Egos are good. I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute. (Warren Buffett) That’s interesting. But what about humility, today’s uber-meta-necessary silver bullet of awesome leadership? The thing we all want to be, humblebragging aside, but can’t really call ourselves.
Let’s talk about being a manager. I’m not just a manager, I’m a leader! So you say. Now don’t go spreading yourself too thin. There’s more to this manager thing than you know. Remember what I said in Truth #8 about performance reviews? I said that you, as a manager, are responsible for the performance
You can’t get through a week these days without reading about another high-profile, progressive, cooler-than-teal business eliminating performance reviews. So provocative! The story goes like this: Do you hate those horrible, lengthy, largely irrelevant standardized performance review forms your HR department forces on you? The solution is simple. Get RID of them. Throw babie out
Best practices are so last year! Perennially. By the time a practice gets labelled as best by some authority, there’s an innovator somewhere finding a better way. Or, more likely, a better way for their situation. Best practices are what you use when you aren’t sure and want to be safe. When CYA is more
It’s useful to play the part of a candidate on other companies’ careers sites every now and then. And on your own careers site. You learn some things.
We are social animals, we humans. We survive by associating with our tribe and distancing ourselves from not-our-tribe. It’s deeply wired in. No matter how much we want to, there is no known way to completely eliminate our tendency to prize the characteristics common to our in-group, whether that’s our gender, race, sexual orientation, favorite
Let me explain. By “fair pay”, I mean the measures of fairness typically used by a business when setting pay – education, experience, market rate, and negotiating power. By “feel fair” I mean to you, the person in the role, pay is a non-issue. You aren’t beset with a painful sense that you are paid too little for the value
You’ve seen it happen. The team meets, discusses issues, and comes to apparent conclusions largely influenced by the biggest-title-in-the-room. Then, after the meeting, a few people huddle in the hallway saying the things that should have been said in the room. The color interpretations. The queries about “what that really meant when so-and-so said that
These days, smart and humble people know that flatter is more better, networked holocracies are the new bestest way to generate business utopia, and all hierarchies are bureaucratic soul-sucking entities. That’s the narrative. And it’s crap.
Nope. Not even most people and maybe not even you. Not even if everyone gets trained in the latest, most coolest leadership capability model you or your CEO have read a book about. Not even then. The most effective leaders are born with baseline talents AND they do the work of building skills, knowledge, and
