The Leadership Professor

Leaders need to understand their world in order to influence it.  This requires sharp sense-making skills.  Sense-making on the surface seems like a cinch: you notice something, decide what to make of it, and determine what to do about it. Humans are pretty fast at this, and therein lies the problem. We tend to overlook [...]

How are your sense-making skills – your capacities to look at a complex situation and understand what’s really happening?  If you expect to lead well and powerfully, your answer to that question could be the key to a long and strong career. Sense-making is the difficult art at the heart of leadership. We’d all like [...]

The final step for raising your joy quotient is a variation on the old adage, bloom where you are planted. Life doesn’t work such that most of us can pick up and find new opportunities to express our evolving talents. And sometimes we can find ourselves far down a path that seems, if anything, to [...]

Nothing signals leadership like confidence, and those who seek influence are warned to develop theirs. It takes confidence to stand for something. It requires confidence to stay strong in the face of inevitable resistance and to listen carefully and openly to others’ concerns while advancing your own. Confidence comes in two measures. One is basic [...]

It’s time to add another form of intelligence to the list.  We have IQ to measure cognitive intelligence, EQ for emotional intelligence, CQ for cultural intelligence.  Why do we not encourage people to enhance their JQ – their capacity to find and express joy through their work? We’d advance their quality of life and their [...]

Joy is not the first thing we associate with leadership. Influence, power, strategy skills, achievement, change management, tolerance for complexity – absolutely. Joy? Rarely makes anyone’s Top Ten list. Experience and years of seeing talented and dedicated executives burdened – or burned out – by the demands of their work have brought joy to the [...]