Category: Leadership

Power Creates Distance Leaders Bridge the Gap

Posted by Phillip Wilson | Feb 15, 2016 | Leadership

Do you shrink the gap?

Why Engagement Efforts Backfire

Posted by Phillip Wilson | Feb 12, 2016 | Leadership

Some engagement efforts don’t go as planned.

You mean well. You conduct your employee survey or focus group sessions. You collect all the data, review all the spreadsheets. You invest a lot of time, energy (and money) on your engagement efforts. And then they fall flat on their face. Ouch.

You do the right things, check the right boxes. But employee morale remains in the tank. Often the explanation is simple. Even if your heart is in the right place, you might be forgetting to walk the talk. If there is a gap between what you say and do for employees, you’re toast.

We are currently neck deep in one of the best examples of saying-doing gaps you can find – the US presidential primaries. As crazy as this year’s election season has been, are the promises that different from 2012? Are they that different from 2008? Or 2004?

Can bad leadership kill you?

Posted by Phillip Wilson | Feb 5, 2016 | Leadership

Everybody knows bad leadership can be costly.

It leads to turnover, workplace stress, and decreased cooperation which costs US businesses billions each year. But can bad leadership kill you?

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that United Airlines is calling in all 12,000 of its pilots for extra safety training over the next 3 months. This is due to a series of serious safety incidents. None of the incidents led to an accident, but there were several close calls.

The Infinite ROI of Talent Development

Posted by Phillip Wilson | Feb 2, 2016 | Leadership

“Training pays.”

Seth Godin says this in his recent article on “the infinite return on investment” of talent development and training. He provides this example:

“Imagine a customer service rep. Fully costed out, it might cost $5 for this person to service a single customer by phone. An untrained rep doesn’t understand the product, or how to engage, or hasn’t been brought up to speed on your systems. As a result, the value delivered in the call is precisely zero (in fact it’s negative, because you’ve disappointed your customer).

On the other hand, the trained rep easily delivers $30 of brand value to the customer, at a cost, as stated, of $5. So, instead of zero value, there’s a profit to the brand of $25. A comparative ROI of infinity.

And of course, the untrained person doesn’t fall into this trap once. Instead, it happens over and over, many times a day.”

Do you suffer from any of the 7 most unapproachable behaviors?

Posted by Phillip Wilson | Jan 20, 2016 | Leadership

One of my favorite things is giving a room full of people permission to practice treating each other like jerks. I guess that makes me the Jerry Springer of leadership training.

During the Approachable Leadership Workshop that’s exactly what we ask leaders to do (don’t worry, we ask them to practice approachable behavior too). They get to pick the most unapproachable things they can dream up and then do them to their coworkers.

You see some truly amazing behavior during that exercise. And the sad part is most people don’t have to dream up their behavior. They simply pull it from their own real-life experiences of unapproachable leaders.

At this point I’ve seen more than a thousand people channel their best “bad boss” impersonation. Here are the 7 most unapproachable behaviors of them all…