Have you ever felt like you were in quicksand as a leader? I’ve never been in real quicksand, but I’ve seen it on TV and in the movies. It looks awful! As I understand the way it works, when you’re in it, your attempts to free yourself plunge you deeper into its grip… and ultimately you die.
Category: Today’s Challenge
Today, I attended a Chess Not Checkers workshop with several hundred leaders. The content was strong, the communicator was phenomenal and the instructional design was engaging and highly interactive. At several points in the daylong program, the participants were asked to record questions that had come to mind during the previous sessions.
Every organization needs leadership – there are only two ways to meet the need: hire them or grow your own. The right answer for most organizations is a combination of these two approaches. Today’s Challenge is from a leader who asked, “How do you attract leaders?”
As I travel the country meeting with leaders, I find many of the questions featured in my posts. Today, I’m in Birmingham and a leader asked, “How do you help someone embrace their leadership potential if they don’t see it themselves?”
As organizations grow, it is increasingly difficult for leaders to stay in touch with the real world. Many leaders understand this unintended consequence of growth and battle against it. Others, less attentive, can gradually lose site of reality. Today’s Challenge: How does a leader stay grounded in reality?
If leaders cannot transfer critical messages throughout our entire organization, we will never realize our full potential. This is one of the messages we are sharing in our 25-city, Chess Not Checkers tour. The question most have is not why transferring critical information is important, but how?
I recently began a 25-city tour hosting Chess Not Checkers workshops. Over the years, events like these have proved fertile ground for outstanding questions for the Today’s Challenge series. The audience is diverse but has a definite youthful bias – many of the leaders are early in their career. It was a young leader who asked, How do you Win the Heart of someone older and more experienced than you?
Leaders are resourceful – this should not be confused with full of resources. Often it is our ingenuity, creativity, tenacity or even our stubbornness that enables us to accomplish what other might perceive to be impossible. Today’s Challenge question is from a leader who is not “full of resources.” Her budget for developing people is extremely low – what should she do?
I love the questions I receive from leaders! Over the last few years, many of the questions have been unique to a specific situation, however, there are others that ring true across age, gender, nationality and stage of career. These are some of my favorites. Today is one of those questions: How can I get ahead as a leader?
Leaders generally know where they are trying to go – it’s called vision. The best leaders also have a good sense of where they are today – it’s called being grounded in reality. However, the challenge is often the how. How will you move from here to there? Today’s Challenge is a question about that journey: I know where I want to go as a leader, how do I get there?