Managers have answers; leaders ask questions. Lawyers only ask a question (in court) when they already know the answer; leaders ask questions to which they don’t have the answer. They are curious. This curiosity pays dividends. By asking questions, leaders engage their followers and tap into the knowledge and experience of their team. They have…
Category Archives: emotional intelligence
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 6
In Part 3 of “The Leadership of Letting Go” I touched on the role of trust in leadership. People want to be able to trust, and be trusted by, their leaders. This demands that leaders be authentic. One roadblock on the road to authenticity is that what we say may not match what we really…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 5
Leadership is increasingly challenging: more demands in less time. Upping the number of hours doesn’t help either since the time to recharge and be fresh for the next day’s challenges gets eaten away. During the rest of the week, we look at some simple tools that leaders can use to help them let go of…
Returning to The Corner Office
The New York Times, Sunday Edition, has been running a series The Corner Office over the past several weeks. In each, a senior manager is interviewed abou their take on leadership. Today’s interview, with Eduardo Castro-Wright, In a Word, He wants Simplicity points to the known short-comings in many MBA trainings: people skills. He makes…
He wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
Nice interview with Richard Andersen, CEO of Delta Airlines, in today’s NY Times, “He wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects” . He talks about the importance of communication skills and the dangers of Powerpoint –people get used to talking in bullets and begin to lose the ability to formulate complete sentences. Another interesting snippet is about…
What’s in it for you?
Image by jmtimages via Flickr I’ve been reading the Bouncing Back After A Layoff blog over the past few weeks – lots of food for thought in these turbulent times. Today’s article on What Jobseekers Can Learn From Obama is an excellent reminder about thinking about where the other person’s interests lie. Barack Obama focuses…
An interview with Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis published a highly readable article on Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership in the Harvard Business Review last September. Their work on emotional intelligence brought them fame and they developed their Primal Leadership model based on that. The recent breakthroughs in neuroscience improve our understanding of what happens in…
