On a final and related note, it is critical that responsibility-centered leaders—and even those who aren’t—confront the reality that the people they lead are probably not telling them the unvarnished truth about their behavior. For every morsel of constructive feedback a leader gets, there will be a dozen compliments, many of them unwarranted. And

Another reason that CEOs, especially the reward-centered ones, fail to communicate enough is that they get bored with their messages. “Haven’t we done this presentation about our core purpose and values enough? What else do we have?” They fail to appreciate that the purpose of communication is not their own entertainment. Nor is it simply the disse

Unfortunately, many CEOs refuse to repeat themselves again and again and again and again. There are a few reasons for this. Many of them worry that they’re going to insult their audience by repeating a message. They forget that employees hate not knowing what’s going on in their organization and that no reasonable human being has ever left a compan

I’ve read studies that say employees have to hear a message seven times before they believe executives are serious about it. Until then, they discount it as corporate speak or internal propaganda. Though it’s been a while since I was a line-level employee, I can remember taking most corporate communication from executives with a grain of salt. That

Most CEOs don’t hate the idea of communicating to employees. But the majority of them greatly underestimate the amount of communication that is necessary.

So many CEOs and other leaders of organizations aren’t afraid to admit that they dread meetings, which they see as a sort of penance. And so they simply tolerate and “get through” awful meetings, rather than making them as focused, relevant, and intense as they should be. Some even try to avoid them altogether. Let’s step back from all this and put

than not, people he confronted changed their behavior. Plenty of times, they chose to leave the organization, which is a heck of a lot better than them staying and continuing their behavior and having to go through a lengthy, painful, and expensive process of being let go. And for those who left, it was better, and more dignified, that they chose t

Alan was neither passive-aggressive nor condescending when he said these things. He meant every word. And more often

One of the keys to Alan’s success was something I call “joyful accountability.” He liked to approach people who needed correction and cheerfully let them know that it was completely up to them whether they changed their behavior or attitude. He would remind them that if they couldn’t change, he would still be their friend, but they couldn’t continu