Successful leaders give much time and thought to the creation and sustainability of their workplace culture. They generally focus on what organizational experts call the cognitive culture — the how we think, our integrity, behavior. Edgar Schein, former professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and an expert in organizational development, divides cognitive culture into three categories: the artifacts (the things that are visible such as rituals and office settings), espoused values (strategies, goals, and how we represent ourselves to the customer), and shared assumptions (beliefs), all of which contribute to the foundation of an organization. [Read more…]

I recently watched an interview with Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google. He was promoting his book “Work Rules — Insights from Inside Google that Transform How You Live and Lead.” The author addressed many issues from what he refers to as “Intellectual Humility” to “Let the Inmates Run the Asylum.” The area I thought most relevant to my readers was the chapter where he discusses “why hiring is the single most important people activity in any organization.” It’s all about recruiting and hiring people, and it debunks most of what you, and in the past I, have done to get high quality employees. [Read more…]

Well-respected leadership coach, Marshall Goldsmith, in his best-selling book, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There,” states, “The higher you go the more the problems are behavioral.” I agree. The challenges of many of my high-level executive coaching clients is not that they don’t have the smarts, the knowledge, or the drive to succeed, it’s their controlling behavior that prevents them, their people, and the organization from reaching full potential. [Read more…]