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Although the rigid, “command-and-control” style of leadership has largely been replaced by more collaborative approaches, structures and processes remain essential, particularly in large, highly matrixed organizations where a lack of alignment can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

The Lies Our Culture Tells Us About What Matters – and a better way to live – David Brooks

The hard thing about when you’re in the valley is that you can’t climb out; somebody has to reach in and pull you out. – David Brooks

Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate – Bryan Walker & Sarah A. Soule

Culture change can’t be achieved through top-down mandate. It lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of “how things are done around here.” Someone with authority can demand compliance, but they can’t dictate optimism, trust, conviction, or creativity. – Bryan Walker & Sarah A. Soule

Creating a Coaching Culture for the Future Economy – Bruce Court

We all know how musicians and athletes benefit from coaching, and so will your leaders …to some degree, we must all become students at the same time we become teachers. And that’s exactly what a coaching culture should help you to achieve. – Bruce Court

Fostering a Culture of Belonging in the Hybrid Workplace – Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic & Katarina Berg

If we are going to devote a third of our adult lives to our jobs, it is quite helpful to find them meaningful… we need to figure out how to create a sense of belonging and community within organizations. – Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic & Katarina Berg

The Best Mentors Ask These 8 Questions – Liz Fain

For mentors, the most important thing, really, is to ask questions, to be this guide on the side, rather than the sage on the stage. – Liz Fain

Mentors, Stop Saying “I Understand”

Organizations in which employees feel fully seen, understood, and safe being themselves, despite their differences, are ones in which creativity, innovation, and business thrive. – Brenda F. Wensil & Kathryn Heath

Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive – Emma Seppala & Kim Cameron

When organizations develop positive, virtuous cultures they achieve significantly higher levels of organizational effectiveness — including financial performance, customer satisfaction, productivity, and employee engagement. – Emma Seppälä, Ph.D. & and Kim Cameron, Ph.D.

Leadership Strategies that Build Trust – Amy Stanton

It’s really not about being seen as the person in charge. It’s about learning how to communicate in a way that other people trust.

How Managers Become Leaders – Michael D Watkins

Few managerial transitions are more difficult than making the move from leading a function to leading an entire enterprise for the first time… though what got them to the top may no longer be enough, there are steps that they and their organizations can take to prepare them to succeed.

How to Silence the Chatter in Your Head to Be a Better Leader

Part of what I find so interesting about chatter is that it is universal — we all have the ability to get stuck in our heads when we are dealing with negative events, and when we get stuck, that can lead to really negative consequences in an organizational or business context.

4 Reasons Talented Employees Don’t Reach Their Potential – Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

It is often the case that top performers evaluate their own performance more critically and harshly, whereas those who perform poorly think they are making a fantastic contribution to the company.

How To Protect Yourself Against Your Biggest Career Saboteur

The truth is that your biggest career saboteur is often someone you wouldn’t expect who can be harsher than any external force—YOU.

5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success

Raw intelligence is undoubtedly a huge asset, but it isn’t everything. And sometimes, when intellectually gifted people don’t achieve as much as they’d like to, it’s because they’re subtly undermining themselves.

Why Are We Here?

Many people—not just Millennials—want to work for organizations whose missions and business philosophies resonate with them intellectually and emotionally… What is your reason for existing? What value are you giving?

How Will You Measure Your Life?

Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people… The powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.

What Is Strategy, Again? – Andrea Ovans

At a fundamental level, all strategies boil down to 2 very broad options: (1) Do what everyone else is doing or (2) Do something no one else can do… there remain endlessly clever new ways to nudge Adam Smith’s invisible hand toward truly productive and profitable enterprises.

Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy

Many (C-level executives) had moved purpose from the periphery of their strategy to its core—where, with committed leadership and financial investment, they had used it to generate sustained profitable growth, stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, and deepen ties with their stakeholders.

Blue Ocean Strategy – W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne

Blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over… it seems clear to us that blue oceans will remain the engine of growth.

Planning Doesn’t Have to Be the Enemy of Agile

The reality is that plans have to be made about the use of a company’s resources all of the time… This is why the quest to rethink strategic planning has never been more urgent and critical.

Emotional Intelligence: Why You Need It & How to Spot It

The truth is that emotional intelligence is more about effort than innate skill. So take time to reflect on what you know about others, gathering and verifying information as you go.

High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety

Positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe.

Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace – on TEDx

Psychological Safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Is Your Emotional Intelligence Authentic, or Self-Serving?

If you want to genuinely employ effective emotional intelligence skills, pay attention to the unaddressed scars and voids lurking beneath the surface of your inner emotional landscape. Tend to those honestly and carefully, and you’ll better be able to maintain credibility and strong relationships with others.

5 of the Most Popular Questions on Emotional Intelligence, Answered

Simply put, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, understand, and manage emotions… More simply put: Emotional intelligence is the ability to make emotions work for you, instead of against you.

Emotionally Intelligent Leaders Impact the Bottom Line

Emotional intelligence goes beyond empathy and listening to others… You need self-awareness, courage, the ability to tell people what they don’t want to hear… assertiveness and influence.

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Digital Library – Voices in Leadership

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