Loichinger Advantage

The reality is that the marketplace offers us so many choices for leadership & management development.  How do you know which one is right, once you’ve done your due diligence? 

Perhaps the best place to start is at the beginning.  Obvious I know.  Ask youself questions like:

• What do you expect of this person? 
• How well and how consistently do they need to perform?
• What does success look like?
• What skills or competencies will drive that level of success?

Our firm recently asked leaders what the most effective & reliable tools within their leadership toolkit have been.  The results are in! The broad base of business leaders from the Capital Region provide their insight.

So much comes across our desk every day – brochures, seminars, university courses, consulting offers.  How can you separate the value from the trash, so that your investments in staff and leadership, offer lasting solutions and results?

Short of staffing and centralizing your own workforce learning and training function, the business leaders we surveyed provided the following great insights to us, and to you.

All to often, we consultants try to create our own model for various aspects of leadership or management.  Sometimes, this works out well as we take a concept to a new level, or establish a contemporary spin on something that has a timeless quality.  Today I’d like to share my review of David Gergen’s latest book, Eyewitenesss to Power:  The Essence of Leadership.

I found David’s insights to be indepth, fair, objective and incredibily insightful.  His review was not only a collection of leadership ideas and concepts, but a targeted review of the leadership qualities of several of our most recent presidents - Nixon to Clinton.  Given his first hand experience within the white house staff’s, along with his personal and professional friendships with many of his colleagues.

I was thinking about the wide range of choices we have to develop leaders today.  Check that, leadership programs that others who supervise managers can check off their to-do list.

There are so many options to develop leadership available and in use today.  Below is my Top 10 Mistakes list.  Feel free to respond with any big ones I may have missed, and of course, your commentary.

1. We send a manager to a workshop they received a brochure in the mail for last week.
2. We send a manager to college or university workshop because they are on a special list.

Listen to the media blasting us 24/7.  You hear that the sky is falling and we’re doomed to fail.  This in turn is fed to people within your organization and translated into the words and circumstances each of us hears and faces every day.  How are you choosing to respond to the words and the news?

Deja Vu

Are we in a place we’ve never experienced before?  Maybe?  Are there circumstances like the national deficit that we should be outraged about?  Most definitely.  Will our society find creative solutions from people of influence to ride out the waves that seem overwhelming?  Absolutely!