As you may know, at Carpenter Smith Consulting, we believe that leadership is the willingness to influence your world and the willingness to be influenced by your world. Recently, we had someone write and ask us this: “You talk a lot about influence. I’m just not sure it’s all that important. What’s made it so central to your model of leadership? What about power and authority?” We love these questions! We know that people often believe that leadership is about…
Last week we talked about our definition of leadership and some ways that different people brought that definition to life in a wide range of settings. It was great to hear from so many of you that these examples helped you see some ways to bring stronger leadership into your world. At the same time, a number of you said that you found the idea of being a leader a burden. Barb summed up her concerns this way: …
As some of you know, at Carpenter Smith Consulting we define leadership in this way: Leadership is the willingness to influence your world and be influenced by your world, regardless of role or title. We’ve brought this definition to leaders of large organizations, leaders in school, leaders in communities, and leaders in life… and based on their positive feedback, we’re more dedicated to this definition than ever. This definition represents a powerful shift in your behavior and supports…
We recently came upon some great research that describes the 5 habits that can derail a career. We thought this was a great list to help you as you lead and manage others. David Maxfield of VitalSmarts interviewed managers from different industries who identified the five top career killers they’ve witnessed in their employees: Being disorganized and unreliable. This person doesn’t spend the necessary amount of time planning, organizing, communicating, and coordinating with others. They fail to follow through on…
We were recently in a meeting talking about some of the work by Roger Fisher and William Ury on the Harvard Negotiating team. Many of you will know them from their 1991 book, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. In that groundbreaking book, the authors introduced a new way to think about negotiations and difficulties. Where we once thought of winners and losers, they proposed identifying options for mutual gain, separating the people from the problems, and…
Since our last post, we have heard from a number of you that you loved the post on Personal Agility and have been struggling to become more agile in your life and work. Over the next few weeks, we are going to address some of the areas you identified as challenging. Personal agility requires the ability to learn and to lead – to influence your world and be influenced by your world. For many of you, a central part of…
Today is our last post on how to use The Engagement Spiral©. For those of you just joining us, here is a list of the previous posts, click on the link to read those you have missed: The Engagement Spiral© Overview Step 1: Tell Them They Matter Step 2: Teach People How to Provide Input Step 3: Take Input to the Relevant Decision-Makers Step 4: Use the Input and Perspective They Provide. In our years of coaching, we have seen…
We hate to keep giving those of you who are already members of our community a recap but we’ve had a lot of people joining our online coaching community in recent weeks and we want them to be able to successfully follow the process in this series. As you will recall, in our December 9th post we gave you an overview of The Engagement Spiral© that we created to help leaders in organizations, communities, and even families create engagement and alignment…
Most of the executives who come in to work with us are bright, well intended individuals who are struggling simply because they haven’t been taught the tools to succeed – especially in the area of engaging others. We created The Engagement Spiral© to teach individuals how to increase engagement and a sense of ownership in others in 6 basic steps. Step 1 is to Tell People They Matter – And Mean It. Step 2 is to Teach People How To…
Last week we talked about the importance of having people in your circle who mirror back to you your impact in Surrounding Yourself with Good Mirrors. Without mirrors it is challenging to know, accurately, what your skills are, how they contribute to your success, how they (sometimes) block your success, what your impact is, where you can have influence and how you lose influence. You can guess, of course, and you can look back and reflect on what happened as…