Leadership Articles by Don Blohowiak

These articles about leadership improvement are offered to you at no charge. They were written by Don Blohowiak of the Lead Well Institute which specializes in custom leadership development.

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Know someone with breast cancer? Modeling Values   Breast cancer patients and their loved ones are invited to share their experiences and perspectives as part of the research for a forthcoming book: The Guy's Guide to Female Breast Cancer: A Practical Manual for the Husband, Lover, Father, Brother, Son or Friend of a Woman with Breast Cancer. The ... Full Text

Becoming Your Best Self Inner Leadership   Most of us have an image in our mind of the person we'd really like to become. How can you actually become the person you want to be? Here's an amazingly powerful technique that you can put to work for yourself. It requires but five easy-to-implement steps. Full Text

Potent "Must Read" on Power Maximizing Own Effectiveness   Power affects all relationships in a way that is, arguably, either underestimated or misunderstood. Or both.  So a book that takes a fresh-eyed view of personal power is a welcome addition to understanding the complexities that underlie all human relationships, and can make a profound difference in the life of every leader (and everyone you know). Full Text

Social Entrepreneurs to the Rescue Leader's Library   Many people are ready to roll up their sleeves and dig in to fix, or at least substantially address, the very difficult problems that evade governments and established institutions alike. Some folks, author David Bornstein shows us, are doing that already all over the world. Full Text

Thou Shalt Heed & Honor Ancient Lessons Leader's Library   "The Bible," leadership development consultant Lorin Woolfe contends, is the "greatest collection of leadership case studies ever written." He postulates that Biblical tales provide modern managers with "tremendously useful and insightful lessons," because these ancient stories "form some of the major archetypes of our collective consciousness." Can modern managers lead better today by looking back thousands of years? Full Text

Serving Purpose Perspectives on Leadership   A popular notion of leadership is very wrong. Leaders are not the sum of ideal traits; they are neither born nor made. Leaders emerge. And they emerge because of one critical, driving factor... Full Text

Humility Aside, Here's Food for Thought Leader's Library   Part memoir, part social commentary, part company case study, the book Authentic Leadership is Bill George's wide angle take on, and prescription for, the current state of corporate leadership. Full Text

Manifesto for a Revolution Leader's Library   The feelings of your employees influence the feelings of your customers, and that drives their buying behavior and your profits. How do you make that happen? The Gallup Organization has some intriguing ideas for you. Full Text

Engage—and Keep—Your Employees Leader's Library   Veteran consultants Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans wrote a handy, very practical, advisor for pressured, task-based (and, yes, even gruff) managers who are too consumed to always remember—but who know down deep—that people, the engaged and motivated variety, really do make the difference in producing great results. Full Text

Got Volunteers? Encouraging & Developing Others   If your organization depends on volunteers to lead and do work, you might be interested in sharing your experiences and receiving a report on Volunteer Best Practices. Participate in a confidential survey on attracting, motivating and keeping volunteers. It originated with some of our volunte... Full Text

Book = Fresh Look at Business Success Leader's Library   A review of: The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Secrets of Continually Developing a More Profitable Business Model by Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles Some wag, a few years ago, audaciously claimed that there really was no such thing as a "business model." It is probably true that many busines... Full Text

More Wives Earn More Journal   02 March 2003--One in three wives now out earns her husband who, in turn, does more of the household chores, according to a new study cited in Business Week magazine. The more economic power the wife has, the more men help out at home. The study found that 51% of men with breadwinner wives ar... Full Text

Doing Strategy Deciding Purpose, Priorities & Outcomes   Strategy—so vitally important in today's mercilessly competitive marketplace—need not be the province of mystics or wild-eyed visionaries. Creating a distinctly effective strategy can be distilled into a straightforward process. And we've codified the exercise for you. Full Text

Brewing Labor Crisis Journal   12 February 2003--A warning from Ira Wolfe, one of the USA's leading workforce experts: Between 2010 and the mid-2020s, 12,480 U.S. baby boomers will leave the workforce--every day. Fifty-one percent of the workforce will be over 70 in 30 years and the number of employees under age 40 is insuffic... Full Text

Be Careful What You Pay For Journal   Incentive pay can be effective in encouraging employees to engage in certain behaviors to produce desirable results. But without adequate guidelines and supervision to assure quality and limit potential abuses, incentive pay can encourage counterproductive behavior—and undesirable results. Full Text

Diagnoses Assessing & Adjusting Performance   One of the most vexing challenges a leader faces: Doing everything right, and having unacceptable, even terrible, results anyway. When you try to identify what's really driving a situation that's not going right, you can usually find roots in one or more of these ten common causes. Full Text

Slow Economy Masks Employee Commitment Journal   30 January 2003---From Roger E. Herman, lead author of Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People: Recent studies show that 30-40% of employees are already prepared to leave their current employer for new opportunities. They’re just waiting for the economy to pick up, and most of their bosses ... Full Text

On Attitude Journal   From a Hallmark greeting card (likely my all-time favorite): Always Remember This: A positive attitude may not solve all your problems... ...but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. Post-chuckle thoughts: 1) You do choose your attitude.2) Your attitude affects your actions ... Full Text

Let's Pretend Managing Processes & Work Flow   Ignoring reality, wishing it were otherwise, does not change what is. Fallacies shared organization-wide don't alter true conditions and their consequences. Full Text

Two Roots to All Successes and Failures in Organizations Journal   A case study reported by the New York Times provides two important lessons: Managerial failures usually start deep within an individual's mind and are aided broadly by organizational policies. Full Text

Restoring Corporate Credibility Modeling Values   "How can companies regain credibility in the face of greed and corruption?," Reuters magazine wanted to know. Good question. In 2002, dramatic ethical scandals rocked the business community and shook the very foundations of the free enterprise system. "Millions of people," as Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner put it , "have seen their retirement funds slashed, their savings decimated, their dreams trampled on...in the wake of the high-profile accounting scandals" and "the trend of executive impropriety." Reuters asked Don Blohowiak of the Lead Well® Institute for his perspective and advice on how to "rebuild investor and employee confidence after such damning revelations." Here is the transcript of ten tough questions from the magazine, and ten no-holds-barred responses from Don Blohowiak, for the piece, "Who's Sorry Now?," appearing in the November 2002 edition of Reuters magazine. Full Text

Piles Preclude Productivity Managing Processes & Work Flow   Literally surrounded by work? Big piles of stuff not only do not signal productivity, they can really detract from it. Full Text

Take Heed: Life Intrudes! Journal   "Back-ups. Contingency plans. Insurance. Safety nets. Catastrophe plans. All seem to be so much trouble, so much of an investment of time and resources. So little return," John Blumberg points out. But, he says, when a disaster does strike, "you will have a first-hand experience in an instantaneou... Full Text

Productivity as Differentiator Aligning & Leveraging the Organization   By maximizing productivity, you gain an edge in the value equation. Either by charging lower prices for a perceived commodity, or by justifying higher prices for innovative or superior performance. But managing for productivity takes much more than merely recognizing its importance. Read this article and learn how to test your organization's productivity acumen. Full Text

Empowering Truth Journal   9 January 2003---Today's thought: If you do not trust your associates, you cannot empower them. Full Text

How to Really Know What People Want Listening & Seeking Input   The key to having good information: Obtaining unfiltered data and insights from the people most important to your leadership—the constituents your operation exists to serve. Full Text

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