Quotes About Leadership

when we fail to get clarity and alignment during meetings, we set in motion a colossal wave of human activity as executives and their direct reports scramble to figure out what everyone else is doing and why.

The most important challenge of building a team where people hold one another accountable is overcoming the understandable hesitance of human beings to give one another critical feedback.

Listen, this is just an unpleasant part of our job sometimes. Those executives know that I took a bullet for them. I'll make sure they acknowledge that in some way, but I'm not going to punish them for it. Remember, they're paying us to help them make their company more successful, and if I had to be a trial balloon or a strategic piñata to make that happen, so be it.

As difficult as it is to build a cohesive team, it is not complicated. In fact, keeping it simple is critical

Ken always says that his job is to create the best team possible, not to shepherd the careers of individual athletes.

I believe that teamwork is not a virtue, but rather a choice. It's a strategic decision and an intentional one, which means it's not for everyone.

To make meetings less boring, leaders must look for legitimate reasons to provoke and uncover relevant, constructive ideological conflict. By doing so, they'll keep people engaged, which leads to more passionate discussions, and ultimately, to better decisions.

Ironically, most leaders of meetings go out of their way to eliminate or minimize drama and avoid the healthy conflict that results from it. Which only drains the interest of employees.

la primera disfunción: la ausencia de confianza. Se

And so a leader of a meeting must make it a priority to seek out and uncover any important issues about which team members do not agree. And when team members don't want to engage in those discussions, the leader must force them to do so. Even when it makes him or her temporarily unpopular.

Humble Only: The Pawn

It is at once shocking and understandable that intelligent people cannot see the correlation between failing to take the time to get clarity, closure, and buy-in during a meeting, and the time required to clean up after themselves as a result.

Whether we like it or not, meetings are the closest thing to an operating room, a playing field, or a stage that we have.

In consulting, entering the danger comes into play in those moments when you're in a meeting and someone says something that is either strange or politically sensitive, and you know that the level of anxiety and discomfort in the room is high. What you're tempted to do is just be quiet and let the moment pass, but what great consultants do, at least according to Lighthouse, is walk right into the middle of the situation and call it out.

organizational clarity allows a company to delegate more effectively and empower its employees with a true sense of confidence.

If we hate meetings, can we be making good decisions and successfully leading our organizations? I don't think so. There is simply no substitute for a good meeting—a dynamic, passionate, and focused engagement—when it comes to extracting the collective wisdom of a team. The hard truth is, bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions, which is the best recipe for mediocrity.

Let me assure you that from now on, every staff meeting we have will be loaded with conflict. And they won't be boring. And if there is nothing worth debating, then we won't have a meeting.

The key to managing this challenge, of course, is to identify a reasonable number of issues that will have the greatest possible impact on the success of your organization, and then spend most of your time thinking about, talking about, and working on those issues.

Trust is not the same as assuming everyone is on the same page as you & that they don't need to be pushed. Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they're doing it because they care about the team.

I believe that all successful organizations share two qualities: they are smart, and they are healthy. An organization demonstrates that it is smart by developing intelligent strategies, marketing plans, product features, and financial models that lead to competitive advantage over its rivals. It demonstrates that it is healthy by eliminating politics and confusion, which leads to higher morale, lower turnover, and higher productivity.

First, we go figure out how to recognize a real team player, the kind of person who can easily build trust, engage in healthy conflict, make real commitments, hold people accountable, and focus on the team's results. Then, we stop hiring people who can't. Finally, we help the people who are acting like jackasses change their ways or move on to different companies.

I have found that most leaders spend the majority of their time and energy making their organizations smarter, with relatively little effort directed toward making them healthier.

this point is critical—no one but the head of an organization can make it healthy.

You have tension. But there is almost no constructive conflict. Passive, sarcastic comments are not the kind of conflict I'm talking about.