GREAT REALITIES OF MANAGEMENT: It’s Not Your Fault, But It’s Your Problem…

By Kris Dunn It’s one of the unwritten rules of management. It’s also one of the hardest things for new managers to wrap their heads around. “It’s not your fault, but it’s your problem.” Let’s deconstruct that a bit.  New managers were often very high performing individual contributors (ICs). The great thing about being an IC is that you only have to worry about one person – and that person is you. But your performance as an IC convinced us that you’d make a good manager of people. For the most part that’s true. One point that sneaks up on

Measuring Leadership in the Classroom

By guest blogger: Scott Mayo   Schools love to measure things. With accountability being the buzzword in educational circles, measurement has become an even greater priority. However, we often fall trap to measuring things that are easy to measure, not because they are the most important things. Leadership is one of those important things – we all want it – that has been notoriously hard to quantify. How do I know that I have a teacher who is a leader? Kris Dunn, HR professional and blogger, has suggested we consider the ideas of Leadership Gravity and Leadership Birth Rate to

Should we measure leadership by popularity?

“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.” What departments and/or managers do people in your company clamor to get into?  What drives this clamor? I’ve seen it before. No one wants to work in finance, but everyone wants to be in marketing. Or everyone is trying to figure out a way to work for manager A instead of having to report to manager B. What is driving the popularity of the department or the person, and should we pay attention to it?  Is the number of people who want to

Before You Can Measure It, You have to Define it: What is Leadership?

We’re talking about measuring leadership here at Horizon Point this month.  In an increasingly prove-it-to-me through data world, one of the things that we don’t do a good job of measuring, and I wonder if we ever really will, is leadership.   It’s so complex. I think part of the reason we have trouble measuring it is because we have trouble defining it. What is leadership? What is great leadership? Most people will tell you that leadership is some form of influence.  It’s getting work done through others. True, but what do we want to accomplish because leadership is at work?

Measuring Leadership- How Many Hurdles Do You Have?

“If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it.” Peter Drucker   When you talk to people about selecting anything, especially people or talent, they are usually going to advocate for a multiple hurdles approach. This means you don’t just look at the resume and hire based on it, you have several steps in your hiring process all of which come together to help you make the best hiring decision. In measuring training effectiveness, we have Kirkpatrick’s model (a multiple dimensional approach) by measuring 1. Reactions (did they like it?), 2. Learning (did they learn something?), 3. Transfer (did