One of my favourite exercises in leadership workshops with people from R&D is to ask them to take a few moments to recall the best leader with whom or for whom they ever worked and think about what it is that makes this person special. For those who have no such candidate, I suggest they…
Author Archives: cj
How leadership complements management
I’m often asked about the difference between leadership and management. While it is helpful to be clear about the differences, you need to be able to both lead and manage, if you want to produce top results and people. Field Marshal Lord Slim, responsible for the British campaign in Burma in WWII and a great…
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What is leadership
Leadership is another of those things that people find hard to define, but can recognise it when they see it. I recently googled “leadership definition” and got 151 million hits, an indication that there are many definitions out there. A dictionary is usually a good starting point to understand a term. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines…
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Building the team that built “Watson”
When I was an undergraduate, artificial intelligence seemed to be a discipline long on promise and short on results. (Everthing was about “10 years away”, even 20 years later, it was still “10 years away”.) Therefore, I was pleasantly impressed when IBM’s Watson machine won an episode of the US quiz show Jeopardy in early…
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5 Essential Steps for Getting Your Team Moving
There is a lot of good literature on how to develop a high-performing team, e.g. The Wisdom of Teams by J.R. Katzenbach and Gordon K. Smith. In this article I focus on five essential steps you need to take to ensure your team is moving in the direction you want it to. Step 1 Make…
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5 Myths about Self-Management
As life’s pace picks up remorselessly, clients are increasingly looking for ideas on how better to manage themselves and their time. In this short article, I explore the self-managements myths I most frequently come across. Myth #1 Time can be managed I’ve covered this one in a 2010 posting on my blog: You can read…
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7 Success Tips for Communication
Since we influence people through our words or actions, our communication style plays a big part in our effectiveness as a leader. In this blog article I outline seven ideas that come up time and again in my work with leaders. Tip #1 There is an “I” in Leader Clarity is a hallmark of good…
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The Top 10 Mistakes Leaders Make Developing their People, Part 1
Apart from the leaders who seem to think that ability is genetic or in-born, all leaders I’ve met are interested in how to develop their people. They delight in seeing their people grow and they enjoy the benefits of higher productivity and the ability to tackle more challenging R&D problems. However, they’re unsure of I’ve…
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The Top 10 Mistakes Leaders Make Developing their People, Part 2
Mistake #6 Micro-management beats trust Some leaders unintentionally take a leaf from Lenin’s playbook (“trust is good, control is better”) and control every single step their people take. While this strategy has its place in an early phase of development, it is counterproductive with good and experienced people. With them you need to agree the…
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Develop the comfort zone
Letting people stay in their comfort zone has a bad press; more people recommend setting stretch goals for your people so that they develop. These two ideas are actually complementary, as the simple chart shows. The inner or comfort zone represents the set of skills and tasks that a person has mastered; they’re comfortable doing…
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