COMMON GROUND
The Power of Definitions
AN AESOP FABLE: CONSTRUCTS, REALITY AND DEFINITIONS Aesop narrated a story of a man and a lion who are competing to determine who is the strongest. To prove his point,…
The Leader as Influencer
One of the measures of a great leader is how people think, talk and remember that person. The greatness of a leader is how instrumental he or she is in…
The Servant Leader Influences Intrinsic Motivators
The idea of “leader as a servant” has been around for some time and long before Robert Greenleaf coined the term for modern business about 40 years ago. Here are…
Are Women Better Team Players?
No one doubts that high performance teams are meant to be the engines that drive success in today’s business environment. Though much has been written on team theory and there…
High Performance Teams & Collective Intelligence
While high performance teams are the drivers of success in an organization, building such teams can be elusive. Simply assembling extraordinarily skilled individuals to have a high-performance team is not…
Pedagogical Virtues of a Virtual Workshop Environment
A core premise in addressing the pedagogical virtues of a virtual environment is the distinction between teaching and learning (see https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.) The premise being that learning is a process of discovery,…
An Influencing Paradox
Recently, I was looking at synonyms in the dictionary for influencing and I found words such as affect, have an impact on, determine, guide, shape, change, alter and transform. These…
Does Good Leadership Include Intimacy?
In a recent training program, the participants and I were looking at different leadership attributes such as trust, vision and innovation. I suggested that intimacy was one of those attributes…
Enjoyment & Performance
Participants In a recent workshop discussing thought leadership, were asked to identify one aspect of their job in which they excelled. One participant started her sentence with “I enjoy”. I…
Positive Thinking & Realism
In a recent coaching workshop, the difference between being positive and being realistic became a topic of discussion. The risk perceived in having a positive approach was that some considered…