Articles on Organizational Leadership

Managing Culture: A Leader’s Most Important Role

Over the years we have seen the leadership role becoming increasingly demanding.  Many expectations are placed on leaders, and a crucial role is to create a unique culture that guides employees to fulfill the organization’s promise to its customers. Ed Schein, one of the prominent organization thinkers and writers, says,…

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How to Choose a Leadership Coach and Grow Your Skills

Selecting the right coach for yourself is a challenging task. It begins with being proactive in setting your coaching goals, selecting the right coach, and guiding the process to ensure a valuable result. Here are some tips: Be clear about your goals for coaching; do you seek insight about the…

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Engage Your Employees – Four Ways to Make it Happen!

It is surely true that being a leader is a demanding job and often takes more hours than seem to exist in any day. However, some leaders know ways to effectively engage employees to perform well. You too can use these approaches. The key is making time for effective communication…

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Getting Off to a Good Start in 2017!

2017 stretches out before us all with new possibilities and many challenges. How will you make it a successful year for your organization, for your employees and for yourself? Here are some tips: Offer Coaching and Mentoring Identify one of your employees who showed promise in 2016 and commit yourself…

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Empathy Is a Muscle

Some people seem to be naturals at communicating; they have an easy way of relating to others and conveying interest. Somehow they can just sense how others are feeling and what to say that helps the communication to move along. And some people do, in fact, have a natural way…

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Gripes Are Not Goals!

Gripes are common and gripers can be heard everywhere. However, effective leaders know that teamwork, high morale and a productive organization cultures are built on a positive outlook – not a lot of negativity – and creating these conditions is part of your job! How does negativity show up? Whether…

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The Fit Bit Motivation Strategy – Make Data Meaningful

It’s no surprise that exercise monitor wristbands (Fit Bits) have become so popular; they encourage us to get moving, and we all know that exercising is good for our health.  But using the device demonstrates a principle of behavior change that is relevant to many other areas of success in…

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Apple CEO Tim Cook: Leaders are responsible for the whole ecosystem of the company

One of the finest leaders in the USA, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, says the ecosystem is your job! In the Washington Post article of 8/14/16, he reflected on the “incredible responsibility to the employees of the company, to the communities and countries that the company operates in, to the…

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NTL Institute Emeritus Award

Founded in 1946, NTL Institute is the esteemed educational institute that was created to study small group dynamics and the fundamentals of leadership. The founders’ brilliant work has shaped our understanding of many important organization processes that continue to be utilized throughout the world. Today NTL Institute continues their work…

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When a Leader Retires

The retirement of a leader can be an unsettling time for everyone in the organization   Whether the retiring leader has been viewed as a hero or a villain, whether the organization is currently thriving or stumbling, whether the retirement is a surprise or long-anticipated, it is a complicated experience.…

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Organization Assessments: Achieve new levels of effectiveness and efficiency

There are times in the life of many organizations when leaders know that overall performance is not what it could be. Whether the organization’s business is products or services, the output is not what is needed for it to thrive. Morale seems off; some managers are not collaborating effectively; perhaps…

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Coaching leaders who are at risk of derailing

Many organizations have found that promising, talented middle managers, leaders or solo performers seem occasionally to get stuck. Their effectiveness erodes and there is a question about their future value to the organization. Their performance becomes undermined by any of the following behaviors: They function like lone wolves even when…

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AMACOM Blog – Attracting a Great Mentor: You Can Do It!

Judy’s findings on attracting a great mentor have been published by the American Management Association. For more information on the topic, read  Attracting Great Mentors: Seven Strategies to Cultivate.

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Renewing Organizations in a Time of Change

Click Here to see the complete article with references, footnotes, figures and illustrations By Judith A. Vogel and David R. Glaser Abstract: Organizations today face changes that occur at an increasingly rapid pace. The effects of these changes alter the implicit contracts that organizations have with their members. When signs of stress…

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Wise Leadership for Difficult Times

Click Here to see the complete article with references, footnotes, figures and illustrations.  By Judith A. Vogel and David R. Glaser, Vogel/Glaser & Associates, Inc. During these difficult economic times, more and more organizations are faced with the need to make hard decisions about financial and human resources. When the choice is…

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Attracting Great Mentors: Seven Strategies to Cultivate

Click Here to see the complete article with references, footnotes, figures and illustrations.  “While a lot has been written about how to be a mentor for others and how to design organizational mentoring systems, we have seen little published on the approaches that some individuals themselves draw on to organically and…

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Team Work Faces a Whole New Challenge

By David R. Glaser What are Geographically-Dispersed Teams? As a result of corporate acquisition, downsizing, merger, and globalization, more and more people are working on teams that are dispersed across town, across the country and around the world. No longer do team members have the luxury of sharing an office…

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An Inner Blueprint for Successful Partnership Development: Putting a Relationship to Work

Click Here to see the complete article with references, footnotes, figures and illustrations.  “While intuitive “chemistry” may provide a sound initial impulse, we propose that building a successful partnership is more predictable if conscious, disciplined, and intentional strategies are used from the very beginning.” By Peter Norlin & Judy Vogel INTERESTING…

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Motivation vs. Engaging

Motivating vs Engaging: The Myth and the Reality Since the middle of the last century, leaders and managers have been told that one of their primary responsibilities is to motivate their employees. This is a myth! People can only motivate themselves – no one can do it for another person!…

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What Would It Take to Inspire Staff to Action?

For organizations to thrive in today’s fast-moving economies, employees need to be fully engaged and pursuing excellence – whether in customer service, product enhancement or process improvement. Many leaders are frustrated that their staffs seem to be just doing the same old thing, rather than boldly taking charge of issues…

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Leading High Performing Teams

Based  on our many years helping teams to succeed, here are the slides from a recent workshop.  We demystify the core of team work and describe what leaders do every day to create and maintain high performing teams. The presentation covers: What teamwork is and what it isn’t Practical approaches…

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Find a Mentor: Build Your Career

“Leadership Broward” in Ft. Lauderdale was the most recent audience for Judy’s research-based model for attracting a mentor’s help.  The article “Attracting Great Mentors: Seven Strategies to Cultivate” is here on our site and the slides are below:

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Big Payoff: Aligning Leader’s Individual Interests with The Organization’s Needs

Recently, we worked with an IT Director who had been trying to deal with several staff members whose performance had been marginal and whose interpersonal style was particularly thorny. Not much that he had tried had worked – yet! And he’d grown frustrated and was even questioning his own competence.…

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When Are Mistakes Exactly the Best Thing to Happen?

Since we were kids we’ve been urged not to make a mistake – to “be careful” – to “pay attention to the rules” or the “right way” or the “tried and true.” Sound familiar?  What a formula for no innovation! Mistakes are inevitable, even by the best people. Mistakes can…

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Talk Is Easy

Ideas Are Easy; Implementation Is Hard! There are very smart and creative people in organizations and they come up with lots of exciting ideas about initiatives that could bring enhanced products and services to their customers and revenue to their businesses. In our experience as Organization Change consultants, we are…

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You Can Lead A Horse To Water

You Can Lead a Horse to Water, but You Can’t Make It THINK! The marker of effective leadership, according to an old belief, was the ability to motivate employees to do the right things – again and again. Today we know that nobody motivates anybody to do anything – that…

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