Leadership

(Author’s Note: This post was originally written in July 2020, when all of us were in the depths of the initial wave of Covid, and its impact on everything. I am on vacation this week, recharging my batteries and building up my own resilience. So this post spoke, loudly, to me. And, with the business […]

We all aspire to be better communicators (or rather, we should.) Strong communication will help us accomplish our goals, drive good outcomes, and add value to our colleagues and customers, and generate business. All good things. But while the benefits of good communication are easy to identify, most people tend to think about poor communication as […]

We get inquiries all the time from managers, directors and organizational leaders about a need for communication training for their teams. And in nearly every conversation, the leader is very clear about the needs and weaknesses of his or her team. Then, when we actually conduct the training, and once the participants get comfortable enough to speak […]

In a recent workshop, one participant asked a series of questions about how broad the application of the content we were teaching in the course actually was. I answered in a very “Latimer way,” by saying that our model applies to all forms of workplace communication: meetings, conference calls, presentations, email exchanges, etc. As I […]

Think about what makes you feel engaged, productive and motivated at work. Is it feeling like a cog in a machine? Is it the feeling that you have no meaningful understanding of the people leading you? Is it feeling alone and isolated? Of course not! Healthy, happy workplaces foster connection: Humans fundamentally want to feel that they […]

Communicating through conflict doesn’t have to be that hard. It can be… but it doesn’t have to be. And the key is your mindset during the conflict. What are you thinking about when communicating with the person you are in conflict with? Are you thinking about winning the discussion, regardless of what comes later? Are […]

Think about the best leader you’ve ever seen. What made her/him compelling? Many of us would say, “They just had ‘it.’ Their charisma was off the charts.” It may be hard to believe, but “it” — that combination of confidence, authority and personality that makes an executive engaging and inspiring — isn’t necessarily an inherent […]

Clients of The Latimer Group have heard me say, many times, that the hardest thing for any organizational leader to do is to change the way his or her people actually behave. If you want to reinvent your organization, you can add or subtract business units, product lines, services, locations, etc, etc, etc. You can […]

I heard from a business leader last Friday, someone I have done some business with, but who is also a friend. And what started as a quick “hey, how are you” conversation, turned into an hour-long therapy session of venting and asking for advice… in both directions. I was thinking about this conversation for the […]

At The Latimer Group, we often say, “no one leads all the time.” And today, we would like to dig into that a little bit more. Take a look at the image above. The yellow figure is usually the one that gets all the attention, much of the acclaim when things are going well. Many of […]