Five Golden Rules for Leadership


In The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By, (Harvard Business Press, 2011) Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman have distilled leadership into five core roles:

  1. Strategist—Leaders shape the future.
  2. Executor—Leaders make things happen.
  3. Talent manager—Leaders engage today’s talent.
  4. Human-capital developer—Leaders build the next generation.
  5. Personal proficiency—Leaders invest in their own development.

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How to Cultivate Executive Presence


Someone in your company may have recently been promoted to a leadership position. This person successfully competed against other qualified candidates, some of whom were probably just as experienced and smart.

As often happens in judging one candidate over another, the decision most likely came down to degrees of “executive presence.”

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Emotions: Leadership’s Secret Weapon


“Leadership isn’t something you do writing memos, you’ve got to appeal to people’s emotions. They’ve got to buy in with their hearts and bellies, not just their minds”

 ~ Lou Gerstner, former CEO, IBM

Business has a long tradition of ignoring emotions in favor of rationality. Feelings are dismissed as messy, dangerous, weak and irrelevant to day-to-day operations.

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