ARTICLES BY DR. ANDY NEILLIE, CSP

I’ve got a lot on my plate.  There are currently 92 “ToDo” items on my task list,  While many of them are not important-and-urgent, the list of important and urgent items is still pretty intimidating to me.  The requirements from the various areas where I exert leadership can feel overwhelming – like a never-ending game of bop-the-gopher.  And I know I’m not alone; you are just as busy as I am, if not more so.

Recently a fellow leader reminded me of the importance of thinking about what leadership activities need to be in the “middle lanes.”…

Coffee is for Closers

Fellow leader – you may remember the 25-year-old classic sales movie, “Glengarry Glenn Ross” (if not, google “Alec Baldwin selling” for a sample – but be prepared for your ears to burn!)  If you saw the movie, you may remember that Alec Baldwin played an archetypical hard-driving sales manager, pushing his under-performing sales team to close more sales.

Glengary Glen Ross

During his monologue early in the movie,

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Unfair

She sent me a blistering email. It was lengthy. It was vindictive. It was accusatory. She threw several of the people on our team under the bus. Including her boss’s boss, who reported directly to me.  Leader – how would you react?

Her accusations were, for the most part, unfounded.  Her perspective was one-sided, defensive and petty.

Her email showed up in my in-box on a Saturday morning, and it threatened to ruin my entire weekend.

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I recently had the privilege of going on a trip with Food for the Hungry to Placer Bonito, Dominican Republic.  Two leadership lessons emerged from our time there.

A beautiful place

Placer Bonito (literally “a beautiful place”) is a poverty-stricken village in the southwestern portion of the Dominican Republic.  (As you may remember from geography lessons, the Dominican Republic is in the Caribbean, southwest of Cuba, and about a 2.5-hour flight from Miami.)

While the countryside around Placer Bonito is indeed beautiful,

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Life is hard

Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper sticker: “Life is hard and then you die.”  While a rather morbid philosophical reflection on life, the point of the saying, I suspect, is supposed to be a wry and humorous acknowledgement that you can’t expect things to always be easy. I’m not a fan of pessimistic bumper stickers, but I do think there is a leadership corollary.

Leadership is hard.  Just plain hard. 

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Leadership lessons sometimes come from the most unlikely places.  Here’s one I learned from the local watch repair shop in the mall.  First, some background.

I used to travel to Asia quite a bit for work.  On one of my first trips to Hong Kong, a colleague introduced me to the Lady’s Market.  This market is a barter market filled with literally hundreds of kiosks selling thousands of high-quality and knock-off items. 

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A leadership lesson from the Grand Canyon: When we lived in Phoenix, my wife and I hiked the Grand Canyon annually. While most tourists visit the South Rim – more than 5 million annually – less than 10% of that number visit the North Rim, and far fewer chose to hike from rim-to-rim. Therefore, hiking down from the South Rim, overnighting at Phantom Ranch at the very bottom of the Canyon, then hiking up the Kaibab Trail to the North Rim gives you a much less-traveled and pristine experience.

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Ned Lud.  Not a name most of us are familiar with.  But his name – and his response to circumstances around him – created a movement.  And a term.  The Leader as Chief Luddite is my recognition that Ned Lud may still have some things to teach us as leaders.

A brief history lesson

In the late 1700s, as the Industrial Revolution increasingly automated jobs in factories and warehouses, a violent movement of laborers intent on “destroying the new machines to save their jobs”

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Leadership and Hard Conversations

We fired one of our senior leaders this week.  It wasn’t an abrupt thing.  It wasn’t a capricious thing.  I will admit it was a difficult thing.  But most importantly, at the end of the day, it was the right thing.  And it came after a series of hard conversations.

Leader: hard conversations are not bad conversations, they are just hard conversations

Leader, how do you do with hard conversations?  

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