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This Moment: The Blog - Jessica C. McWade, Ed.D.

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Play Ball!

January 31, 2008

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It is just days to spring training. Touching the World Series trophy only makes the heart grow fonder.

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"Bad News Takes the Elevator"

The Council on Foreign Relations heard from Ajay Banda this afternoon, Executive Chairman of Mastercard. He reminded us that one key to effective operational leadership is to create environments in which employees are relatively unafraid to deliver bad news. "Bad news takes the elevator and good news takes the stairs," he said, underscoring the importance of raising negative issues as soon as possible in order to confront, understand, and resolve them. No doubt speaking from personal experience, Banda said that "people love to feed you good news when you're the boss. You have to make them feel okay delivering bad news and then you have to live up to it." He added an important and understandable exception to his rule, however, indicating that "if you bring me bad news three times and you're the cause of it in each case, then we'll need to have a discussion." He believes in the power of listening with patience and acting with urgency, reminding u...

IQ Gets You Hired. EQ Gets You Fired. (Part One)

Daniel Goleman told us that when he first wrote about emotional intelligence (EQ) in the 1990s, he was warned not to use the word “emotion.” It was felt that there was no place for talk of emotions in business and professional life. Of course, that sentiment was utterly ridiculous. There is now and have always been few things more central to success at work than managing our emotions and understanding the emotions of others. This reminds me of the time I was told that my Fortune 100 CEO boss didn’t like people using the word “intuition,” which he undoubtedly deemed too feminine. He certainly had no use for concepts of emotional intelligence either and, as a result, was a terrible practitioner of it. Of course, that CEO had no problem with the term “gut instinct," which means about the same thing as "intuition" but with a more macho ring to it. To some men in leadership positions, all of this reeks of softness. That's too bad, since emotional intelligence is among the...

Maximizers and Monetizers.

It’s an age-old lament. Regrettably, it hasn’t changed much in recent years. It’s the solemn proclamation by some leaders of publicly traded companies that their most important job – and every employee’s top priority – is to maximize shareholder value. Really? In my days as a senior corporate executive, I often bristled when my CEOs and CFOs publicly invoked this view in ways that seemed to me cliched and unthinking. What did I really hear – and almost everyone else hear – when CEOs and CFOs spoke about maximizing shareholder value? Right or wrong, the cynical take was what they really meant was increasing their personal wealth (and job security) and that of the senior leadership team – including me – board members, and large, wealthy shareholders. Yes, to be fair, many 401(K) shareholders benefit when a company’s stock value rises, but it rarely represents the accumulation of enormous, generational wealth realized by the insiders and their primary influencers. Is this what happened to...

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