Leadership Articles

Changing an organization's culture or the norms of a team is not something to take lightly. An organization's culture is the pattern of how it routinely behaves much like the personality of a human being. The analogy is apt since an organization is a human system....

You made me angry. You scared me. “You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it.” Such sentiments are part of our western culture. There are two problems with this: Thinking others are in charge of our emotions, we make ourselves emotional victims. Thinking we are our...

A good strategic plan serves as the focal point for how an organization manages itself and its business as it moves toward both long and short-range success. It provides… Direction for aligning organizational units, staff, and their activities. Criteria for...

As leaders, we all have had to deal with people who see us too much as authority figures. Such people automatically defer to us, whether we want them to or not. There are certainly times when such automatic deference would be welcome when the demands of being a leader...

For the holidays, I thought an article that explores the less-discussed aspects of leadership that bring joy and satisfaction to leaders would be in order. How much time do you spend simply appreciating the pleasures that being a leader can offer? The greatest way to...

Stress is our normal reaction to possible threats in our environment. Faced with anticipated danger, stress enables us to fight, flee, or hide if necessary. When the threat ends, the stress dissipates. Stress becomes distress and distressing when the sense of threat...

Conflict is behind every dysfunction in our teams, organizations, and other human systems. Conflict that is openly hostile or a passive aggressive power struggle. Conflict over some difference. We turn differences into dysfunctional conflict whenever being right, or...

Many leaders have the notion that it is lonely at the top. Like so many things, if you believe it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact is no one has ever accomplished anything of any significance alone. Think about that. I think about my first successful,...

The leader of a portion of a major museum complex in Washington, D.C. desperately wanted to be a better leader, but his behavior consistently defaulted toward wanting to be liked. The leader of a major television station in the same city spent much of his time...

So many leaders today bemoan the difficulty of finding and keeping good people. Those same leaders rarely consider doing something about their leadership style as a remedy. It’s time for them to revisit servant leadership. Servant leadership, a concept first...

I'm often asked to work with smart but underperforming executives, whose justification is that taking certain actions would be uncomfortable. They also cite that they don't want to cause anyone else discomfort (which they find discomforting). Leadership is a role rife...

Human beings have two opposing and powerful pulls: to be part of and to be apart from. When we are ‘part of,’ we belong. We want to belong to groups of others that accept us, appreciate us, and support us. In fact, we only survive and thrive in communities with...

Time is a resource. And leaders never have enough of it. There are goals that must be met, staffs to be managed, customers to coddle, finances to figure out, superiors to satisfy, and the partner and kids at home wanting their attention. The list goes on and on. There...

Charles N. Seahore, Ph.D. was the author of this article. Charlie was an exemplar of leadership and the practice of organization development. One method, of acquiring, maintiaining and demonstrating one’s interpersonal competence is to have a network of supportive...

Contracting for Ego Management We all have egos. To a greater or lesser degree, we all have needs to maintain and/or protect our sense of identity and self-esteem. The admonishment to leave egos at the door is fruitless. Therefore, the following three can be useful in...

Contracting for Effective Relationships How well a leader accomplishes his/her intended goals and strategies is very much dependent on the quality of the connection among the members of the system. As important as relationships among team members are in the world of...

Contracting for the Impact We Intend Effective leaders need followers to execute strategies and tactics if they are to accomplish their visions and goals. Too often misunderstandings and miscommunications hamper effective execution. Good contracting can prevent these...

Leaders are human and can screw-up. Their screw-ups, however, can be very costly. A primary source of their screw-ups, like all of us, is their egos. Our egos are our sense of identity, our sense of self-importance and self-esteem. They are our perception of our...

Leaders cannot accomplish their intentions and goals alone. It is essential that we connect well with those whose support makes us leaders. I mentioned last month a leader who embarrassed an important employee in public. That leader weakened their connection with that...

From our previous article, we know that we all make many choices automatically. They save us time and energy and we don’t even notice them as choices… even when they are not saving us time and energy, when our automatic choices are actually wasting time and energy....

I was consulting with a significant part of a large aerospace company. I was interviewing a very senior vice president. He was complaining about how hard it had become holding on to top employees. Of particular concern to him was what he saw as the lack of loyalty of...

The foundation of effective leadership is self-mastery. When followers aren't following and results are hard to come by, the first place a leader needs to look is at themselves. When life isn’t working for you, when you aren’t getting the results you want, when your...

Great leaders are going someplace extraordinary and lots of people follow them! Leaders in most organizations know where they want to go. Keeping followers aligned and in sync to get there, however, can be frustrating. Here are seven areas to turn that frustration into excitement. All of the questions are born from the two primary aspects of leadership: They have some place to go, and they have people following them!