by Michael Holland Normal managers are everywhere: in fact, most managers are virtually the same in the way they manage and lead their teams. These normal managers follow the status quo of the culture and fight to maintain the mediocrity of entitled management, wearing their self-proclaimed status symbols of “Back to Back Meetings” [...]
by Michael Holland How effectively are you integrating new employees into your company? Into your team? To be honest, orientation programs usually suck. From an employee’s perspective, being loaded down with hours of mind-numbing data and stale presentations on the vision-mission-values of the company sets the stage for personal soul searching regarding whether or not they [...]
by Michael Holland Are you struggling as a leader to figure out how you’ll get everything done? Consider adjusting your “planning assumptions”: those parameters or guidelines that act as guard rails to keep you aligned on your original path. Planning assumptions are great when they help to keep you moving forward on autopilot, [...]
by Michael Holland Part of the art of leadership is the give and take of that information which is not common knowledge. There's a barter of sorts which occurs between leaders as they share bits and pieces of information they know, or sort of know, or are conjuring up as they piece together [...]
by Michael Holland Why is it that some employees are just heads and tails above others? It’s not that they are the most talented in the bunch, though they do have some talent. And it’s not that they work the hardest all the time, though they do work hard. Rather, it is more [...]
By Michael Holland When we struggle as managers, we often feel inadequate. We may wonder quietly why we took the job in the first place, but we definitely do not want to talk with others about our struggles. But times of great strain create defining moments in who we are and how we can lead. [...]
by Michael Holland Reading well-written biographies provides a great opportunity to place myself in the life and times of the focus of the book. Recently I read Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, a tremendous, deep dive into Jefferson’s use of all his talents. Jefferson was exceptional at knowing how to distill complexity [...]
by Michael Holland The Wright Brothers were successful in inventing and building the first successful controlled airplane even though they were neither as wealthy nor as educated as their rivals (neither brother received a high school diploma). But what they did have was a clear vision, an undying belief, and the capability to [...]
by Michael Holland Historically analyzing transformational change allows us to see the moments in time when leaders have articulated profoundly simple visions, and the resulting behavioral change that occurred over time within an organization or group after the proclamation. JFK’s “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” speech [...]
By Michael Holland Uproar, controversy, and disbelief. The business world and thousands of bloggers wonder how golden girl Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo , could make such a horrible decision regarding remote employees. How could this high-tech executive—the 20th employee at Google, the builder of the successful teams that launched Gmail, Google Maps, and iGoogle, [...]
