I try, I can’t get him to engage. Any thoughts? Frustrated Dear Frustrated, I think the only thing to do in t...

A successful Chief Customer Officer/Customer Leader can:

Bring folks together who don’t normally work together.
Establish clarity out of the complexity that surrounds who does what on projects for “customers.”
Break the work into manageable chunks so that it doesn’t get abandoned.
Develop “ownership” of the work by the operating areas.
Consider their success as enabling the operating areas to focus and change.

New advances in the field of social neuroscience are fundamentally reshaping perspectives on the best way to lead and manage the performance of others. That’s the main message Scott Blanchard will ...

Dear Madeleine, I think I have made a big mistake. I have been a manager for about five years. At first I enjoyed the challenge, and I have worked hard to become a really good manager. I get good r...

Giving performance feedback is a critical job responsibility of any manager, but it can be a daunting task for many people—especially when the feedback is less than positive. Managers don’t want to...

It doesn’t matter if you’re leading a country, a company, a department, a team, a church, or even a family … leadership has NOTHING to do with title or position. You could be the President of a country or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and NOT be a leader.

Are you taking your young employees seriously enough? Too many companies aren’t. Case in point: In my consulting work, I once visited a large—strike that, very large—company, one of the …

By Nelson Cary Consider this employee’s Facebook post: Bob is such a NASTY MOTHERF___ER don’t know how to talk to people!!!!!! F__k his mother and his entire f__king family!!!! What a …

Multitasking is an essential skill in the era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter. But, argues neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin, it’s actually making us less efficient

My company is obsessed with Millennials, and for good reason. The traditional old guard of global industry is rapidly changing – and the youngest ranges of the workforce are primarily …

Here are some phrases that can pose difficulties to many of us when our ego gets in the way. Great leaders, however, understand their importance and master them early on. 1. “I was …