It Doesn’t Exist If It Isn’t Written Down

If you want to increase your personal leadership effectiveness, then you may want to adopt the following policy: It doesn’t exist if it isn’t written down.

Most people are familiar with the cliché “out of sight, out of mind”.  One way to interpret this cliché is that if we don’t have some way of remembering things

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Obeying the First Law of Accomplishment

One reason people experience stress and feel that they have more to do than time in which to do it is because they are in an argument with The First Law of Accomplishment.  The First Law of Accomplishment states: “The accomplishment of anything requires a sufficient period of time in which to accomplish it.”  Its

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On Building Infrastructure

When it comes to improving productivity, our own or others, we frequently look to such things as motivation, commitment, leadership, incentives and rewards, and various other factors (obstacles?) for the answers.  You know, I would be more productive if I was more motivated or committed, or if there was better leadership, or if the incentives

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Not Responding Can Cost You

A former Mastery of Execution student sent me the link to a great blog article posted by Fast Company entitled “2010: The Year of Saying ‘I Got It’ “.  The focus of the article, written by Lynette Chiang,  is how companies, as well as individuals, have gotten into the habit of not responding to inquiries

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What the Absence of Accountability Sounds Like

I have been doing some research in preparation for a workshop on personal accountability a colleague and I are doing for MBA’s at the Fisher College.  As I have been getting into it, I am beginning to notice more about what the absence of accountability sounds like when people talk.  Consider the following example.

The other

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Convert Expectations into Agreements

Don’t risk being held to account for things you don’t know about. Take the time to find out what people really expect you to do, and what they expect you to deliver.  If they don’t tell you, ask.

I recently had a conversation with a manager who was disturbed by her inability to meet the

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Incentives Don’t Work? Part II

If you read my earlier post on Incentives Don’t Work, then you know that Dan Pink’s TED video raises some interesting questions about incentives.  In particular, he raises questions about the role of external incentives and their impact on non-routine, creative, or innovative work performance.  His point is well made.  Research has long known that

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Motivating Others Is Easy IF You Stop Trying To

On September 29, I started my MBA class on Leading and Managing Change in Organizations.  Unlike my prior classes, this is a mix of working professional and fulltime students.  One of the questions I asked them was “What’s important to you?  What do you really want out of this class?”

Although there were a variety of

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Stop Explaining and Start Asking

Do you ever have trouble getting people to give you what you want when you want it?  Do you find yourself explaining things over and over to people with the expectation that if they really understood what you wanted and why, they would give it to you?  It could be that you are using the

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Know Your Silver Bullets

If you want to kill a werewolf, you use a silver bullet.  If you want to stop productivity, there are silver bullets that will do that too.  To avoid being stopped, know your silver bullets – and make friends with them.

Folklore has it that if you want to kill a werewolf, you do it

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