I came across this article last week in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Where’s the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting” that made it sound like CEOs weren’t productive and spent large amounts of time in meetings, at lunches and traveling, with as little as six hours per week working solo.
Chaos at the top of an organization is a recipe for disaster. Learn about the three types of unpredictable leader, underlying causes for the behavior, four paths toward resolution and methods of coping if it’s your boss who’s unpredictable.
Many executives and companies have a built in limiting factor, just like the governor on a gas pedal. Here’s how you can prevent micro-management at the highest levels from stifling your growth.
E-mail is a great convenience, but it’s completely one-way. This can create havoc in your business infrastructure. Here are some of the biggest e-mail mistakes, most of which can be avoided by the original and most powerful form of communication.
High maintenance employees sap all the energy from team and upper management. Here are some examples of the breed and suggestions for resolution of the problem.
Can your team keep up if you ask them to tackle new challenges without giving them new resources to offload other tasks? Here are the key steps to moving a team through a detailed, integrated project planning process.
Being a leader puts you in a powerful position to get more accomplished than doing it alone. But the transmission of that power is team communication. Without systematic and regular communication, you’re demoting yourself from leader to worker.
There are many ways to do this, and many points of view, but this is the process I use(d) in my company and find works quite well. View my presentation slides on this topic.
In both my own company and several client companies, we’ve discussed, then written out a code of conduct to help set expectations about how we should treat each other. Some companies, especially young ones can be rough places to work. Letting the “roughnecks” run free will destroy the willingness of many other talented people to contribute at all, and many will leave.
It’s all too easy to lose focus on the important tasks in our lives and to busy ourselves with seemingly urgent work. In the end, we pay for that in a big way. Here are some tips for fighting this common battle.
Robert Sher is founding principal of CEO to CEO, a consulting firm of former chief executives that improves the leadership infrastructure of midsized companies seeking to accelerate their performance. He was chief executive of Bentley Publishing Group from 1984 to 2006 and steered the firm to become a leading player in its industry (decorative art publishing).