It is one of those milestone birthdays. 50 years. When my Dad turned fifty he said “I can’t decide if I am going to start counting backwards next year, or just adjust my birthdays to the Celsius scale.”  I was 30 when he said it, and it made me laugh. It still makes me laugh.

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I put this slide on the screen yesterday, while giving a talk on hiring strategies for Choice Hotels International Convention. . . If you want to hire rock stars, you can’t wait until you have an opening to start thinking about hiring.   Here’s an exercise to do today to help you implement this idea.

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  It’s Mother’s Day in the United States – a day to set aside to thank, honor and remember our mothers.  As a leader, I hope you are doing those things for the mothers in your life, and after reading this post, I hope you do a little bit more. This post isn’t meant to

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Part of my team and I are exhibiting at the American Society of Training and Development International Conference in Denver this week.  Yesterday, as a part of the conversations we had with participants, several asked if we provide training for people to prepare them for supervisory/leadership roles before they get those jobs.  As we debriefed

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Have you ever enjoyed the sounds of a rock and roll band? Would you like to have a team that performed as well as your favorite band? With the five tips below you can be on way to creating that rock star team. Have a clear vision and purpose. The band needs to know the

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As leaders, we must be willing to let go of lots of things. Just Monday, I wrote about this idea of surrender.  Consider this a companion to that post – perhaps a more practical addendum. Micromanagement In workshops I led yesterday, I said “no one includes micromanagement in the list of attributes of a great

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Surrender? When you think about surrender, you don’t likely think of great leadership. People who surrender, lose, right? The dictionary tells us that surrender, as a verb, means things like: “to yield possession or power,” “to give (oneself) up,” “to give up, abandon or relinquish.” These are hardly the ideas we connect with leaders we

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If you believe, like I do, that we all have tremendous untapped potential, then today’s quotation begs an important question. A question that I will ask you below. “Great work is done by people who are not afraid to be great.” – Fernando Flores, engineer and politician Questions to Ponder How do you personally define greatness?

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Excuses . . . wear me out. Here are some examples from the workplace (though I could easily give you a longer list outside of work too): I can’t learn it that way (it’s not my learning style). I need to know this first, so until I know that I can’t . . . I can’t make it work because. . . No one will agree with me. I

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Effective coaching is a big topic. Here are just a few examples where being a more effective coach can make a difference: at work, for your children’s sports teams, for a friend and in your community. As with anything as important and as pervasive as this topic, there are lots of resources available to you.

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