“They never teach us this in medical school!” One of my surgeon clients said this to me a couple weeks ago, and it wasn’t the first time I had heard it. (He and I were reviewing Joel Trammell’s “The CEO Tight Rope,” which gives sage advice about creating a top-notch recruiting function.) In addition to…
“Take the results of their personality profile, crumple it up, and throw it out the window.” These were the words of the trainer who was teaching us what to do after we debriefed clients who had taken a popular personality profile. Obviously, she didn’t mean it literally. Her point was that personality profiles are tools,…
“We’ve been to the battlefield and met the enemy. He is us.” A modernized version of this famous paraphrase: “We have been to the battlefield and met the enemy. The enemy is the way we’ve been interpreting the challenges we face.” Technical development teaches you things to know. Adaptive Development facilitates better ways of…
You assume the brilliant surgeon will be a brilliant leader. You promote or onboard your most talented people to positions of authority. Then, because they are indeed brilliant, you set them free to do the job with little or no developmental support. “I call it cruel and maybe the root of all crueltyto know what…
Don’t let your most valuable resource go to waste! Fern EPC founder and president Brad Fern shares insights on how organizations can help their people reclaim wasted cognitive and emotional energies. In his latest video, Brad describes the importance of the Challenger, the Attuned, and the Contributor in forming the ego strength necessary to lead…
Do you have your strengths, or do your strengths have you? Michael Watkins teaches that what got you where you are won’t necessarily serve you there. “Success often requires us to stop doing some things we’ve been doing and to embrace new competencies.” The surgeon leader who tells herself, “To meet expectations, I must do…
The Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, ‘I caught a glimpse of him in a dream, expert hunter of himself, always in ambush.’ Machado reminds us that the self is perpetually incomplete. Growth is not just what we can do. It’s what we can be. The idea of self-growth can be daunting, but courage is not…
“Mankind owns four things That are no good at sea: Rudder, anchor, oars, And the fear of going down.”[i] In leadership, we are often responsible for things we don’t completely control. Some refer to it as the Authority Paradox. The more authority we have, it seems, the less we can rely on authority to get…
Fern EPC President Brad Fern describes the Assertiveness Spectrum: https://youtu.be/jQ-zWDe7rOY
When leading or generally interacting with others at work, consciously or unconsciously, we choose default “relational modalities.” In other words, we act passively, assertively, or aggressively. Awareness of your default mode will increase your relational agility and leadership efficacy. Passivity, on the far right of the Assertiveness Spectrum, is a fear-based state in which ego…