Beware The Narcissistic Leader
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because...
View Article7 Tips From Neuroscience For CEOs Dealing With COVID-19 Stress
While many of us are used to managing stress and change in our workplace and daily lives, the layers of uncertainty and volatility the pandemic has created, have intensified the amount of stress we are...
View ArticleHow We Can We Offer Greater And More Differentiated Value To Our Organizations
As the CEO of a national company that strives to deliver value, I’ve been intrigued by a Harvard Business Review article, “The Elements of Value,” written by Eric Almquist, John Senior, and Nicolas...
View ArticleExceptional Executive Assistants Keep CEOs Thriving In Times Of Crisis
If ever there were a time when executives must call on the full complement of their assistant’s skills and utilize them to best advantage, now would surely be that time. With the world on Covid-19...
View ArticleBeyond Bears: Remembering Mike McCaskey’s Real Legacy
Chicago Bears owner Mike McCaskey (L) answers questions at a press conference. Six months ago, former Chicago Bears chairman Mike McCaskey told me that he eagerly looked forward to returning to New...
View ArticleCovid-19: A Career Defining Pandemic
There is no leader today, no CEO, actually no one, who does not say that the past two-plus months have been unprecedented. Never have we seen such disruption to economies and chaos to life. About nine...
View ArticleThe Value Of The Letter “C” In Organizational Leadership
Maybe “C” is better than “just good enough.” As a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point during the mid-Eighties, I may have been generously described as a “fair-to-middling student” at best....
View ArticleKnow When To Step Aside
It was a beautiful day. So, I grabbed my water bottle, donned my mask, and headed out for a hike. I chose a rugged trail up the mountain, which at times, was narrow, steep, and hazardous. This made...
View ArticleThirty Years Later, My Dad’s Book Is Still Relevant
When my dad, Dr. Stephen Covey, first wrote the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he spent a year working almost exclusively on it, distilling his thoughts, crafting the narrative and...
View ArticleDoug Conant: CEOs Must Find Their Courage
Douglas Conant was hired as CEO of Campbell Soup Company when the company was struggling to meet stakeholder expectations. Within a few short years, he led the company to deliver superior financial...
View ArticleWhat You Can Learn From CEO Communication Blunders
Through this spring’s Covid-19 pandemic, I have celebrated models of great CEOs who filled a trust void with meaningful external messages—and I’ve also seen some blunders. Here’s a look at what’s...
View ArticleA Two-Step Guide For New CEOs
There’s a reason you’re the new CEO: You were brought in to be something the previous leader was not. Chances are, you’re inheriting a laundry list of problems, all of which existed prior to Covid-19...
View ArticleIn The Age Of Transparency, Command-And-Control Leadership Loses Its Iron Grip
What a difference three days can make. CrossFit is a multi-billion-dollar fitness brand. On June 7th, Greg Glassman, the founder and CEO of CrossFit, tweeted an apology. “I made a mistake by the words...
View ArticleA Hard Look In The Mirror
The pandemic has cloistered many of us in our home offices for months now, restricting the once abundant opportunities we had to casually engage with each other over a cup of coffee or a meal. For some...
View ArticleWhen A CEO’s ‘Position Authority’ Gets In The Way
By default, CEOs have position authority – they are the senior-most executives in their organizations who serve as agents on behalf of their boards, investors or sometimes themselves as owners. They...
View ArticleTo Be A High-Performance CEO, Be Like A High-Performance Athlete. Some Tips.
Even high achievers can be guided to perform better and more consistently, says World Series Champion Performance Coach Dana Cavalea, a man with a proven track record helping top athletes and...
View ArticleJohn Lewis’s Last Lesson For Leaders
Rep. John Lewis in October, 2019. While living in Atlanta in the 1980s, I was fortunate to have gotten to meet the late Congressman John Lewis. Then, in the late 1990s he generously did me a huge...
View Article5 Best Practices For Strengthening Your 1-On-1s
A good bit of data and many years of observation suggest that CEO one-on-one discussions with direct reports can have a surprisingly large impact on a leadership team’s performance. In their Project...
View ArticleEffective Leadership: CEOs Need Both IQ And EQ
Leaders are expected to possess a culmination of all the best personal characteristics. As such, leaders often feel like they’re being pulled in a million different directions. CEOs must be unwavering,...
View ArticleOlympian Jim Craig on ‘Preparing to Win’
Jim Craig’s reputation as a winner was cemented back in 1980 when, as goaltender for the U.S. Olympic hockey team, he blocked 36 out of 39 shots to help bring an end to a six-year winning streak for...
View ArticleFive Phrases To Avoid During A Crisis
On a normal day, communicating message clearly and successfully to stakeholders can be challenging. But during a crisis, when people feel more raw than they’re willing to acknowledge, a CEO’s...
View ArticleThe New Role Of Trust In Business In A Pandemic
A powerful effect of the coronavirus pandemic has been to expose the gap between what company leaders say and what they mean. When a company demands that its workers produce a sick note to qualify for...
View ArticleIt’s Not To Late To Get Web-Cam Ready
In our new reality, more and more of us are attending meetings and conducting business from home, and will be for some time. This means more video discussions using webcams on devices like laptops,...
View ArticleWhy Vulnerability Is A CEO’s Secret Weapon
Early in my CEO career, I would have described a great leader as someone with vision, a growth mindset, authenticity, confidence, charisma, and courage. Then a board member called me aside: “Burnison,...
View ArticleFive Ways CEOs Can Model Inclusiveness
In mid-June 2020, Google Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai announced a corporate initiative aimed at increasing “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 30 percent by 2025. The announcement came...
View ArticleCarlyle Group’s David Rubenstein On ‘How to Lead’
David Rubenstein As co-founder of The Carlyle Group, David Rubenstein built one of the most influential and innovative private equity shops in the world, pioneering the PE revolution that has come to...
View ArticleFour Ways To Help Your Team Excel (And Stay Sane) In A Remote World
The future of business is here, and it’s increasingly virtual. Millions of workers are now working from home, and companies as large as Twitter have already announced employees never have to return to...
View ArticleThe Mystery Of The ‘E’ In CEO
It’s amazing that an acronym as ubiquitous and commonly used as “CEO” can remain so poorly understood. After two decades of working with chief executives, I have to say that there is still far too much...
View Article‘Be Human’: Marshall Goldsmith’s Best Leadership Advice Right Now
Marshall Goldsmith In any time but the current one, this is the last place Marshall Goldsmith, one of the most in-demand CEO coaches in the world and bestselling author of leadership classics like What...
View ArticleThe Kind Of Leader We Need Now
A CEO I’m working with shared a very powerful story with me recently. One of his employees sent him an email the day after the tragic killing of George Floyd. It was a short email. The employee simply...
View ArticlePracticing High-EQ Leadership
“I should lead by example—not lecture people on what they should ultimately be doing.” —Kara Goldin, CEO, Hint Water Target store one evening in March and executed a corporate duty she’d left behind a...
View Article4 Ways to Become a Creative CEO — Even If You Think You’re Not One
Want to know your biggest mistake as a CEO? It’s assuming you’re not creative. You are. You’re just using the wrong semantics. Contrary to popular belief, creativity isn’t about visual design or...
View ArticleIs Your Leadership Team Getting Better?
It is certainly an oversimplification to say that running a business in October 2020 is not easy. The pandemic, social unrest and the political climate have put pressures on organizations of all shapes...
View ArticleWhat John Mackey Learned At The Brink Of The Abyss
Leaders can often point to one pivotal moment, a seismic challenge they had to overcome, that came to define, or redefine some cases, their raison d’être as a leader. For John Mackey, it was the day he...
View ArticleWhy Power Saps Empathy—And What You Can Do to Keep Yours
Everyone starts out with the best of intentions. As a new founder or a newly-promoted leader, you begin making promises to yourself, swearing that you’ll be the compassionate boss you wished you had as...
View ArticleBeyond Great Leadership: Six Imperatives For The CEO
In the first part of this two-part series, authors of BEYOND GREAT: Nine Strategies for Thriving in an Era of Social Tension, Economic Nationalism, and Technological Revolution (October 6,...
View ArticleHow To Talk Politics At Work
When President Trump called out Goodyear Tire in a tweet, “canceling” the company for not allowing employees to wear “Make America Great Again” hats, CEO Rich Kramer was no doubt surprised. “To be...
View ArticleWhat 35 Years As A CEO Taught Me About Leadership
The following is an excerpt from Robert Rosenberg’s new leadership book, out this week, Around the Corner to Around the World: A Dozen Lessons I Learned Running Dunkin’ Donuts. As CEO for three and a...
View ArticleLeadership Revealed, Lessons Learned
Timing is everything. In March, after a career as a pediatrician, public health official — including service as an Admiral in the U.S. Public Health Services Commissioned Corps — and Assistant...
View ArticlePatrick Lencioni: A Good Time For Quiet Contemplation
Imagine there was an activity that every CEO agreed was critical to maximizing their success and that almost none of them did. And imagine that this activity cost absolutely nothing, took just 10 to 15...
View ArticleThriving In Sustained Ambiguity
As a strategist, I am very comfortable with ambiguity. After all, ambiguity is intrinsic to strategy development and execution. Uncertainty is the norm. Thus, I’ve been surprised by how challenging it...
View ArticleBank Of America CEO Brian Moynihan On The Lessons Of Rugby: New Corporate...
Our CEO of the Year, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, sat down with longtime Sports Illustrated Associate Editor Don Yaeger on his Corporate Competitor Podcast to discuss how sports shaped...
View ArticleHow Pole Vaulting Taught Topgolf’s CEO To Be Braver In Business
Topgolf CEO Dolf Berle In this week’s edition of our Corporate Competitor Podcast, Topgolf CEO Dolf Berle teaches how to overcome self-doubt, shorten the life-cycle of failure, and be a brave leader....
View ArticlePatrick Lencioni Exclusive: Discover Your Team’s Genius
Live Session Available: Join Pat on January 26, 2021 as he dives into the Six Types of Working Genius in an exclusive Chief Executive session tailored for CEOs and their leadership teams. You’ll get an...
View ArticleWhat CEOs And Boards Can Learn From The President’s Erratic Exit
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks about the 2020 U.S. presidential election results in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., November 5, 2020. REUTERS/Carlos Barria In...
View ArticleBuilding Your Executive Brand
I frequently speak with younger executives about advancing their careers. Inevitably, we discuss their career aspirations and the importance of a strong personal brand. Senior executives and CEOs, too,...
View ArticleI Had It All Wrong—Until I Learned To Trust
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I’m willing to bet that most people reading this article have heard a frustrated leader utter these words in a moment of panic over a...
View ArticleHeroizing CEOs Exacerbates Gender Divide
We all strive to be leaders in one way or another: whether it is in leading our workplaces, communities or in personal capacities, the general consensus is that it is good to be a leader. The lines get...
View ArticleRam Charan: The One Essential For CEOs Facing The Worst
A dozen years ago, Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical, was facing the worst day of his professional life. At the time, Liveris had a seemingly airtight agreement to buy Rohm and Haas, a chemical...
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