Dan Greer – Dan Greer

Stop Ghosting And Start Saying No

Dan Greer — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:32:22 +0000

All of us want to help other people and so we usually commit to things we have no capacity or intention in really following through with later. This causes serious problems with our reputation when we over promise and under deliver. When it happens to us we always take an emotion hit and have to process all our negative thoughts.

Having the emotional intelligence to say No on the front end is the key to sustaining trust with other people. This HBR post is excellent: “I’ve been ghosted more times than I can count. There was that time a senior leader enthusiastically offered to introduce me to the chief marketing officer of one of the largest tech firms. That never happened. There was that time I went through eight rounds of interviews with a large financial institution, and the executive search firm never called me back. And finally, there was the time a public relations firm reached out with urgency because they wanted me to host a podcast for their client. One year later, I’m still waiting to hear back about the next steps.”

Five Essential Traits Of Post-Pandemic Leadership

Dan Greer — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:08:12 +0000

Even the most bottom line leaders should know by now that healthy relationships within their team is what delivers the most productive results. So now we are in a leadership culture where Character is far more important than Competency. Words like Trust are no longer considered soft skills but are very hard in impacting the bottom line.

This Forbes post is excellent: “The long-term impact of the pandemic on the work environment remains to be seen, but the pandemic’s immediate impact has been to underline the flaws in the entrenched industrial mindset approach to work. And while those flaws, and the attendant command and control approach to how work should be performed, have been acknowledged by organizations for more than two decades, without adequate pressure to change that mindset, the pace of change has been glacial.”

The Power Of Healthy Relationships At Work

Dan Greer — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 16:01:20 +0000

Any effective leader today knows that developing other leaders is the only sustainable way to deliver consistent results. This is not some back door way of being nice to drive up the bottom line but totally re-evaluating what is most important for your top performers.

They want a leader and an organizational culture where trust is high and feedback is consistent without toxic blame being assigned for every failure. This HBR post was an excellent read:

“Kushal Choksi was a successful Wall Street quant who had just entered the doors of the second twin tower on 9/11 when it got hit. As Choksi describes in his best-selling book, On a Wing and a Prayer, his brush with death was a wakeup call. Having mainly focused on wealth acquisition before 9/11, he began to question his approach to work.”

Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy And Purpose?

Dan Greer — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 15:02:42 +0000

I have done a lot of work in the area of strategy because that requires you to define your competitive advantage in your market and find a way to leverage that to make a profit. Equally as important is the organizational culture your people work in to make sure they are empowered and love working together as a team.

What is rising to the top again is the North Star of purpose which takes leaders beyond making a profit to making a difference. This post by HBR is a very practical application of all three priorities:

“Early in my career, strategy was seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business — the north star and inspiration meant to orient all company activities. But there is often a large gap between a company’s purpose and what its employees experience, and a simple communication campaign about the great new company purpose won’t do much good on its own.”

Two Common Mistakes Leaders Make About Developing A Healthy Feedback Culture

Dan Greer — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 14:56:03 +0000

My leadership development taught leaders that they should be giving ongoing feedback to team members based on performance. This almost one way conversation almost always felt like an audit rather than a conversation. The missing piece in setting the right culture is to let the team member have the primary responsibility for asking for help.

This Forbes post is an excellent read for all leaders: “All healthy companies strive to create a culture where well-intended feedback is continuously provided and received at all levels of the organization. Few things accelerate individual and organizational performance as much as receiving constructive feedback about how actions and behaviors can be more effective toward accomplishing desired goals. Today’s working environment is complex, fast-moving, and matrixed, making it necessary to quickly understand when behaviors and actions are causing unintended issues.”

Where We Go Wrong With Collaboration

Dan Greer — Thu, 12 May 2022 20:29:21 +0000

Although collaboration can be a very good thing for your leadership, if you get it wrong it can destroy your productivity and damage your team culture. The old ideas that everyone needed to know everything and that everyone needs to give input are both worst practice for teams. For your information updates and too loose meeting agendas will also discourage your best leaders who need that time to actually get some work done.

This HBR post is an excellent read for any team leader who wants to be effective:

“Practically everything we do at work is a collaboration. Pre-pandemic, many people spent 85% or more of their time each week in collaborative work — answering emails, instant messaging, in meetings, and using other team collaboration tools and spaces. This number has only grown throughout the pandemic, with no end in sight as we move into various forms of hybrid work.”

5 Key Trends Leaders Need To Understand To Get Hybrid Right

Dan Greer — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 16:08:27 +0000

By its very nature a major disruption demands transformation not realignment. This does not mean that everything in the past about leading teams needs to be replaced but it does mean that it will probably never be the same again either.

A massive shift is taking place in corporate workplaces and every leader needs to be able to navigate the changes that must be made to hire and retain the best leaders moving forward. This HBR post will definitely help:

“After many false starts, organizations are finally making the shift into a true hybrid work model. Like every other turning point over the past two years, there’s no shortage of perspectives on what this next phase will look like. While some companies are going all in on flexible work, others are pushing for a return to the office of 2019.

Despite this range of approaches, nearly every leader today has the same question: Is the new emphasis on flexibility and well-being a temporary pendulum swing, or the beginning of our new normal?”

3 Strategies For Holding Yourself Accountable

Dan Greer — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 15:22:31 +0000

As I prepare for my coaching this week, I am reminded of an extremely important truth. We must never forget that we are personally our most important client. We get trapped in all the drama of the other people and projects that demand our urgent attention. Then we let them become the excuse for not prioritizing leading ourselves well and our families.

This post by Diana Kander is excellent: “At the beginning of your career, you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You asked for help and soaked up the wisdom of your mentors and managers to climb the mountain. But once you experienced success, you found yourself scared to look down. After all, it’s intimidating at the top, when you think of everything you could lose. At this point asking for help begins to feel a lot less like a learning experience and a lot more like proof that you might not be cut out for the job at hand.”

Five Tips To Be An Authentic Leader

Dan Greer — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 20:39:29 +0000

Great leaders always lead from the inside-out. They value their character more than competency. As a matter of fact, they realize that their inner values and passion directly impact the outward results they can accomplish.

When I enlisted an accountability mentor everything changed for me. I now had someone who was willing at all times to tell me what I needed to hear not what I wanted to know. This post by Anne Phey is an excellent resource for personal improvement:

“Here are five things I have learned about becoming an authentic leader through observing leaders and, most of all, through my own journey from being a boss from hell to being a boss from heaven, as a teammate described it.”

3 Reasons Why Time Management Strategies Never Solve Your Problem

Dan Greer — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 14:46:03 +0000

I still have my leather calendar with all the tabs and different sections that were going to solve my time management problems. They helped getting things done but it never asked me if all those things should be done at all? I became very efficient but sadly never effective.

Today with all of our project management software and the corresponding apps that drive them, we are no better off in solving this core leadership problem. This post by Carey Nieuwhof is an excellent read:

“Time famine is a big challenge for leaders.

No matter how much your organization grows or declines, how many staff quit or join, how many upset people you have to deal with, or how insane the world gets, you only get 24 hours in a day to solve everything that comes your way as a leader.

Unfortunately, this leaves most leaders with a nagging sense that they can’t get it all done.

As a result, as things grow or problems escalate, most leaders respond by working more hours, usually at the cost of their health and the well-being of the people they love the most.”