Succession Planning and the Organizational Life Cycle
The motion of a swinging pendulum can be fascinating to watch. If designed to do so, a swinging pendulum can create beautiful, symmetrical designs of calm and order. However, a swinging pendulum can also result in disarray and destruction. It depends on the degrees of awareness and intentionality in those who put the pendulum in […]
Succession Planning and Knowing What You Mean
Welcome to the first in a series of blogs on successful succession planning. This one starts it off with some thoughts on the language of succession planning and how it shapes our mindsets around the purpose and process. All of which significantly influences the success of a succession plan. (This is not an exhaustive approach, […]
Are You Haunted by a Leadership ‘Ghost’?
October is the season for ghosts and goblins. While the manifestations inhabited by children in costume is cute and quite fun, there is nothing enjoyable about struggling with a leadership “ghost.” Chances are you know what I mean, even if you have never heard my term before. In the Goodwin leadership lexicon, a “leadership ghost” […]
Great Managers Do Things Differently
Companies often fall into the “promotion” trap—promoting an employee because they excel at their job. What they often fail to detect is if that individual has management skills or the company fails to provide management training.
Credibility Doesn’t Transfer
Your leadership credibility does not follow you from one company to another.
The Dangers of Leading a Turnaround
Acceptance There is an old Samurai tradition that admonishes warriors that, before battle, they must “accept their own death.” Only in this acceptance can they be fully present for the battle. Accepting the reality that one might die makes that warrior fearless and thus more likely to survive. The same is true for the would-be […]
Team Checkup
Hard Lessons The odometer on my Toyota RAV4 just clicked over the magical 100,000 mile mark. That event triggered two immediate thoughts: 1) I drive too much (LOL!); and 2) I need to get this car into the shop for its 100,000 mile check up. That second thought came from a hard lesson years ago […]
TW Leadership Profile: David Cavazos, City Manager of Santa Ana, CA
Teaching Leadership Is it possible to inherit the leadership traits needed to manage a city from your parents? David Cavazos believes so. “I learned confidence from my father,” says David, “and self-reliance from my mother.” And those two traits have brought him a long way. With almost three decades of public management experience, David’s journey […]
Vision Fueling
A Leader’s Vision Vision is central to leadership. Without it, a leader cannot motivate, empower, or unite people towards a common goal. Vision has a clear unity, however, vision is more than one monolithic picture of a preferred future. Granted, vision is a supraordinate goal that everyone can agree upon, however, there are often many […]
Emotionally Intelligent Leader
By Dr. Reggie Thomas, Senior Consultant, TurningWest, Inc. Emotional Intelligence and Leadership What do you think is the most important characteristic of leadership, second to character and credibility? I believe it is possessing relational competency. Dr. Daniel Goleman is the leading expert in the field of emotional intelligence and he contends that only 25% of […]