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Tim Schneider Articles

Written by: Tim Schneider

Leadership Insight: The Balanced Leader - Click To Read Article
Workaholics need not apply. Throughout the late seventies, the Charlie Sheen Wall Street eighties, and even through a good part of the nineties, work ethic was defined as living at work, living work and committing every waking moment to work. To be a boss, you had to commit your life to the organization and outwork your peers and potential competitors for promotion.

Leadership Insight: Recover Your Leadership Mojo - Click To Read Article
I’ve been there. You’ve been there and there is a high probability that all people in a leadership position have been there sometime during their career. Some people will call it malaise, cruise control, mailing it in or going through the motions. For our purpose, we will call it Mojo Deficiency Syndrome. Whatever label it gets, it is the blocks of time where you just don’t have the passion and desire to move forward and you are content with managing the status quo. Unfortunately, leadership is really not about keeping things the same. It is much more about making it better.

Leadership Insight: Skin in the Game; Are You Interested or Invested - Click To Read Article
Most often attributed to the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, the phrase “skin in the game” probably originated in a California newspaper in the summer of 1912. Regardless of origin, the phase has been quoted millions of times in baseball dugouts, football huddles, board rooms and corporate meeting rooms. One of the more famous recent uses of the phrase came from Barrack Obama prior to his being sworn in as president of the United States. The president-elect was describing the shared sacrifice needed by all Americans to resurrect the economy.

Leadership Insight: Stump the Dummy - Click To Read Article
A game for the entire organization to play. And many do play it regularly. Stump the Dummy goes something like this: “How are you doing with that Smith file” says a senior level manager to a mid level manager. Or the company president asks a unit executive “where are we at with the remodeling of the meeting rooms?” Or the mayor asks a department head about the pothole on main street.

Leadership Insight: A Culture of Tattling - Click To Read Article
When we were all five years old, we couldn’t wait to tell on someone. Our job as little kids was to make sure than someone was held accountable for their buffoonery and with a little luck, it made us look good along the way. Unfortunately, that same behavior at age five can become pervasive and very destructive in the modern working environment. Team members telling on each other. Supervisors and leaders that validate the behavior. The creation of a culture of tattling.

Leadership Insight: Drama Queen and Emotion King - Click To Read Article
I know you know them. You may work with them. They may live in your neighborhood or even your own home. Drama Queen and Emotion King. To Drama Queen (DQ) and Emotion King (EK), every event is worthy of sharing and over sharing. Every small thing that the rest of us brush off and rack up to another day, they turn into a major crisis. As we work to calm others, they work to stir up others. When we try to fix a problem, they tend to make it worse. When they exist in the workplace they offer some significant challenges to leaders.

Leadership Insight: Social Networking for Leaders - Click To Read Article
Social networking has had a more profound effect on the business community than anyone could have imagined a mere two years ago. News travels quicker on Twitter than on the wires of Associated Press. Personal relationship status changes are known to thousands within the blink of a keystroke. Holiday and birthday greetings over the internet have put Hallmark on the defensive. Millions have been raised for both worthy and shady charities. Images have been enhanced and careers have been ruined on the unfortunate tag of a picture.

Leadership Insight: The Great Turnover Bubble - Click To Read Article
It may well become the great turnover bubble of 2011. Or maybe 2012. The turnover bubble that is referenced has been created by economic conditions that began largely in 2008 but have been festering ever since. The bubble relates to a great number of people that would like to change jobs but cannot because other jobs are not available. When those jobs become available again, the bubble will burst and we will see a large migration of talent between companies and organizations.

Ten Commandments of Leadership-Not Being a Wimp - Click To Read Article
Wimp. Wiener. Coward. Spineless. Jellyfish. And more not fit to print. All are words used to describe someone who lacks courage. The courage to do the right thing. The courage to confront. The courage to object. The courage to take risks. The courage to take a different path. All of these are needed characteristics of effective and winning leadership. In all types of settings and in all organizational structures, leaders need courage and, more importantly, the good judgment when to utilize courage and when to stand down. As important as courage is, the ability to not fight a battle is equally important.

10 Commandments of Leadership-Tone Setting - Click To Read Article
One of the lead questions that we routinely ask in leadership training programs is “who do your people work for?” Routinely the common response is the company name or a division within that company or even the parent organization. Occasionally we will hear a response about working for themselves painting a picture of self-motivated team members. Rarely we will hear the correct answer that they work for you.

10 Commandments of Leadership-Ethics and Integrity in Leadership - Click To Read Article
The high road in this commandment describes a commitment to and consistency with ethical behavior in the working environment. Even beyond the workplace, it is the application of value sets to daily decision making and interactions with the team being lead. It is also a core competency related to protecting the credibility of the leader.

Doing the Right Thing in Leadership - Click To Read Article
Many times, doing the right thing has penalties. In leadership, those penalties are magnified because there are less safety nets for team members in leadership positions. People in leadership positions are more visible so when they face issues of ethical penalty, it is more widely known. Although you can never avoid the penalties for doing the right thing, there are a couple of skills that can be embraced to reduce the impact of them.

Hiring New Team Members - Click To Read Article
Quick hiring, convenient hiring or insider hiring rarely works. There is reverse proportion between the timing of the hire and the quality of the hire. The quicker the hiring decision, the more likely the decision will be a poor decision. The more convenient the candidate (i.e. Bob in accountings’ sister in law) the more likely it will haunt you for a long period of time.

GAPS, SWOT and Segments, Oh, My - Click To Read Article
SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. When performed normally, this type of analysis yields almost cursory and useless results. Typical responses when looking at an organization as a whole include comments about having good people (a strength), lacking suitable space (a weakness), growth of a business in a strong economic market (an opportunity) or the presence of a competitor (a threat). This provides a brief snapshot of where an organization is and what might be on the horizon in very high overview. This approach contains only the singular dimension of flat area.

Social Emotional Intelligence in Leadership - Click To Read Article
Leaders and entire organizations have discovered that success in the workplace has significantly less to do with intelligence or core job competencies and more to do with emotional and behavioral intelligence. The best technicians and the most brilliant team members will often end up with the highest degree of dysfunction when their emotional intelligence is very low. The fattest human resource files have very little to do with job knowledge and generally, have a great deal to do with poor behavioral adaptation and emotional intelligence.

The Pitfalls of Policy Based Leadership - Click To Read Article
In a nutshell, policy based governance is based on separating organizational purpose from all other organizational issues. Dr. Carver calls this “ends” versus “means.” A board of directors is responsible for the large scale, purpose functions while the chief executive, president or other company officer is responsible for all tactical and operational issues. Dr. Carver proposes that duplicity is reduced and lines of accountability are made much clearer.

Courageous Conversations - Click To Read Article
For the purpose of leadership, courage is defined as a reconciliation of the consequences of failure. A courageous conversation is then the interaction between people when the leader has defined the consequences of failure and is alright with those potential risks.

10 Commandments of Leadership-Communication - Click To Read Article
Communication is a tricky combination of art and science. In it’s basic form, communication is the flow of information between humans. The last part about being a human phenomenon is important to remember. Communication is a human connectivity that is critical to the leadership role because it enjoins people in a unique and personal way to the tasks and mission of an organization. It also relates directly to the personal nature of leadership and the connection point of why people will follow a leader. To have people to want to follow, the leader must communicate with them.

The Seventh Commandment of Leadership-Self Management and Relationship Power - Click To Read Article
The most difficult person that you will manage in your leadership career is you. That is a very hard statement to get your hands around and grasp but managing yourself is a very challenging task. Without good self-management, the delicate balance between leader and follower is jeopardized. You can loose credibility. You can damage relationships. You can completely become irrelevant. First, a little background on self management. Self management is half of the science of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence tells us that eighty percent of our reactions, responses and projections are driven by emotion and not by logic or processed thought.

Working with Ethical Gray Areas - Click To Read Article
The bottom line in leadership is that ethics cannot be codified or dictated. Ethical behavior is dependent upon the judgment and decision making by the leader. The best leaders are consistent and deliberate in their decisions when ethical gray is present. They communicate the decision, and more importantly, the reasons for their decision. They often collaborate the decision, not to cover their rear ends, but to seek wise counsel and tap into the judgment of others.

The Power of Tone Setting - Click To Read Article
When used in the leadership role, simple human interactions can have extraordinary impact and power in managing morale and productivity. Quite simply, leaders with good tone setting skills will achieve much greater results, improve the loyalty of their team members, work through difficulties easier, create an environment with less stress and deliver greater levels of service to their end customers.

Talent Management in Difficult Times - Click To Read Article
Talent management is always an important functionality but it difficult or lean times it becomes even more critical.

The Case for Training and Development NOW!! - Click To Read Article
It is sure easy to delay, defer and cancel training programs in this economy. As a lot of training professionals will tell you, it is one of the first line items to be axed from any budget. Unfortunately, reductions in training also carry a significant penalty. It will prolong the length of time needed to recover from a downturn. It will limit the ability to capitalize on the faltering of competitors (in fact, they may prey on you). It will reduce your ability your ability to perform at the high levels required when staffing is cut. It will harm your ability to attract and retain good talent when the economy recovers.

Leadership Success-Coach Constantly and Provide Feedback - Click To Read Article
Coaching is defined in many ways, terms and contexts. For our purpose, coaching is a stream of communication from the leader to team members for the purpose of maintaining and improving performance. Often times, coaching is viewed as an athletic function and visions of Bobby Knight, Dean Smith, Tom Osborne or Lou Holtz are summoned. The model provided by the athletic version of coaching is not far off from the business model but there are some distinct differences.

Leading Leaders - Click To Read Article
Dr. Paul Hersey probably best described the phenomenon of leading other leaders in his work on Situational Leadership. Dr. Hersey clearly identified different skill sets related to managing and leading people based on their skill set and based on the particular leadership situation. His groundbreaking work identified some of the possible disconnects when leaders utilize the same skill set to manage leaders as they do when they supervise entry level workers. In his model, when leading leaders, you can no longer be directive, use a cookie cutter approach and overly define the process details and steps.

Baseball and Leadership - Click To Read Article
Baseball is a game that rewards the clever. As with adaptability, baseball games often hinge on the smallest and most ingenious plays. A pick-off at first base. A hit and run with two outs. A squeeze bunt. Leaders too will be rewarded for cleverness. Rather than simply replicating the results of predecessors or maintaining the status quo, the modern leader is required to seek different and creative methods and solutions.

10 Commandments of Leadership-Not Breeding Sheep - Click To Read Article
Sheep. Need constant attention. Need to be told and shown every step along the way. Not thinking. Not deciding. Not innovating. Just following and doing what they are told. Nothing more and nothing less. Bah. Sheep in the Workplace Even if you have never left the comfortable confines of the big city, you have been exposed to sheep at work. They are the people that require constant direction, sometimes the same direction, over and over again. They cannot solve problems, cannot think creatively, cannot deal with change and cannot make decisions. There will never be independent risk taking. They develop a co-dependence on leaders to guide them on a constant and continuous basis. They require a great deal of time to get even simple things accomplished. There is no correlation betwe

10 Commandments of Leadership-Coaching and Providing Feedback - Click To Read Article
Coaching is defined in many ways, terms and contexts. For our purpose, coaching is a stream of communication from the leader to team members for the purpose of maintaining and improving performance. Often times, coaching is viewed as an athletic function and visions of Bobby Knight, Dean Smith, Tom Osborne or Lou Holtz are summoned. The model provided by the athletic version of coaching is not far off from the business model but there are some distinct differences. One of the comments that has often been expressed about coaching is the lack of time to devote to this activity. This is a classic symptom of a leader being too involved in doing and not involved in leading. When debunked this comment is really more about a lack of comfort in coaching skills than it is about available time.





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