Digital Library – Voices in Leadership
WRUG & Co's Digital Library of Voices in Leadership
Trusted, experienced voices that align with WRUG & Co’s strategic growth priorities and people-centered, visionary leadership that amplifies & multiplies.
search for key topics in leadership, strategy, and growth (i.e. vision, purpose, trust, culture, EI, empathy, psychological safety, goal setting, crisis managements, etc.)
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The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift
With a net worth estimated at $1.6 billion, Swift is the most financially successful musician of her generation. And she’s managed to achieve all this during a time when the industry has undergone profound technological and business model shifts, moving from CDs to iTunes to Spotify. – Kevin Evers
When Your Team Bypasses You to Get Things Done
Although the rigid, “command-and-control” style of leadership has largely been replaced by more collaborative approaches, structures and processes remain essential, particularly in large, highly matrixed organizations where a lack of alignment can impact far more than just personal credibility. – Jenny Fernandez
The Power of Strategic Fit
A senior executive posed a simple yet profound question: “Are we winning?” It sparked an intense discussion… What does winning mean to us? Are we using the right scorecard to measure and manage progress? Which strategic factors are constraining our success? – Darrell Rigby & Zach First
Four Leadership Loads That Keep Getting Heavier
No one ever said leadership was easy. But in recent years, as with so many jobs, being a leader has, in fact, become harder… understanding how and why each of these leadership loads has become more difficult to carry can set you on the path to doing better. – Melissa Swift
When You Share The Vision: How It Motivates Teams To Reach Their Goals
When leaders have a clear vision but don’t share it, employees are left in the dark about why their efforts matter. As a result, they can’t connect their daily tasks to a bigger goal and that often leads to burnout, frustration, and disengagement. – Dr. Diane Hamilton
Customer-Centric Leadership: A Strategy For Sustainable Growth
Customer-centric leaders understand that personalization is no longer optional; it is essential… Leaders who view their audience as dynamic and diverse individuals—and build strategies around this understanding—can transform customer experiences from mere transactions into meaningful, personalized journeys. – Brent Gleeson
Transforming Leadership Into Teamship: The Power Of Co-Elevation
This isn’t just delegation or empowerment; it’s a fundamental reimagining of how teams work together, combining new behavioral commitments with modern collaborative processes and tools… he had hired a team of stars, he needed them to work like a constellation. – Keith Ferrazi
Seth Godin: What Is Strategy And Why We So Often Get It Wrong
Strategy is a flexible plan that guides us as we seek to create a change. It’s scary and it takes time… A gardener plants seeds, but doesn’t expect that they’ll have an orchard or a bushel of crops in an hour or even a week. Planting is simply a step in the unfolding of what is to come later. That’s strategy. – Seth Godin
The 6 Fundamental Skills Every Leader Should Practice
No matter where you are in your career, you can find opportunities to practice these six skills.
Leaders often have a bias for action that keeps them from stepping back in this way — but it is the reflection on your practice that will help you improve… become a leader, capable of rallying an organization of people around a meaningful collective goal and delivering the results to reach it. – Ron Ashkenas & Brook Manville
How To Build A Community Of Leaders Through Accountability
Leadership accountability isn’t about finger-pointing or checking off responsibilities. Think of it as building a community of current and future leaders who thrive on shared purpose and collective effort. – Dan Pontefract
How to Avoid Strategy Myopia
When the boss demands a strategy that comes with certainty and proof, we’re likely to settle for a collection of chores, tasks, and tactics, which is not the same as an elegant, resilient strategy. To do strategy right, we need to lean into possibility. – Seth Godin
The Best Leaders Have a Contagious Positive Energy
We found that the greatest predictor of success for leaders is not their charisma, influence, or power. It is not personality, attractiveness, or innovative genius. The one thing that supersedes all these factors is positive relational energy: the energy exchanged between people that helps uplift, enthuse, and renew them. – Emma Seppälä & Kim Cameron
Compassionate Leadership Is Necessary — but Not Sufficient
Leadership is hard. To be effective, it often requires pushing agendas, giving tough feedback, making hard decisions that disappoint people, and, in some cases, laying people off. Showing compassion in leadership can’t come at the expense of wisdom and effectiveness. You need both. – Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, & Nick Hobson
How to Get Employees to Tell You Like It Is
Too often, we don’t find out what’s truly on others’ hearts and minds because we don’t know how to ask the right questions in the right ways. – Jeff Wetzler
5 Different Change Management Models, and How to Use Them
There is no perfect way to manage change, especially when it’s unexpected…
Choosing the right change management model will go a long way to minimize employee resistance and cost while enhancing the efficacy of your new initiatives. -Sounding Board Inc
Building a Learning Organization
A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights… How, after all, can an organization improve without first learning something new? – David A. Garvin
Why ‘No’ Leaders Are Outperforming ‘Yes’ Leaders In The Workplace
By fostering a culture that values strategic prioritization and clear communication, “no” leaders can outperform their “yes” counterparts, leading their organizations to greater success. – Cheryl Robinson
5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently
Creating a high-performing workplace takes more than simply hiring the right people and arming them with the right tools to do their work. It requires creating opportunities for genuine, authentic relationships to develop. – Ron Friedman
4 Distractions that Derail Meetings — and How to Handle Them
In a survey of senior managers, 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. And a study of 20 organizations revealed that dysfunctional behaviors in meetings — like complaining or criticizing others — are associated with lower market share, less innovation, and lower employee engagement. – Luis Velasquez
Research: How to Delegate Decision-Making Strategically
People in our studies thought being asked to make a decision was less fair than being asked for advice… this sense of unfairness made them view delegators more negatively.
While delegation may be critical… knowing when and when not to delegate may be even more important. – Hayley Blunden & Mary Steffel
Tom Brady on the Art of Leading Teammates
Despite the challenges, I remain optimistic about the potential for more people to become better teammates and team leaders… If the corporate world creates more skilled team leaders, companies will produce better results and employees will have more fun doing it. – Tom Brady
Why Leadership Teams Fail
Instead of working together to advance their company’s interests, many teams procrastinate, engage in political infighting, get mired in unproductive debates, let themselves be overtaken by complacency, and more. The companies they’re supposed to be leading suffer as a result. – Thomas Keil & Marianna Zangrillo
Keep Strategy Simple
Strategy is about identifying where you need to go… it is essentially an outward looking, relatively high-level exercise. Only after you’ve figured out where you want to go should you move to the operational challenge of figuring out the specific steps you’ll need to take on the inside in order to get there. – Graham Kenny
The 4 Types Of Organizational Culture—Which Is Best?
Every organization has a culture, for better or worse. With effort and persistence, you can ensure your organizational culture is pushing you forward, not holding you back. – Tracy L. Lawrence
At Your FINGERTIPS – Strategic Growth, the WRUG and Co way
How We "Close Gaps" through our Asset-based Approach to Strategic Impact Growth extracted from our CEO & Founder's, Ron Hadley, guest appearance on the June 2024 Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast hosted by Brian Lofrumento.