Perspectives

When I started blogging, I made up a list of attributes of leadership that has come to be 84 items long. You may have noticed that I'm working through the list, tackling a different subject every week (plus other stuff from time to time.) Well I was wanting to comment...

Well here it is, what you've been waiting for all week, my definitive advice on what to do with difficult people. Are you ready? Nothing. That's right, nothing. Difficult people are that way as a result of some combination of low emotional intelligence and poor...

Many years ago, a friend of mine spent six years trying to find a way to deal effectively with a particularly difficult person and in one tense moment, finally blew up from all of the pent-up strain. So what do you think happened? You guessed it. My friend got in...

I ask the question with all the right intentions. Could you actually be one of those difficult people that you hate so much? I don't think any of us realize that we can at times be difficult. Me, I've been guilty of yelling, being a frequent critic and being slightly...

Reading about Rob Ford on the weekend brought to mind all of the difficult people I have had to deal with in my career. Not as many as some I would imagine as I've spent most of my life out of the business mainstream but enough to know that it isn't pretty. Difficult...

I feel like I'm opening up another can of worms in this subject of being open to feedback. For some reason, I am continually finding things that are normally seen as simple in the blogosphere are really quite problematic. Case in point: Today I was having a tea with...

I was watching the finale of Survivor last night (I had totally forgotten it on Sunday) and saw some particularly interesting exchanges between contestants. Numerous failed contestants were critiquing the performance of successful ones and it made me wonder. Being...

There's a lot of bloviating going on out there on the net on the topic of being open to feedback. I was talking to someone the other day about what I was doing here and they asked if I wanted feedback and that got me thinking. Am I open enough to it? So I went on the...

In order to learn leadership, there are three things we need. We need a coach to show us how to improve, a process to follow, and some data to know if we are making progress. The trouble is that in the process of learning to be leaders we rarely get all of these....