New Thoughts on Current Business Topics to Develop Leadership and Team Capabilities

Latest Thinking and Insights

Our consultants share and present new thinking on today’s current business topics. Though our research, work with clients, contributions as business leaders and life experiences, we look for and explore the latest developments to grow leaders, teams and high integrity workplaces. Our team is widely published and has a track record of creating groundbreaking assessment tools, leadership ideas and forward-thinking concepts to support global client systems.

Below is a sampling of articles and papers:

Articles

Is Your Legacy Sustainable? (Enterprising Women Magazine)

A leader leaves a legacy, whether planned or not.

Virtual Leadership Competencies: “Leaders Leading Leaders and Teams”

Leaders are expected to manage virtual teams in ways that ensure successful launches, good decision making and to maintain team commitment and collaboration.

Listening to Story through a Developmental Lens (Coaching World)

As a coach, you listen to your client’s stories through your own meaning-making lens. Are you trying to “pull your client up” to your stage of development when that might not be what they need or want?

Are You Working without a Net? (SHRM Magazine)

Professional meetings and events, whether internal or external, are some of the best places to grow a network.

Help Employees Understand and Reduce Stress (SHRM Magazine)

With increasingly competitive work environments and greater connectivity through computers and wireless devices, workers often seem tethered to work even when at home.

Balancing Acts: Integrating Work and Life (PINK Magazine)

Keeping work at work is never as easy as it seems.

Significance: A 100,000 Mile Check-up (American Management Association – AMA)

Even high performance executives get knocked out of alignment by the routine road hazards of everyday life.

The ART of Diversity (OD Practitioner)

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) practitioners confirm that many diversity efforts are underutilized and lack lasting impact.

Seeing Women and Men through a New Lens (Compass Chat)

Managers working with women as direct reports, peers, staff members and bosses gain effectiveness when they better understand gender communication differences.

Are you a bi-lingual veteran - Watson

When military veterans enter the corporate world, they enter an unfamiliar culture with new rules, expectations and language. Even so, the military experience has prepared veterans to learn, adapt, think differently and quickly. Entering the corporate environment provides a new challenge and opportunity for veterans to apply their skills and achieve success.

Innolect Culture Matters - Watson 2015-1

One of the greatest problems facing organizations today is employee retention and engagement. As many as 50% of people recruited leave their jobs in the first two years of employment, and 25% of those leave within the first six months. A primary factor that determines whether or not employees choose to stay is culture fit.

Embrace Yourself: The Art of Self-Promotion

Presenting current gender communication research, this article addresses the importance of self-promotion and executive presence as well as suggests opportunities for increasing visibility in 2013. As an advocate for women-owned businesses, GWBC® and Watson are in the business of helping WBEs build their capability and skill at positive self-promotion. GWBC’s mission is to partner with women to increase their visibility and recognition for their hard work and success. It is important for women to tell their story and position themselves and their companies for even greater success.

How to Improve Listening and Increase Influence

Leadership is often defined as the ability to influence others. Beloved leaders set the stage to influence through relationships built on trust, confidence and support. Others influence by providing data and evidence to demonstrate their value. And, still others influence through power and control of rewards. Our research over the last 30 years suggests that employees are influenced differently depending on their listening preferences.

Virtual Leadership Competencies: “Leaders Leading Leaders and Teams”

Leaders are expected to manage virtual teams in ways that ensure successful launches, good decision making and to maintain team commitment and collaboration. Yet, globalization, technological advances, telecommuting, and outsourcing have created workplaces where leaders rarely see the individuals they lead, and often struggle to use their skills without face-to-face contact. With so many leaders managing team members who are living in different time zones, countries, and continents, or even just in different locations in the same city, there is an ever increasing need for people who don’t see each other frequently to figure out how to work better together.

Listening Preferences- The Paradox of Small-Group Interactions

When challenging issues or problems arise, many leaders seek out the positive benefits of a joining a team rather than tackling a problem on their own. While understanding the value of working in teams, these same leaders frequently become frustrated with the time and energy required to manage differing personalities and conflicting points of view within teams. The contradictory nature of working with teams creates a paradox of both wanting and not wanting to work with others. There are hidden dynamics that can hinder a team from functioning effectively – listening preference differences.