Category: Leadership Skills

As we celebrate Christmas, I was excited to read Eric Harvey’s The Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus: How to Get Big Things Done in YOUR “Workshop”…All Year Long.

As he points out, it’s not easy being Santa Claus!  Santa plays two roles that people rarely associate with him: Santa the “Manager” and Santa the “Leader.”

Like most managers, Santa deals with marketplace fluctuations (“Dear Santa, I thought I wanted that, but now I want this.”). And he’s certainly seen more than his share of budget cuts, staff reductions, employees who are either unwilling or unable to adjust to change, technology advancements, increasing demands for higher quality and better service, fluctuations in the economy, competing priorities, ever-growing performance expectations (for all of us), and a whole lot more.  Sound familiar?

If it’s not magic, what is Santa’s secret?

Click here to learn Santa’s 10 Leadership Secrets

Happy Veteran’s Day 2019!  In honor of the day, I thought it would be timely to summarize Brad Johnson And Gregory Harper’s Becoming a Leader the Annapolis Way:  12 Combat Lessons from the Navy’s Leadership Laboratory.

I picked up this book last Summer after NASA’s new Administrator—a former Naval aviator—mentioned that he appreciates the military’s model for developing leaders.

A common refrain at the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) goes something like this, “Every graduate of USNA receives a degree in leadership.”  Johnson and Harper asked themselves, “How can modern day civilian organizations take USNA’s key leader development lessons and apply them successfully in honing their own talent?”

Their mission is straightforward, but probably not simple: to translate the relevant portions of the leadership development program at USNA into a set of applicable lessons for managers and organizational leaders.

At Navy, leader building is at the bedrock of what they do.  Creating the finest leaders in the military and the country at large is what the Navy is all about.  At USNA, leadership development is deliberate and intentional.

Click here to learn 12 Lessons from the Navy’s Leadership Lab