Biggest Leadership Challenges; Leadership Mash-up; Five Gurus, Pat Lencioni Online

"...keeping you great" HEADLINES: Challenge of Promoting from Within -- Scott Weiss's insightful blog post last week hits right at one of the toughest challenges in leading a growing firm - do you promote from within or bring in outside talent. He notes, "The key to all of it (promoting from within) is making sure that there's a sponsoring executive that is willing to spend a boatload of time coaching the budding leader." He then outlines four suggestions - please take four minutes to scan through his post where he has the four suggestions bulleted. Great Leadership Training -- one of Weiss' suggestions: "It helps to have some great leadership training. In my experience, most leadership training courses suck. You get two hours of useful information spread out over two weeks of mind-numbing presentations. We put together a rapid fire, two-day course and had our leadership team teach it. Interviewing, performance reviews, 1:1s, career planning, holding staff meetings, etc. We all got together and boiled down the best practices for all the important areas into short, punchy presentations/role plays. Every new manager went through it to give them some tools that were culturally consistent with what we were doing." Gazelles is following up and structuring a practical leadership course in addition to the Rockefeller Habits. To this point: Leadership Mash-up: Five Gurus -- in another "it takes a village of thought leaders" series, here's the latest Growth Guy syndicated column (May) featuring my mash-up for Leadership - a quick summary of the five gurus whose combined ideas will get you 90% of all the leadership tools you need. Master these techniques and you're ahead of 99% of the rest of the leaders. Take five minutes and scan through the column. The Five Gurus/Topics -- Everything in business begins and ends with leadership. And because it's a complex topic, no one expert (no matter what they say) has a complete formula for what makes a better leader - and it's no time for amateur hour when it comes to leadership or any topic. Here are the five: Pat Lencioni - his Five Dysfunctions of a Team framework is vital to maintaining a healthy leadership team. His latest book The Advantage fills in the gaps. Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner - their Leadership Challenge framework is celebrating its 25th anniversary. No one has come close to a better overall model for leadership action. Brad & Geoff Smart - recruiting and hiring the right talent IS the most important skill a leader must possess. Their Topgrading methods deliver a 90% success rate. Victoria Medvec - the second most important skill is negotiations. Her High Stakes Negotiation methodology gets the outcomes you want while building key relationships. Marshall Goldsmith - in the end, it's about getting out of our own way and knowing thyself. In turn, "self-help" is impossible. His peer coaching process is the very best way to improve as a leader - to Weiss's point about a sponsoring executive. Pat Lencioni Online -- based on his latest book, we produced a one-hour online seminar with Pat Lencioni, released yesterday. Like a book-of-the-month club, commit your leadership team (and mid-managers) to viewing one online seminar each month and use it as a platform to discuss and support each other in leadership development.