Leadership is all about change. It’s about initiating and executing on activities that bring about positive change. From an organizational perspective positive change is change that delivers value to the organization and its customers, through innovation or through increased efficiency.

It’s been a challenge to try to summarize many of these concepts on leading change, because each and every section below could have pages or books written on it.  Not only will we be writing more to fill in those gaps, but your feedback and requests in the Facebook group will help us choose what to expand on next. Your questions and comments also help determine what kinds of tools and resources we publish! 

Back to the discussion on change leadership.

There are two parts to Leading Change: the first part is about developing the change initiative, and the second part is about implementing the change.

The kinds of things you do, as a leader, and the kinds of conversations you have...

People don’t leave jobs, they leave poor managers. They may join for the company, for the opportunity, for the skills or the money, but at the end of the day, they leave poor managers.

If you’re not convinced, try this visualization.

Have you ever had to work for, or work with, a bad manager? You may not remember exactly how bad it was, but ask your friends, ask your significant other, they’ll remember and be able to tell you the type of impact it had on you. You might be working for one right now. Think about the impact of that person on you and those around you? How did you feel day in and day out?

Did you find yourself productive or drained? Successful or Stressed?

If you worked for a bad manager, then the chances are very good that you did not find yourself productive or successful.

When you are working for a bad manager all problems are magnified.  Your pay is too low and your vacation too short, even your chair isn’t good enough. You aren’t...

We hear two statements from technical experts that go together, over and over, on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter if it’s with technical experts that attend our training, our 1:1 coaching clients, or our clients’ technical experts when we help out with Business Critical projects. It’s all the same.

“I don’t want to become a manager, I like being technical”

And

“I’m frustrated because nobody listens to me when it comes to solving the problems around here”

Sometimes the words we hear are a little different, but they mean the same thing:

“Are you here to help us explain what’s going on and what needs to happen to fix it?”

“They’ll listen to you because you’re consultants”

“Don’t bother trying to explain it, we already know they’re not listening…”

If you’ve followed some of our earlier blog posts, you should have an initial idea on whether or not...

The planned post I had for this week has changed. This week I’m sharing one of my mistakes. 

Everyone makes mistakes on their journey, myself included. I’ll share the big one with you in the hopes that you learn something from my errors.

For those of you who have read my book, you know I’m focused on the concept of Business (or Organizational) Value. If you start a project, job, program where you’re going to spend time and money, and haven’t mapped it back to Business Value, then you’ve started down the wrong path. You may achieve value, but that will be accidental.

There are two paths to Business Value:

• You can develop a (new or improved) product or service that allows your external* customer to do something of value to them that they were unable to do before
• You can reduce the internal cost of delivering a product or service to a customer with no loss of value to them

* We’ll come back to who your external customers are and why...

Welcome back! This post is coming in a little later than we wanted, but we finally made it.

For those of you who are joining us now, you may want to go back to the first part of this blog at. Don’t forget to download the free assessment worksheet and take the time to understand whether transitioning to people management is right for you.

This is especially important if you like the work you do currently, you like the organization you work for and the people you work with. From personal experience, I can tell you that putting the effort into making the transition from team member to people manager is a challenge, and it’s even more challenging if you finally get there and realize it’s making you unhappy…

Transitioning upward is easier than going back to becoming an individual contributor, while maintaining or improving your reputation. It’s not impossible; it’s just more difficult. With that in mind, let’s take a look at your assessment from...

Thank you for all the great feedback on Part 1 of this post, here’s Part 2!

We’ll start with a blunt statement: Managing is a hard job, and it can be a hard transition. For the vast majority, management roles are not for you. It’s not difficult because you can’t learn to do the job, the difficulty comes from the fact for many of you, that the role isn’t going to fulfill you (in practical terms, the demands of the job will be more draining than the value of any reward it gives you).

If it’s not rewarding to you, if it doesn’t motivate you regularly, then your chance of progression drops quickly. Nobody wants to start down a dead-end road that ends in frustration, or worse, burnout.

With that out of the way, we can talk about how you can move ahead. (Remember from Part 1, we talked about three of the motivators for career advancement: More decision-making freedom, more power or responsibility and more money.)

If we put the transition to...

I can't count the number of times people have come to us because they believe the only way to move up in their organization is to become a manager.

I'll start with a caveat: Some organizations, which are HR or policy dysfunctional, mandate that the promotion path for all positions leads to management. The majority of these 'management' positions manage nothing and no one. They're simply senior-level team members and specialists. The terms manager, leader, and director in those organizations have become meaningless.

So caveats and business-card-inflation aside, when people want to 'move up' or get promoted, at the basic level it's because they want:

• More decision making freedom
• More money
• More power

Assuming you are a team member, as an individual contributor and not a manager, then you have 4 paths you could pursue to get you closer to your 3 "mores" above:

• Become more focused/specialist in what you currently do
• Transition to a management role (includes project management)
• Change...