Steve Dion

Leadership agility as a circular process, with mindset at its center. This article presents a practical, action-oriented approach to developing leadership agility.

When one CEO faced a budgetary challenge to a leadership event, he chose to focus on long-term gains—and reaped the benefits.

Leading in a high-growth company requires a different set of decisions, actions, and behaviors to ensure the growth is well managed—and not chaotic.

Becoming a more agile leader is a learning process that takes practice and focus. This article presents a leadership agility development model and explores the work required to develop this crucial leadership skill that will help leaders find success in a workplace that is only becoming more complex and unpredictable.

Five observations and key takeaways for leaders working with Gen Z.

These three items together create the recipe required to propel a founder’s business to the next level.

Coaching can help key leaders create sustainable strategies that remove barriers to their performance and improve their confidence and well-being proliferates across the organization. This article shares some convincing data that makes a case for including leadership coaching in your talent development plans.

What difference-makers should you look for in a coach or a coaching program? What makes for a truly transformative executive coaching experience? This article answers those questions and more.

How can human resource professionals help combat the impact of our current talent shortage and contribute directly to the bottom-line performance of their organization? Providing short-term, practical, and results-oriented talent management solutions will help stop the bleeding and clearly demonstrate HR’s value to the organization.

Amid talent shortages, take on a strategic and tactical role to move departments from struggling to thriving.

Create an Inclusive Healthcare Organization By Discussing Differences

We invited over 100 leaders who had recently completed one of our coaching programs to respond to our leadership coaching survey. Our intention was to gain insights on how participants utilized the coaching program, what leadership behaviors improved, the experience with their coach, and most importantly, what organizational outcomes improved as the result of coaching.

Talent development leaders can help their organizations change the perceptions about the potential uses and perceived value of leadership coaching. The best filter that will deliver a strong ROI on today’s coaching dollars is not an employee’s poor performance or behavioral gaps. Rather, the best way to determine coaching candidates is by assessing your most productive, key leaders’ satisfaction levels and their ability to be resilient. It is also the basis for creating a powerful retention… Show more

Talent development leaders can help their organizations change the perceptions about the potential uses and perceived value of leadership coaching. The best filter that will deliver a strong ROI on today’s coaching dollars is not an employee’s poor performance or behavioral gaps. Rather, the best way to determine coaching candidates is by assessing your most productive, key leaders’ satisfaction levels and their ability to be resilient. It is also the basis for creating a powerful retention coaching program. Show less

With focused attention, the new people you hire, the new working relationships you have created, and the new focus on well-being can help you distinguish yourself as the ideal post-pandemic employer.

While much has been written about the Great Resignation and its impact on retaining top talent, there is an important next chapter to our COVID-weary workplace story yet to be acknowledged and understood: the challenges that come with a new generation of prematurely promoted managers. This article describes the situations and urges leaders to act now, ensuring that these new managers don’t crash and burn.

In today’s reinvented workplace driven by a tight labor market, employees have been provided with opportunities to stretch in ways they couldn’t have thought possible. This article explains why nurturing the next generation of managers is critical and how talent develop professionals can help assure their success.

Inherent in the complexity of today’s hybrid workplace are five paradoxes. Understanding the paradoxes explored in this article will provide training and development professionals new insight into the valuable unintended consequences — or opportunities — resulting from the pandemic. The article presents a new base of knowledge from which training and development staff can engage with leaders in meaningful conversations about the differences between leading in the past and leading in the “new… Show more

Inherent in the complexity of today’s hybrid workplace are five paradoxes. Understanding the paradoxes explored in this article will provide training and development professionals new insight into the valuable unintended consequences — or opportunities — resulting from the pandemic. The article presents a new base of knowledge from which training and development staff can engage with leaders in meaningful conversations about the differences between leading in the past and leading in the “new normal” work environment. Show less

Are you in the pro-office camp, believing that sustaining high levels of productivity and collaboration as well as a strong and healthy corporate culture demands that employees work under the same roof? Or do you envision a world where your home is your office, and you only make periodic guest appearances at a smaller corporate office?

With more than half of all employees suffering from burnout, many workers are beginning the new year with unhealthy levels of stress, anxiety and depression. Plagued with lost sleep, increased medical problems and strained relationships, productivity is suffering. In addition, organizations are experiencing record high turnover, an inability to recruit new talent and lackluster business performance.

Some organizations are attempting to address the burnout issue with well-being initiatives that are typically broad-based and policy-driven. They provide gym memberships, access to meditation apps, statements about flextime, or other passive self-driven efforts. These are great additions to an organization’s offerings and helpful tools for those in a mentally healthy place to take advantage of these perks and use them well.

This engaging case study proves that virtual and blended learning is not just acceptable — it’s an effective way to deliver leadership development. Organizations can save a significant amount of money on travel and training venues, while still achieving program goals. Participants can learn, grow and establish deep relationships with their colleagues without having to leave their homes and families for long stretches of time.

The determining factor among the CEOs who win the talent war and those that lose will be how they handle work-life alignment issues and virtual team fatigue in the new hybrid or fully back-to-the-office environment. A four-step strategy.

If you’re getting a picture that attracting and retaining talent will be a significant business issue in this decade, you’re not alone. According to HRD Connect’s February 2020 study, approximately 80 percent of CEOs are either extremely or somewhat concerned about getting access to the skills their business needs. As we move toward a post-COVID landscape, one of the first challenges in talent retention will be to keep valued intellectual capital from walking out the physical or virtual door… Show more

If you’re getting a picture that attracting and retaining talent will be a significant business issue in this decade, you’re not alone. According to HRD Connect’s February 2020 study, approximately 80 percent of CEOs are either extremely or somewhat concerned about getting access to the skills their business needs. As we move toward a post-COVID landscape, one of the first challenges in talent retention will be to keep valued intellectual capital from walking out the physical or virtual door. Specifically, older workers who possess experience, institutional knowledge, and leadership will become increasingly difficult to replace. Show less

A practical guide with helpful tips for fighting virtual team fatigue.

It is imperative to influence organizational culture from both a leadership development and an organizational strategy perspective. Culture is created through behaviors that grow into norms that influence how we behave at work. Therefore, the culture change will occur when leaders begin to consistently exhibit new or different behaviors, setting the example for others to follow.

2021 is right around the corner. While many of us are eager to put this tumultuous year in the rearview mirror, we need to face the reality that the way we work will remain resource-constrained for the foreseeable future. Many organizations are still figuring out how to work remotely while also responding to shrinking sales, tight margins, and seemingly insurmountable challenges such as finding a new way to execute their supply chain.

As we deal with the economic and organizational chaos prompted by COVID-19, I believe there is another important group that should be considered essential: leaders and managers. I have witnessed how these organizational heroes—from CEOs to first-line managers—have stepped up to solve unprecedented challenges to keep their businesses solvent while consistently showing compassion for the employees that make up their workforces.