Category: Leadership Skills

7 Ways to Sustain Your Leadership

Being an effective leader is enormously complex. It requires vision to see a future, dedication to make things happen, sensitivity to people who are quirky at times, and personal confidence without arrogance. - Dave Ulrich

As I’ve pointed out throughout the month, leaders need Sabbath Rest for effectiveness and sustainability.

Are you tired as a leader?  Today, we turn to Dave Ulrich—BusinessWeek’s #1 Management Educator & Guru; one of FastCompany’s 10 most innovative and creative leaders; and the #1 Most Influential International Thought Leader in HR—for tips on how to sustain our leadership.

Ulrich and Norm Smallwood, who co-founded The RBL Group—one of the top leadership-development firms in the world—partnered to write Leadership Sustainability:  7 Disciplines to Achieve the Change Great Leaders Know They Must Make.  They suggest a mix of self-coaching, expert coaching, peer coaching, and boss coaching for sustained change.

As you consider the disciplines they suggest, practice the principles of learning: experiment frequently, reflect always, become resilient, face failure, and improvise continually.  Sustained change is a matter of both the head and the heart.

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March Madness or How You Play the Game?

If you make every game a life and death proposition, you're going to have problems. For one thing, you'll be dead a lot. - Dean Smith

This weekend, we move from the Sweet Sixteen to the Final Four of the NCAA’s annual basketball tournament, dubbed “March Madness.”  In the early 1980s, Brent Musburger popularized that term during annual broadcasts of the NCAA tournament.

Dean Smith—called a “coaching legend” by the Basketball Hall of Fame—coached for 36 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and retired with 879 victories, the NCAA Division I men’s basketball record at that time.  During his tenure as head coach, North Carolina won two national championships and appeared in 11 Final Fours.

Former player and member of the 1969 NCAA Final Four basketball team David Chadwick—currently pastor of Forest Hills Church—outlines twelve leadership principles he gleaned from Coach Dean Smith in It’s How You Play the Game.

Click here to learn more from Coach Smith.