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.)

Elevated Voices by Growth Topic

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Although the rigid, “command-and-control” style of leadership has largely been replaced by more collaborative approaches, structures and processes remain essential, particularly in large, highly matrixed organizations where a lack of alignment can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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 Most Strategic Leaders Excel in 4 Disciplines

According to research by Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, the average CEO invests 45 minutes a day developing their physical fitness. How much time are you investing each day in your strategic fitness? – Rich Horwath

3 Ways to Clearly Communicate Your Company’s Strategy

In survey after survey, employees of even successful companies claim that they do not know their organizations’ strategies. – Constantinos C. Markides & Andrew McLennan

Brilliant leaders are skilled at handling complexity

Strategic thinking wouldn’t be necessary if the business world were benign, stable, and predictable. But, of course, it’s none of those things. – Michael D. Watkins

When nonprofit strategic planning goes wrong

Strategic planning can help improve how an organization makes decisions to achieve their goals and achieve sustainable success. The questions posed during the planning process …are not the sort you answer only once. – Preeta Nayak & Lindsey Waldron

How to Communicate Your Company’s Strategy Effectively – David Lancefield

Communicating strategy clearly increases the chances of an organization “winning” by helping people decide where to focus their attention, energy, resources, and capabilities. Unclear communication results in wasted effort from lack of alignment and confusion, which leads to inertia.

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

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

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

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

5 Steps to Living the Strategic Life

While, certainly, you’re different from an organization, you can learn a lot from some of the principles in business strategy to create a strategic life… This puts you in a better position to control events rather than have them control you. – Graham Kenny

How to Scale a Business: 6 Tactics – Lauren Landry

As an entrepreneur, it’s critical to anticipate your business’ growth. It’s one of the most important business strategies on your path to success… to handle any measures of success, no matter the capacity.

Nonprofit Mergers and Acquisitions: Not Just an Escape Plan

M&A isn’t a sign of failure. It’s usually a sign of progress and doing what’s next. – Christie George & Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman

Scaling up: How founder CEOs and teams can go beyond aspiration to ascent – McKinsey

Here’s what we know about hyperscalers: they outperform industry peers, remain resilient during downturns, and maintain strong cash positions. They set the bar high for corporate performance, and they aren’t afraid to make bold moves… Hyperscaling companies dare to be unreasonable.

Strategy for Start-ups – Gans, Scott, & Stern

Entrepreneurs who commit to the first promising route they see leave their start-ups vulnerable to competitors that take a less obvious but ultimately more powerful route to commercialization and customers.

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 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 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

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

High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It

Twenty-first-century success depends on… the broaden-and-build mode of positive emotion, which allows us to solve complex problems and foster cooperative relationships …positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. – Laura Delizonna

5 Practices Leaders Need To Maximize Talent And Help Their People Thrive

An organization’s success strongly correlates with the extent to which its people feel engaged and motivated. Engagement is influenced not only by doing meaningful work, but also by the organization’s recognition of its people’s worth and commitment to enabling their desire to progress in their career and lives. – Scott Pulsipher

How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote

The solution is in understanding the new rules of engagement; in building a communication skill set that reflects the demands of our digitally-driven age. – Erica Dhawan and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

High-Performing Teams Don’t Leave Relationships to Chance

A wealth of studies reveal that by fueling our basic human psychological need for belonging, meaningful workplace connections drive many of the outcomes central to high-performing teams.

Getting Back to the Basics of Human Connection

‘Attunement’ should not be viewed as simply fostering a touchy-feely emotional connection with others, but as a unique power — a power that enables us to perceive communications from others, to connect and have our message understood, and to manage conflict. – Edward S. Brodkin & Ashley A. Pallathra

Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?

Any strategy statement must begin with a definition of the ends that the strategy is designed to achieve. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” is the appropriate maxim here. – David J. Collis & Michael G. Rukstad

The Art of Persuasion Hasn’t Changed in 2,000 Years

The ability to persuade, to change hearts and minds, is perhaps the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge in the knowledge economy. – Carmine Gallo

9 ways to be a better conversationalist

Although communication is at the core of the human experience, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and shy away from it, dismissing it as too hard. – Adam Mastroianni

Effective Leaders Are Peacemakers — Applied Leadership Partners

Peacemaking means asking the questions and addressing the issues to either initiate or restore communication… My failure to act created the larger problem down the road. We were stuck in a ditch of my creation.

Three Solutions To Quiet Quitting – Clarissa Windham-Bradstock

The weight of solving this issue does not rest entirely on the employer. If you’re an adult with a job, you have a responsibility to earn your keep and go to your supervisor and have a conversation rather than communicating your dissatisfaction on social media. That’s not easy.

Value Propositions That Work – Anthony K. Tjan

Most people can’t explain what their company does — its value proposition. The best way to start getting employees and management aligned is to understand the benefit the company is trying to deliver to its customers

What’s Your Listening Style? – Rebecca D. Minehart, Benjamin B. Symon, Laura K. Rock

Experimenting with how we listen solidifies our active partnership in conversations… Through intentionally applying new ways to listen, we build relationships, understand others, and collaborate and problem-solve more effectively.

Leaders Focus Too Much on Changing Policies, and Not Enough on Changing Minds

Most organizations pay far more attention to strategy and execution than they do to what their people are feeling and thinking when they’re asked to embrace a transformation. Resistance, especially when it is passive, invisible, and unconscious, can derail even the best strategy. – Tony Schwartz

Persuading the Unpersuadable

The bad news is that plenty of leaders are so sure of themselves that they reject worthy opinions and ideas from others and refuse to abandon their own bad ones. The good news is that it is possible to get even the most overconfident, stubborn, narcissistic, and disagreeable people to open their minds.

Great Leaders Must Be Great Coaches — Here’s How to Become One

To be a successful leader, you must become an expert in how to help others grow and develop… Your job as a leader is not to blaze a path alone. It is to inspire your team to move forward together. – Scott Taylor

Make Learning a Part of Your Daily Routine

In our increasingly “squiggly” careers, where people change roles more frequently and fluidly and develop in different directions, the ability to unlearn, learn, and relearn is vital for long-term success. – Helen Tupper & Sarah Ellis

What Leadership Style Do You Major In? – Hope Horner

Successful leadership requires you to have an understanding of three things: people, process, and performance. Most leaders major in one style and minor in another …be aware of your majors and minors to build and communicate with your team in the most effective way.

It’s Time to Reimagine Employee Retention – Helen Tupper & Sarah Ellis

Unless efforts are refocused on retention, managers will be unable to drive performance and affect change. Leaders need to take action to enable their managers to keep their talent while still being able to deliver on results.

Coaching managers elevates your organization

With the reorganizing of the workplace and introduction of hybrid and remote work for many organizations, evolving priorities for employees, increased job-switching and burnout, managers are more critical to organizational performance than ever. – Calvin Coffee with Amy Lavoie & Kevin Wilde

To Be a Good Manager, You Have to Be a Good Teacher – Ron Carucci

It’s common for newer leaders to make assumptions about what their team can do, giving assignments without fully vetting whether someone has the skill, knowledge, or experience to succeed… effective leaders learn to be good teachers in moments when team members have the confidence and humility to ask, “Can you show me how?”

How Resilience Works – Diane Couto

More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. – Dean Becker

Find the Coaching in Criticism

It is the receiver who controls whether feedback is let in or kept out, who has to make sense of what he or she is hearing, and who decides whether or not to change. People need to stop treating feedback only as something that must be pushed and instead improve their ability to pull. – Sheila Heen & Douglas Stone

How to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You – Michael Gervais

If you start paying less and less attention to what makes you you — your talents, beliefs, and values — and start conforming to what others may or may not think, you’ll harm your potential.

‘Following Your Passion’ Is Dead – Here’s What To Replace It With – Michal Bohanes

Following your passion is a very “me”-centered view of the world… Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better and that is the thing to follow. – Ben Horowitz

What Leadership Style Do You Major In? – Hope Horner

Nonprofit Mergers and Acquisitions: Not Just an Escape Plan

M&A isn’t a sign of failure. It’s usually a sign of progress and doing what’s next. – Christie George & Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman

5 Myths About Strategy

Strategy is still what it has always been: the art of taking action under the pressure of the most difficult conditions. – Stephen Bungay

The Art of Persuasion Hasn’t Changed in 2,000 Years

The ability to persuade, to change hearts and minds, is perhaps the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge in the knowledge economy. – Carmine Gallo

Scaling up: How founder CEOs and teams can go beyond aspiration to ascent – McKinsey

Strategy for Start-ups – Gans, Scott, & Stern

9 ways to be a better conversationalist

Although communication is at the core of the human experience, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and shy away from it, dismissing it as too hard. – Adam Mastroianni

Effective Leaders Are Peacemakers — Applied Leadership Partners

Getting Back to the Basics of Human Connection

The Neuroscience of Trust

Ultimately, you cultivate trust by setting a clear direction, giving people what they need to see it through, and getting out of their way. It’s not about being easy on your team or expecting less from them… hold people accountable but without micromanaging them. They treat people like responsible adults. – Paul J. Zak

When Trust Takes Away from Effective Collaboration

Contrary to common belief, trust is not a prerequisite for teamwork and collaboration …information sharing, perspective taking, and effective turn taking can help organizations make progress on and speed up change and transformation.

Relationomics (book highlight)

When we express belief in and invest in those who have failed, we are making a huge statement… We are saying that we don’t throw people away at the first sign of trouble and we are committed to the growth and development of one another, even in the face of setbacks. – Dr. Randy Ross

Make Friends by Increasing Your Likability Quotient – Jack Schafer Ph.D.

Laws of attraction play a critical role in shaping human relationships. Certain psychological principles increase the probability that two individuals will be drawn to each other and experience a positive outcome.

Quiet Quitting Is Loudly Showing Managers a New Perspective – Jaclyn Margolis Ph.D.

Although quiet quitting is not new, the vast attention on the topic has made the message louder. The workplace is changing, and in order for managers to succeed, they must pay attention.

It’s Time to Reimagine Employee Retention – Helen Tupper & Sarah Ellis

How Company Culture Shapes Employee Motivation

A great culture is not easy to build — it’s why high performing cultures are such a powerful competitive advantage… culture can’t be left to chance. Leaders have to treat culture building as an engineering discipline, not a magical one. – Lindsay McGregor & Neel Doshi

Three Solutions To Quiet Quitting – Clarissa Windham-Bradstock

Productivity Is About Your Systems, Not Your People – Daniel Markovitz

Leaders are always seeking to improve employee productivity… Personal solutions can be useful, but the most effective antidote to low productivity and inefficiency must be implemented at the system level, not the individual level.

Value Propositions That Work – Anthony K. Tjan

How to Move from Strategy to Execution

Human ingenuity can be unleashed, and we can collectively achieve what we do at our best — realize our dreams. – Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic & Darko Lovric

How To Improve Your Ability To Effectively Execute

Most people recognize that effective execution is a critical skill and strive to perform it well, but they may a) underestimate how important it is to their career advancement or b) not realize that you can improve on execution without working longer hours. – Jack Zenger & Joe Folkman

Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies – Freek Vermeulen

There are usually different ways of doing things, and there is seldom one perfect solution, since all alternatives have advantages and disadvantages.

Don’t Mistake Execution for Strategy – Graham Kenny

The problem… the organization is “drowning in things to do” – the words of the CEO. Another executive suggested that the company needed “clarity about where we’re heading.” …Another executive described this abundance of activity as “leaving staff feeling quite lost.

Does Your Strategy Have a Spine? – Rita Gunther McGrath

Much as your own spine serves to tie together many different parts of your body to create capability for movement, a strategy spine shows key stakeholders exactly how all the pieces fit.

Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose? – Hubert Joly

A tight connection between purpose, strategy, and culture is critically important …as leaders, we can shape our companies’ cultures faster and more profoundly than generally thought.

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Digital Library – Voices in Leadership

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