No President cut a broader swath through the federal government than Theodore Roosevelt. Having served in a number of public offices including governor of New York and under secretary of the Navy Roosevelt was experienced at public administration upon arriving at the White House in 1901 on the death of President McKinley.
Strock examines Roosevelt’s unique approach to leadership throughout his life and especially as President. He identifies a dozen primary areas where Roosevelt demonstrated extraordinary leadership skills.
T.R., as he was affectionately known, seized the role of leadership where ever he …

Introducing change can be a pretty messy affair, and may well open a Pandora’s Box of never ending problems. The main resistance to change is people, for people are creatures of habit, and tend to prefer staying within their comfort zone, the status quo. As such, it is pertinent that as leaders and managers, we carefully manage the introduction of change in a way that can produce maximum effects for our team.
In this leadership lesson, we shall look at five principles that we can follow as we set out to …

“How To Manage Conflict: Turn All Conflicts Into Win-Win Outcomes” by Peg Pickering is a useful little book with some practical suggestions for handling conflict. It is aimed at the manager who must deal with conflict with employees, vendors, and customers, but some of the information is practical for other settings as well.
It’s a short book and very easy to read. And while it does not go into depth regarding conflict resolution theories like some texts, it does provide simple, practical advice that you can implement right now without knowing …

It is often tempting to seek a ‘perfect’ leadership model, and use stick to it religiously. Such a model certainly has its appeal, as it would mean a strategy that would work 100 percent of the time, and this would certainly prevent much unnecessary failure and setbacks.
However, we must realise that such a ‘perfect’ model simply does not exist, for leadership is certainly not a straightforward process that may be carried out by robots. Leadership is a delicate process involving the leader, his team, the work the team does and …

Through my leadership journey, I’ve had the misfortune of sitting through numerous failed meetings. Some were downright unproductive, some were agonizingly long, and most yielded no decent results. Here we shall discuss a particular instance of a failed meeting which many may identify with, and may we all draw precious insights from this valuable leadership lesson.
Margaret, the head of the security department in a departmental store, was the chairperson for the meeting. While the meeting was set to start at three in the afternoon, Margaret was still talking on the …

An infant is learning to crawl. She begins by pushing herself backward around the house. Backing herself around, she gets lodged beneath the furniture. There she thrashes about — crying and banging her little head against the sides and undersides of the pieces. She is stuck and hates it. So she does the only things she can think of to get herself out — she pushes even harder, which only worsens her problem. She’s more stuck than ever.
If this infant could talk, she would blame the furniture for her troubles. …

I’m sure we all have had experiences of never ending meetings, those that start early in the day and end when the sky is dark. What’s more, many of these meetings often yield no results, and we come out of such meetings, wondering what we had talked about that took the entire day! Evidently, without proper time management, meetings can loose its purpose and effectiveness.
Let us first explore three reasons why time management in meetings is so important.
1. It allows us to avoid spending unnecessary time. In the corporate world, …

Explore what goes into a company’s transformation from mediocre to excellent. Based on hard evidence and volumes of data, the book author (Jim Collins) and his team uncover timeless principles on how the good-to-great companies like Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo produced sustained great results and achieved enduring greatness, evolving into companies that were indeed ’Built to Last’.
The Collins team selected 2 sets of comparison companies:
a. Direct comparisons – Companies in the same industry with the same resources and opportunities as the good-to-great group but showed …

I have often been asked, “How will I know when I’m not proactive enough?” Indeed, this seems to be a common question among leaders and managers. “How much is enough?” “Is there ever an end to it?” “Where is the line to stop?” In this leadership lesson, we shall explore the rule of thumb to proactivity: When you find that you are fire-fighting, you are not proactive enough.
Allow me to explain. All too often, as leaders and managers we find ourselves frantically fighting fire. What does this mean? It simply …

“There is always something that can be improved, as long as we think creatively.” To many, such a statement may be deemed as easier said than done. To many, try as we might, everything seem to be well in place, and there really do not seem to be any room for improvement.
With regards to this problem, a more appropriate question to ask ourselves, rather than “What else may I improve?” is “Am I getting ALL the results I hope for my team to achieve? If not, why not? Or specifically, …