麻豆传媒

Frontline Leadership

The Center for Corporate and Professional Development

Core Values SignWhat is it about someone that makes them a great leader? Is it their status, outgoing personality, likeability, relatability, vision, ability to create a great strategy and execute it? I鈥檝e always been interested in the subject of leadership and what makes some people so good at it, while others (despite all the classes they take, books they read or coaching they receive) are not. As an avid reader on the topic and observer of others, I find that the foundation of great leadership is self-awareness. 

The Center for Corporate and Professional Development

Program ParticipantsStripped down to its essentials, business is about one thing: making decisions. Therefore, decision making is an important skill of leaders in all levels of an organization. It鈥檚 also one of the toughest and riskiest skills. It is a skill that can be sidetracked by a number of psychological traps that can undermine decisions. These traps can even cause great leaders to make bad decisions at times. Sometimes the cause is bad luck or poor timing, but more often than not bad decisions are the result of biases that as humans we bring into our decision making processes.

The Center for Corporate and Professional Development

Photo of a MeetingHave you ever seen an adult engage in a tantrum usually exhibited by a toddler? Have you ever been the recipient of someone鈥檚 silent treatment? Have you ever found yourself doing a favor for someone while wondering how you allowed yourself to be maneuvered into doing something you really didn鈥檛 want to do? Most of us have had experience with people who regularly break the rules of polite decorum and who frequently disregard others鈥 boundaries.

The Center for Corporate and Professional Development

Question Mark PhotoOne of the common traits of human behavior is that, when making decisions, we typically evaluate the choices based on our perspectives and emotions at the moment. That results in decisions focused on the 鈥渞ight-now鈥 or a very short-time horizon. You can probably recall impulse purchases that seemed like a great idea at the time, but once you got the item home, you wondered what in the world you were thinking. 

The Center for Corporate and Professional Development

Accountability LadderIt seems that in every class I teach, I鈥檓 asked, 鈥淗ow can I get my direct reports to do what they are supposed to do?鈥 I hear comments like, 鈥淚 feel like I鈥檓 a babysitter鈥 or 鈥淣o one takes initiative鈥 or 鈥淓veryone comes in and dumps their problems on me and expects me to fix them.鈥 These comments are all too common. So how do we get our employees to take initiative and get the job done?

The Center for Corporate and Professional Development

Program ParticipantDo you ever wish people would just do what you asked and that you could get people to follow through on their part of the project? Maybe you wish you could get your point across better, or perhaps you have trouble saying no? The solution to all of these situations is learning how to influence others well.