Many leaders fail to effectively tap in to the knowledge and experience of their team. Executive and leadership coach John M. McKee says this is like working with one hand tied behind the back. In this article, he shares questions any leader can use to improve results and morale.

How the military can help you learn from your mistakes.

Find a bright spot and clone it.

That's the first step to fixing everything from addiction to corporate malaise to malnutrition. A problem may look hopelessly complex. But there's a game plan that can yield movement on even the toughest issues. And it starts with locating a bright spot -- a ray of hope.

The “vision thing” is still with us, but while leaders insist in having a compelling vision, the fact is that many – both the leaders and the visions – leave people standing still, unmoved. A leader who engages stakeholders when developing a vision will, in the end, articulate one that resonates strongly and impels people to act.

Individuals don’t have to be well-rounded, but teams should be.

One of the most startling conclusions of Gallup's research is that there is no one strength that all good leaders possess. What's more, the most effective leaders are not well-rounded at all, but instead are acutely aware of their talents and use them to their best advantage.

The colossal business failures of the past few years underscore the fact that the conduct of a company’s leadership team is directly correlated with the organization’s long-term performance. Once-venerable institutions such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland paid the ultimate price for the behaviors of their leadership teams. And just as business failures can be traced back to the conduct of the leadership team, so can business success. High-performing leadership teams breed high-performance companies.

Without an awareness of your strengths, it's almost impossible for you to lead effectively. We all lead in very different ways, based on our talents and our limitations. Serious problems occur when we think we need to be exactly like the leaders we admire. Doing so takes us out of our natural element and practically eliminates our chances of success.

Power diminishes perception and perspective: Why are some managers seemingly incapable of understanding their subordinates’ points of view? Adam Galinsky finds that high-power individuals anchor too heavily on their own perspectives and demonstrate a diminished ability to correctly perceive the perspective of others.

Want to ascend to a true leadership role? Be prepared to let go of what you're good at.

The diversity of identities and personalities in today’s knowledge workplace complicates a leader’s task. However, knowing what factors shaped and still influence those identities can help a leader understand – and predict – why certain personalities behave in certain ways. Made aware and sensitized, a leader comes to respect those identities. In turn, followers come to respect the leader.

One of the realities of corporate life is that there is only so much face time, airtime, meeting time, and thinking time available to those who lead organizations. You can have influence only to the extent that people take time out of their busy days to listen to you and pay attention to your advice. As the author has discovered, there is an art to giving advice.

Many CEOs are naturally inclined - and responsible for - overseeing the day-to-day operations of their respective firms. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but in the years ahead, one of a company's major competitive advantages will be its ability to attract, develop, excite and retain talent. Responsibility for managing that talent is already being assumed by some CEOs, who, these co-authors and McKinsey consultants say, are fast coming to the realization that their respective organizations are going to have to improve their talent management practices. In this article, which is based on their recently published book, The War for Talent, the co-authors survey the state of talent management as practiced by 13,000 managers. While becoming a talent manager is imperative, it will require a fundamental shift in how a CEO sees his or her job and a significant time commitment, tasks that the authors describe in the article.

Leadership becomes more urgent than ever in a downturn, and ensuring an adequate supply of leaders in the roles where they can make the most difference remains a vital priority. Closing leadership gaps and building a talent-rich organization requires careful planning.

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The inventory tool is the companion to the book The Amaryllis Way - Growing Leaders Who Grow Leaders, a leadership parable that describes a philosophy of leadership. The inventory tool builds on the concepts from the book and seeks to identify your leadership approach. It is designed to help you and members of your team reflect on how you grow people or where you may be deficient. With a healthy dose of honesty, it can provide insight into your strengths and weaknesses, and establish a basis for discussing how to develop people as leaders and as members of a team.

In this article the authors argue that firms need to develop "Authentic Visionary Leaders" by using the Leadership Style Inventory (LSI) and matching the results with specific job requirements.

To be effective and successful in any leadership position, an individual must fit the demands of a particular position, as well as its leadership requirements. Organizations and individuals can use the LSI to identify leadership styles and match employees to key positions that drive organizational and individual performance. Employees with strong potential can then be enrolled in leadership development programs that enhance their potential, hone their leadership skills, and place them in appropriate positions of authority. By using the LSI to gauge not only the leadership style but the dominant leadership pattern with the organizational position, organizations can develop Authentic Visionary Leaders at every level.

The CEO's reputation undoubtedly has an influence on the prestige of the business, but what determines the good name of the CEO? A survey of top Spanish CEOs reveals that personal credibility and offering a strategic vision are considered paramount. Surprisingly, ethical behavior was nudged off the Top 10, while good corporate governance and social and environmental responsibility came in even lower.

True power requires modesty and empathy, not force and coercion, argues Dacher Keltner. But what people want from leaders—social intelligence—is what is damaged by the experience of power. [Hat Tip to Seth Levine, Brad Feld]

Where both CEO and COO roles are employed, an effective working relationship between the two executives is increasingly critical to successful governance. This paper describes design options for structuring this CEO-COO working relationship. We begin with a taxonomy of corporate leadership roles and related behaviors that together define the collective executive team leadership responsibilities of the CEO and COO. We then present some alternative models based on the strategic role distribution for structuring the CEO-COO relationship, along with a comparative analysis of each model’s relative advantages and drawbacks. The paper concludes with a discussion of two critical concerns that need to be addressed regardless of structure: management and governance processes, and partnership issues.

A new approach to leadership can help women become more self-confident and effective business leaders.

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The environment has taken center stage recently in the media. Perhaps "environment" should be the word at the center of leadership conversations as well. Consciously or unconsciously, leaders cultivate the environment in their workplaces. Some are lush climates where leaders flourish and thrive, while others are toxic environments where leaders either leave or wither from the pollution. This article poses five questions about the environment you're creating as a leader. The goal is to help you nurture a winning environment in your organization.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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The environment has taken center stage recently in the media. Perhaps "environment" should be the word at the center of leadership conversations as well. Consciously or unconsciously, leaders cultivate the environment in their workplaces. Some are lush climates where leaders flourish and thrive, while others are toxic environments where leaders either leave or wither from the pollution. This article poses five questions about the environment you're creating as a leader. The goal is to help you nurture a winning environment in your organization.

This paper develops a model of adaptive leadership, which is leadership that helps organizations adapt to new or existing realities. A manager provides adaptive leadership by exposing the organization toa novel experience that demonstrates that the firm's beliefs do not match reality. Exposure to the novel experience creates distress, which decreases utility for managers and lowers productivity.The prospects for increasing profits by improving beliefs, the desire to decrease distress by engaging in adaptive learning, and the possibility of improving productivity by lowering distress and stimulating controlled cognitive processes motivate managers to engage in adaptive work, which requires effort and consumes resources.

Editor's Note: the introductory part of this paper is interesting and then it gets bogged down in mathematical formulas...

When leaders give reasons for change to people who don't agree with them, it's worse than ineffective. A significant body of research shows that it usually entrenches those people more deeply in opposition to what the leaders are proposing.

This is why the traditional leadership approach of trying to persuade people of something different by giving them reasons why they should change their minds isn't a good idea if the audience is at all skeptical, that is, cynical or even hostile. If a leader presents reasons at the outset of a communication to such an audience, it will likely activate the confirmation bias and the reasons for change will be reinterpreted as reasons not to change. This occurs without the thinking part of the brain being activated: the audience becomes even more deeply entrenched in its current contrary position. Reasons don't work, because the audience is neither listening nor thinking.

Desiring alignment and delivering it are two different matters. We have found that the concept of a brand promotes alignment between external expectations and internal actions. In marketing terms, brand represents the expectations associated with a product or service that differentiates it from competitor offerings in the minds of customers and influences customer opinion, choice, and behavior. We can adapt this definition to define three additional levels of brand beyond product brand (firm brand, leadership brand, and personal brand) that turn external expectations into internal actions. Using these three levels of brand, we define four components that are necessary to create alignment between external and internal factors.