Recently I had a conversation with a Twitter friend about a change his team was about to go through. Here’s how the advice and how  you can help your team deal with change. Change isn’t easy, but if you do it right, you can minimize the long-term pain your team will go through as a result of the change. 1) Explain why you’re making the change – Why are you making the change? Your team probably thought everything was going well. Take time to explain the WHY behind the change as completely as possible, leaving very little to the imagination. The better job you do of this now, the better things will be long term. 2) Explain the impact of the change – Does the change mean a schedule change? More work? Different work? Less work your team... [Read more]

This chapter is from the book Leading at a Higher Level, Revised and Expanded Edition: Blanchard on Leadership and Creating High Performing Organizations by Ken Blanchard Those who want to lead at a higher level need to understand that to create a high performing organization, they need to aim for the right target. Don Carew, Fay Kandarian, Eunice Parisi-Carew, Jesse Stoner, and Ken Blanchard Marksmen will tell you that when you aim at a target, you should go for the bull’s-eye. The reason is that if you miss the bull’s-eye, you’re still on the target. But if all you do is aim for the target and you miss, you’re nowhere. Don Shula, who coauthored Everyone’s a Coach1 with Ken Blanchard, always told his Miami Dolphins football team that... [Read more]

Managers, What’s your one thing? The one thing you need to do? That if you do, Will make a difference? That if you don’t do, Will make a difference? What’s your one thing, That only you can do? You can’t delegate it, You can’t avoid it, You can’t ignore it. You have to do it? What is it? Why are you still reading this article? GO DO IT! Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkn/2057381520 [Read more]

When I graduated high school, I went into the Navy and worked as a communications technician. I worked with a lot of people in military intelligence, including Navy guys who had the coolest patch for their flight jackets. In God We Trust…All Others We Monitor At the time, I thought it was the way things were. You trusted people, but you monitored them. And now, as a manager, I guess that is the way things are. I trust my team to do things…but I review their work to make sure it’s done right. I attend meetings where people say they’ll do the right things…but then we check in at the next meeting to make sure they got done. I expect my team to take care of customers, but then I ask them how we’re doing whenever I see them. Now that... [Read more]

Hope this week was another great one for you. As it draws to a close, I find myself looking inside my heart for lessons I need to learn. I hope the six articles I’ve chosen touch your heart too! Miki Saxon has my favorite article of the week, Ducks in a Row: Cut Them Some Slack, offering a powerful lesson we all can learn from: But the older I got the more successful I was and I never regretted it. If the behavior continued I look for reasons and more often than not I found them. Sure, there were times nothing was wrong and the person was just taking advantage of me and others, but more often they were under the gun, whether a derringer or a bazooka, and I was glad I didn’t make it worse. So the next time someone lets you down, think about... [Read more]