As more people become vaccinated and states continue to ease restrictions, many businesses are formulating a plan for how to bring employees back to the office, make work from home permanent, or adopt some type of hybrid model as their new normal.

Does love have a valid place in leadership? We say, absolutely yes! In fact, effective servant leadership cannot exist without love. Then why does the term not hold its rightful place in the leadership vernacular alongside concepts like compassion, empathy and respect? Well, it starts with how the word love is defined in this case.

A great thinker, Ferris Bueller, once said “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.” If only Ferris knew how fast life would move in 2021 compared to 1986.

While the world continues to get faster and faster, we are submitting a campaign for slowing down. One of the problems we as humans face is an inability to react both quickly and rationally….consistently.

Would you like your compliment sandwich on white, wheat, or rye? 

We’ll politely decline the sandwich overall and instead ask for a slow-cooked plate of relationship building, a side of trust, and we’ll finish it off with a tall glass of praise.

How well do leaders really know themselves? Many like to think they are excellent communicators or attentive listeners. Yet, the true numbers are usually much lower when leaders are pressed for additional insights and examples. So why the disconnect between those who think they are and those who actually are?

The practice of coaching has exploded recently as more and more leaders are looking to increase their overall effectiveness. However, the impact of coaching can be seen not just in the formal coach/client relationship, but also the supervisor/employee relationship as well.

With the new year in full swing, it’s a good time to assess your growth and development. Gauging your effectiveness as a leader starts from a standpoint of humility. Having a keen self-awareness of both your strengths and weaknesses can provide you with the proper foundation for how best to move forward in 2021.

If asked whether or not their organization has a set of core values, many leaders would respond in the affirmative. A smaller number could recite all or at least some of those values, as well as identify where those values could be found within the organization (i.e. company intranet, posted on the walls in their building, conference rooms, etc.). We submit that even fewer leaders yet, if many at all, know what those values specifically mean to and within their organization.

In this episode, we wrap up the conversation on resilience by looking at some character traits of resilient people. The list is certainly not exhaustive by any means, but rather a starting point when thinking about your own capacity for resilience and how to ultimately grow it.

It’s fair to say that just about every one of us has dealt with some form of adversity in our lives. From smaller bouts that have come and gone quickly to more prolonged episodes that really brought on a significant amount of stress; life happens. Yet, what is far less consistent, are the responses to adversity.

In this episode, we start a new series centered on a word that quickly became synonymous with 2020 and the ability to handle adversity; resilience. It’s our position that the ability to be resilient is comprised of three factors: personality, or our natural resilience; experience, or our exposure to adversity thus far; and skill set, or the tools we’ve developed in order to become more resilient.

Effective communication is vital to the success of an organization. So much that oftentimes it represents what leaders feel is one of the largest contributing factors to a poor company culture. While sometimes the issue lies primarily with the amount of communication taking (or not taking) place, other times this “quantity perception” is actually masking other problems.

As we wind down the conversation on the pressure and peace of leadership, we look at the peace that can come from looking outward. When we lead solely from the standpoint of satisfying our own needs, we miss opportunities to put others as well as the organization in the best position to be successful. This desire to satisfy our own needs can oftentimes lead to fear and arrogance; thereby increasing pressure.

As leaders, we must accept the fact that pressure applied by internal and external forces is a given. If we set out with the mindset of trying to make it go away, we will be sorely disappointed. But does this pressure have to consume our lives? Rather, can we find ways to live with the pressure and maybe even turn it into an opportunity for growth?