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If I can’t manage myself, how can I manage others?

I’ve been thinking and reading about leadership lately. Specifically, I’m trying to more clearly articulate what I mean when I say, “Better humans make better leaders.” What does “better” mean in that sentence? Mature? Enlightened? Capable? These words have the same problem. What do they mean? How do you measure them? So, I’ve started to…

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What keeps you going when nothing seems to be working?

If you’ve led your agency for any length of time, you’ve experienced some ups and downs. For example, here’s an email I got from an agency owner this week: I thought the deal would catapult us into a new level of stability. I had verbal commitments and contracts out. In the meantime, we were working…

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Moving toward more grounded leadership

Contented: satisfaction with one’s possessions, status, or situation. Merriam-Webster Part of being grounded is knowing that I have what I need at this moment, and when challenges or opportunities arise, I can meet them with confidence. Another word for that is contentment. When I live from a place of contentment, it’s harder for people to…

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The first step to improve your leadership and influence

If you want to be influential and lead others, there is one thing you can do that will have an outsized impact on your leadership. Get a good night’s sleep. Before you sign up for an expensive leadership development program or read another book about leadership, pay attention to the basics. Things like sleep, nutrition,…

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The best way to improve your team’s performance

In human affairs, the distance between the leaders and the average is a constant. If leadership performance is high, the average will go up. The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise one leader’s performance than to raise the performance of a whole mass. ~ Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive Leaders I…

What is “Leadership”?

Founders of creative service firms and other agencies have built a platform that’s created leverage for them. They have a team. They’re leading an organization from a positional sense. However, the team doesn’t always do what they expect, and sometimes team members act in puzzling ways that contradict the direction they have set. To gain…