Earlier this month Wally Bock of the Three Star Leadership Blog wrote a blog post offering advice for leaders on how to talk to team members about performance issues .
He describes the 3 Ws: a leader should describe what performance or behavior she wants the team member to change in non-judgmental language, explain why the behavior is worth discussing and what happens as a result of it, and then leader should wait for the team member’s response–the leader could have been misinformed. [...]

Here are some photos from a book signing Andrew and I (and our co-author Linda Lee-Davies) did earlier this month for our book Leading for Success : [...]

“I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together.”
Bartlett, Tennessee, 18 August, 2000
Thus said outgoing American president George W. Bush. This was one quote among many that the BBC recently put together in a collection of Bush misstatements . While he didn’t get the words out right, his sentiment, that a leader is someone who brings people together, is actually true. [...]

The American auto makers are rapidly becoming another casualty of the financial crisis. However, the financial crisis is not the sole reason for their downfall; we need only look to Toyota and other non-American auto makers to see that–while not thriving, these non-American car companies are at least surviving the downturn without any government handouts. [...]

Today it was announced that the seven highest ranking executives at Goldman Sachs will not be taking their bonuses this year . It’s an good move and will generate some positive publicity for the firm, especially because they announced their decision before other banks and before bonus season starts in earnest. Likewise, such a move was almost a necessity given the potential for public outcry if multiple executives were receiving bonuses worth over $50 million each after the company was one of the 9 banks that shared a $150 billion cash injection earlier this fall.
This move reminds me of some of that activity that Linda Lee Davies, Nada and I found in our recent book Leading for Success . One of the seven sides of great leaders we identified was ‘finding ways through.’ In the chapter dedicated to that subject, we said: [...]