Category Archives: Leadership

One of the primary challenges of leadership is inspiring the trust of others. It is essential when you depend on others to help you achieve a shared goal. For others to follow you, they must see you as someone with positive intentions, whose word is reliable, and who follows through on commitments.

What is trust?
There are four components to trust:

• Care: Showing benevolence and goodwill toward others, taking an interest in their well-being and goals
• Credibility: Acting with honesty, integrity, and consistency
• Competence: Having sufficient expertise to offer solutions and to deliver them
• Commitment: Demonstrating a long-term orientation to the relationship rather than viewing it as transactional or temporary

Why is trust important?
Trust is the lubricant that makes relationships work smoothly. It is vital to attaining creating a productive and effective team or organization. If you want to have open communication, people must have confidence that bringing bad news won’t be punished. If you want  employees to learn, … Read the rest

I spent fifteen years teaching at the Simmons School of Management, and each August the new group of MBA students would take part in a week-long series of classes, discussions, and activities we called Foundations of Business. Most of the faculty made an appearance;  I usually led a case study discussion and also gave my recommendations for how to succeed in the program (and everywhere else, for that matter). My simple advice came from what I had learned as a teacher, my familiarity with some research on learning, and my own personal experience as a student. It boiled down to this: Success requires effort, persistence, and resilience:

success = ƒ(effort)(persistence)(resilience)

Effort: Students need to be prepared for class, complete assignments, seek help when they need it, and engage with their peers. They need to take responsibility for their learning and not expect instructors to do all the work.

Persistence: Each semester’s workload has periods of greater and lesser intensity, … Read the rest

Consensus is a collaborative, participatory style of decision-making that offers an alternative to top-down or majority rule approaches. Its results often lead to more effective implementation, stronger group relationships, and greater interpersonal connections.

Consensus is both a process and an outcome. It means that the leader and team members listen to each other and try to formulate a proposal that combines many people’s ideas and is agreeable to all.  Consensus means that members are sufficiently in favor of a decision that no one will become an obstacle to carrying it out. It does not mean that everyone gets his or her choice or that there is  unanimous agreement about a best solution. Consensus exists once there is a solution everyone can accept even if they favored another outcome.

A leader should seek consensus when the team needs to agree on a specific decision or plan of action so that it can move forward. If there is ambiguity about the proper … Read the rest

Effective teams are ones that meet their objectives while maintaining their ability to sustain performance and providing satisfactory experiences for the team members. That definition, and  many of the ideas in this post, come from the work of my teacher, the late social psychologist Richard Hackman (see especially this, this, and this).

Leading teams requires attention not only to how the team does its work but also facilitating the collaboration process. So, what are the key success factors for leading a team? The four most important things leaders can do help their teams be effective are:

1. Set a compelling direction
2. Establish clear roles and responsibilities
3. Facilitate interpersonal relationships
4. Coach the group to enhance its performance

The first two are best done when a team is formed or when it has begun work toward a new goal. They can be revisited and adjusted as the needs of the organization and the team require. The second two are on-going … Read the rest