My daughter Robin has been quite a teacher of leadership in my life. She is a very special woman who lights up any group she is in. I’ve never met anyone so quick to make friends and make a positive impression on all she touches.

Robin is also one of those people that managed to squeeze four years of college into five years. Upon completion of that phase of her life, she moved to Steamboat Springs to be a ski bum – which basically means you have three part-time jobs just to survive – but you get to ski a lot. I was definitely a bit jealous.

Two years into that experience, out of the blue, Robin called me and said, “Dad, this has been fun, but I think it is time (Continue reading the article)

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It seems so appropriate that I was reading Stanford University’s alumni magazine over this Thanksgiving holiday weekend(in the U.S.) and came across a wonderful article that I see directly related to a different perspective of leadership - making a difference. The article was called “Small Change - Big Payoff: Got 25 Bucks?” It has me very excited about a new way to make a difference all over the world. I suggest you go read it online now by clicking on the link above.

The article is about an amazing entrepreneurial venture, Kiva, that is dedicated (Continue reading the article)

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Today’s practical leadership tip is a little different. I asked Tiffany Childs, our marketing manager,  to provide her perspective of the performance review she “received” on Monday. Here is her commentary:

How many times have you been in a performance review, either as the reviewer or the one being reviewed, and felt unsatisfied at the end? Having a periodic review is a necessary part of working in any environment and so we’ve all most likely had our fair share of them, but it seems as though often managers are just going through the motions in these reviews.

I feel that is a shame because (Continue reading the article)

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I had a delightful discussion recently with the Director of a substantial medical center. She and her team had been “beaten up” by corporate when they received an admittedly abysmal 18% effectiveness rating in one of the 150 areas for which they are measured. Not surprisingly, it created a great deal of frustration on the team, and opened up quite a change management opportunity for the Director.

Being a staunch believer in the essence of Enlightened Leadership and Leadership Made Simple, she knew the solution to the problem lied within the creativity of the people involved. She also knew that creativity would never surface if they stayed in their frustrated state.

To get past that frustration, she encouraged them to shift their focus to what was working - not only in that specific area, but in other areas that might trigger insights for how to do this one differently.

Using that Forward Focus(TM) approach, the team came up with several ideas they could immediately implement to improve the situation. As they got positive results from those early actions, they were energized to find more creative ideas - which, of course, they had no problem generating!

They periodically got back together to build on their successes to continually improve that particular metric. It was an easy process - celebrating and analyzing successes and taking the resulting creative energy to come up with more improvement ideas.

By the time the August numbers came out, they had improved the metric from 18% to 90% effectiveness in just 4 months. What an amazing performance improvement. This is what leading for results - the easy way - looks like!

Our acknowledgment and congratulations to the team!

In what ways have you experienced leading for results the easy way? We would love to hear - your solutions and your challenges.

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CRM Learning is close to introducing a new learning video based on Leadership Made Simple. We are excited about it and will have a trailer/preview on our site in the next couple of weeks.

If you have experience with using the Framework for Leadership(TM), you won’t be surprised by a statement made on the video by John Van Sky, Bioterrorism Preparedness Training Manager, Orange County(CA) Health Agency:

“I’m a clinical psychologist by training, and I’ve never seen anything take down the barriers for folks quicker than the Framework.”

Isn’t breaking down a variety of barriers one of the ongoing challenges we face in our team leader, supervisor, manager, executive, or even parent roles? Key to breaking down barriers is honoring people and teams for where they already are - BEFORE asking them to do even better. The Framework does that in spades if your intention is right!

How have you have used the essence of Leadership Made Simple to make a difference in your situation. Send us your comments.

To your continued success!

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One of the most expensive mistakes we ever make as managers is
hiring the wrong people for a job, yet simple, affordable tools exist to
greatly improve the probability that we are hiring the right person.

Let me share a story, then give you a chance to experiment with just (Continue reading the article)

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Wayne Turmel hosts a podcast called The Cranky Middle Manager. He recently interviewed Ed Oakley about “Leadership Made Simple: Practical Solution to Your Greatest Management Challenges.”

Please listen to the podcast here.

The interview starts at about 5 minutes into Waynes discussion, and you can move the slider over to get to it faster.

Enjoy!

The Enlightened Leadership Team

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Gary owns a courier service in Denver, Colorado. We met in Starbucks, and when he discovered what I do, he asked for some advice. His situation was that he had a delivery contractor who had a bad attitude along with some behavioral issues. On top of that difficult situation, Gary needed to lower the contractor’s compensation as a percentage of revenue, as the current situation was not profitable for the company.

My coaching to him was basically to use the essence of the Framework for Leadership. I’ll bet you’re thinking, “what a surprise!” The idea was to first set the context (Continue reading the article)

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I had an experience last month of how easy it is to judge
circumstances as good or bad - yet we might be totally wrong.
In our leadership roles, this quick judgment can limit our ability
to “hear” feedback and different perspectives. This lack of hearing
or really understanding someone can then have a huge impact
on the quality of our decisions.

Here is what happened. A group of friends, flying on different
airlines from Rome to get back to the States after a great vacation (Continue reading the article)

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We thought you might want to know that the first of three articles to appear in Materials Handling Management magazine by Ed Oakley has now been published.

The article is titled “Leading Change Without Authority,” and can be found online at:

Materials Handling Management magazine - May, 2007

This link will take you to the cover of the magazine. Just click on the article, “Leading Change Without Authority,” or turn to page 17 and 18.

Enjoy!

The Enlightened Leadership Team

ELS Leading Change without Authority learning program

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