Our 10 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2020

Leadership

It’s been an unprecedented year marked by uncertainty and disruption. Let’s face it, many of us cannot wait for 2020 to be over. But before we dive into 2021, we took a look back at which of this year’s posts got the most buzz. Some of our most popular posts were book lists, whether you were interested in upping your leadership game or deepening your understanding of racism and inequity in America. Other popular posts dealt with how to lead yourself and your team through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Regardless of the nature of each post, we tried to find a lesson or two that you could take away in 750 words or less. Something you could apply in your office (virtual or in-person) that day, or that might sharpen your skills as a leader.

Here are the top ten posts we shared to serve that purpose:

10. 15 Steps Lincoln Took to Lead a Divided Country

It’s been just over two weeks since George Floyd called out for his mother as his life was callously drained away by a white police officer in broad daylight on a Minneapolis street. Mr. Floyd’s death ignited a powder keg in America that spread around the world. Images of his murder, followed by buildings in flames, followed by national guard troops positioned on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial showed the worst of what can happen when we lack the kind of leadership that helps us navigate the path between chaos and control. [Read more]

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9. 6 Books to Read During this Era of Isolation

You know the expression found money? When you put on a jacket that you haven’t worn in a while and find a $20 bill in the pocket? There is such a thing as found time too. Millions of people now have extra time on their hands during this era of isolation. You can choose to spend yours toggling between 24-hour “Breaking News” reports, or taking advantage of the opportunity to read a good book. We’ve gathered six titles for perspective on leading through a crisis, and beautifully written prose that is once both personal and profound. Spend this found time wisely to help you fend off a mindset of isolation and focus on a good read. [Read more]

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8. 3 Things You Should Be Doing Right Now to Lead Your Team Through This Crisis

You’re probably getting flooded with free advice right now. You suddenly have access to everything from ways to indulge yourself without breaking the budget, to virtual art and culture exhibits to unlimited, free training and development during the coronavirus. The options for what to do during this unprecedented time in history can be overwhelming. If you’re facing a deluge of distractions right now, chances are that your team members are too. Now, more than ever, it’s critical that you lean in and take some basic steps as a leader to keep your team focused and productive. [Read more]

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7. Servant Leadership: 50 Years After Greenleaf Penned the Essay

The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the origins of servant leadership. Robert K. Greenleaf was a mid-20th century iconoclast who argued that leaders should use their positions of power to help their teams succeed rather than for self-interest and personal glory. It’s a powerful concept that has been put to the test by many organizations, including Southwest Airlines and WD-40. [Read more]

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6. 5 Resources To Help You Develop A More Diverse and Inclusive Workplace

No matter who we are or where we come from, our assumptions and beliefs are shaped by our experiences, our upbringing, our race, our gender, religion, and culture. Those beliefs help us navigate and make sense of everyday life. But they can also mean that we believe that there is no difference between our perceptions and reality. For leaders, that means we must continuously question our assumptions and value the voices of people who are not like us to help us assess reality correctly. [Read more]

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5. 10 Ways to Improve Your Conversation Skills When You Disagree

Unfriend anyone on Facebook lately? Avoiding someone because you’re afraid that the subject of politics, religion, or even the weather will come up? In a world that is growing more polarized by the day, there may be no more important skill than being able to hold a meaningful conversation with another human being. In order to free yourself from filter bubbles, radio host and TEDx speaker Celeste Headlee suggests ten ways to improve your conversation skills. [Read more]

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4. 6 TED Talks from 2019 to Share with Your Leadership Team

It’s time to decide how you want to lead your organization in 2020. How did your leadership team impact organizational culture, and, ultimately, performance, in 2019? Were they too busy focusing on daily demands to read case studies and dig through reports about the latest leadership topics? Since 2006, TED Talks have provided accessible content on topics that stimulate new ideas about unexplored topics. [Read more]

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3. 7 of the Best Leadership Books to Add to Your Wish List this Holiday Season

In a year marked by disruption and uncertainty, this holiday season is the perfect time to read and reflect. We’ve selected a list of seven titles – from nature to biographies, from history to current events and re-imagining capitalism itself – these works are original, enjoyable, and provocative. [Read more]

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2. 8 Books that Deepen Our Understanding of Race and Racism in America

This year has given Americans the opportunity to face some ugly truths about our country. The torch that was lit when George Floyd was murdered on Memorial Day continues to burn day and night. Under that light, American citizens are daring to step out of the protection of their houses and step into the public square to debate issues such as freedom, patriotism, policing, and racism. [Read more]

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1. Meet 5 Graduates of an Elite Program for Transitioning Special Ops Team Members

For the past five years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as a pro bono coach for a San Diego-based nonprofit called The Honor Foundation. The program offers a 120-hour, MBA-style curricula that serves as a bridge for members of the Special Operations forces of the military to transition from service and discover what’s next on their career path. Thanks to The Honor Foundation, these men and women have the tools they need to confidently enter the workforce with pride and a sure footing. They are prepared to take the leap of faith that the civilian world will honor their service, embrace their elite training, and place them in positions worthy of their talents. [Read more]

Question: What thought leaders did you follow most in 2020? Did you learn anything that helped you become a better leader?

Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!

3 Things I Value About 2020: Reflections From a CEO

Leadership

I learned so much this year. As much as I desperately want 2020 to be over – and as much as I know that the restrictions of living and working during a pandemic will not miraculously disappear in 2021 – I truly value the new skills, insights, and relationships that I built this year. Capturing some of those here feels like the best use of this treasured space:

Lesson #1 – Even though it’s happening to you at the same time it’s happening to your team, you’re still the leader. 

I remember the weekend after our governor declared a stay at home order in late March. While my family wrestled with what stay-at-home would look like and my weekend grocery shopping trip looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie, I realized on Sunday night that my team needed to hear from me first thing Monday morning. I sent an email at 7:20 a.m. that started, “In light of the escalating news about the spread of the coronavirus, I wanted to take a minute at the start of the week to let you know that your health and safety are my first priority…”

 Lesson #2 – Let go of perfectionism and pivot through the plot twists. 

When my team sat down to discuss our responsibility for helping our clients and readers navigate the late spring and summer of 2020, we decided to provide free content in the form of Zoom leadership webinars and virtual panel discussions. We’d built a reputation for delivering seamless, hiccup-free, in-person content, but shifting to content that depended on technology that we didn’t have 100% control over was a leap into the abyss of vulnerability. We quickly learned that audio will not always line up with video, dogs will bark, and plot twists that we could not plan for would surely happen. We relaxed our pursuit of perfectionism and focused on delivering quality content that mattered – dogs and all.

Lesson #3 – Shift our paradigm from “When will these changes end so that we can go back to normal?” to “How can we stay perpetually curious and innovate to help our clients thrive in the 4th Industrial Revolution?” 

Resistance to change runs deep. Our brains are hardwired for predictability and our organizations are designed for efficiency. But, the clients that have reached out to us for help are reckoning with the fact that the best laid plans quickly fade in a world of global pandemics and cyber attacks. The logical systems that they’ve relied on to plan and execute strategy took a gut punch in 2020. Our job now is to help our clients recognize that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is well underway and that their existence depends on not waiting for things to return to normal, but to thrive in a world that requires perpetual curiosity and innovation.

2020 also helped me learn: 1) a LOT of new recipes, 2) that dogs can develop a nasty limp if you take them walking for 30 miles a week; and 3) that I can form strong relationships with entirely new people by being physically distanced, but socially connected.

Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!

Doing Well by Doing Good: 12 Companies that Got it Right in 2019

Leadership

The best organizations today understand that culture is their strongest asset and can be the glue to retaining top talent. Whether you nurture it or not, you have a culture. It may be empowering or toxic. Either way, the results are showing up on your bottom line.

Here are the 12 companies we featured in CEE News this year that show how doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive.

1. Pike Place Fish Market, “Look for ways to make others’ day.”

The city of Seattle, Washington, is home to the world famous Pike Place Fish Market where fresh fish have been hawked for nearly a century. The open air market is known for its team of fun loving fishmongers who hurl customers’ selections from the ice packed displays at the front to the scales in the back. The story of the market’s success is rooted in the story of its former owner, John Yokoyama. Its future lies in the sure hands of four former employees to whom Yokoyama sold the market to in July of 2018. The fish market was not always a place that drew crowds. In fact, 21 years after Yokoyama bought the market in 1965, the business was facing bankruptcy. [Read more]

2. Houwzer, “Our mission is to change the real estate industry for good.”

“Would you like a career with a stable and steady income? Then being a real estate agent is NOT the job for you.” That’s a description of what it’s like to work in the real estate industry according to a recent article posted in Redfin. It’s also a model that Philadelphia-based Houwzer founder, Mike Maher, set out to break. A 2018 Gallup survey found that Americans perceive real estate agents as having very low standards of honesty and ethics. Part of that distrust is due to the fact that the very people who advise you through the largest purchase of your life base 100% of their income on whether or not you sign on the dotted line. That’s a model that Houwzer is disrupting. [Read more]

3. KPMG, “The recipe for success is good work. Do good work and you will get work. There is no other way.”

You might think that getting hired at an accounting giant of over 30,000 global employees requires attention to detail and a knack for numbers. At KPMG, it also requires heart. In 2014, the company launched an initiative aimed at inspiring its workforce to reframe and elevate the meaning and purpose of their work. It started with a simple question, “What do you do at KPMG?” and a video that answered: “We Shape History!” The video was shared with employees along with an app that enabled all team members to create and share digital posters for a 10,000 Stories Challenge. [Read more]

4. EchoPark Automotive, “To infect the world with highly contagious CARE (Caring Acts Randomly Expressed).”

Before the 2008 financial crisis hit, Steve Hall was riding high on $70 million in annual revenues from the Dallas-based used car dealership he’d built in just 3 ½ years. His bank account was full, but his life was empty. It took the financial crisis to shake him out of his maniacal focus on profit maximization, and shift to a model of purpose maximization. That’s when Hall found the Conscious Capitalism community. In 2010, Hall re-ignited his company, driverselect, with a new purpose – to infect the world with highly contagious CARE (Caring Acts Randomly Expressed). The focus on purpose, culture and values sent revenues soaring and attracted the attention of Fortune 300 company Sonic Automotive, which acquired driversselect in September 2017. [Read more]

5. Chewse, “Making sure no one eats alone.”

By the age of 10, Tracy Lawrence had been bullied so much in school that she regularly ate lunch alone in the bathroom. She was naturally drawn to the new students, especially ones from other countries and different backgrounds. The ‘in’ girls were merciless in their torment. For years, Tracy tried to bury the pain of bullying and isolation. In a recent article in Forbes, she recalled, “As I grew older, I told myself that I had to move on. That remembering it wasn’t helpful. But the opposite of ‘remembering’ isn’t ‘forgetting’–it’s ‘dismembering.’ I took an important part of me, my past, and I tried to throw it out of my identity. As if I could actually do that.” [Read more]

6. IntelliGenesis LLC, “We hold ourselves to the highest standards in the way we conduct business, manage our missions, and support our employees.”

Angie Leinert credits her career trajectory over what can be described as a “chili dog epiphany.” At age 19, Leinert realized that the best part of her job as a gas station attendant was eating a chili dog while on break. She knew that she wasn’t living up to her potential, and set about to find a better path. She started by serving six years as a linguist for the U.S. Air Force, earning an MBA, then joining BAE Systems as a project manager for technology systems for the U.S. intelligence service. In 2007, she set out with nine colleagues to start IntelliGenesis, a data analytics and cybersecurity firm with a head for business and a heart for people. [Read more]

7. Heap, “Power business decisions with truth.”

Despite the Brotopia reputation of many Silicon Valley tech companies, not all startups in the San Francisco Bay Area operate like a frat house. In fact, Heap has earned the #1 spot on Glassdoor’s 2019 list of Best Places to Work in the small-to-medium sized business category. Heap provides a data management technique that automatically captures every web, mobile, and cloud interaction—like clicks, submits, transactions, emails—and retroactively analyzes data without writing code. If you work in the data engineering field, you just saved 60% of your time cleaning and organizing data in preparation for analysis. [Read more]

8. Relativity, “In order to grow the business, people also need to grow.”

If you’re mildly curious about the volume of daily data traffic circling the globe, you might check out Internet Live Stats for fun. But if you’re a litigator whose case depends on organizing and selecting the data you need to win a case, wading through oceans of discovery can be grueling. A 2012 Rand study found that records collection and review consumed nearly three-quarters of litigation expenses. Data has only become more complicated and voluminous since then. That’s a problem that Relativity is solving. The software engineers, analysts, and designers at Relativity run a platform that stores trillions of documents and handles billions of requests every day. That’s right. We’re nerds,” proudly says Relativity team member, Shawn, in this about us video. [Read more]

9. Greyston Bakery, “We don’t hire people to bake brownies, we bake brownies to hire people.” 

In 1982, Bernie Glassman, a Brooklyn-born Zen Buddhism teacher, was living with his students in a home called Greyston Mansion located north of Manhattan. Along with the Zen Community of New York (ZCNY), Bernie opened a small bakery café nearby as a way to employ the students. The café successfully supported the students, but Glassman wanted to do more. His Buddhist beliefs drew him to community development and work with the homeless and unemployed. His opportunity came when the mayor of Yonkers invited the ZCNY to move the business to his city. The ZCNY sold Greyston Mansion, closed the café, and moved into one of Yonkers’ most troubled neighborhoods. There, an abandoned lasagna factory became home to Greyston Bakery [Read more]

10. Health Catalyst, “Continuous Learning, Hardworking, Humble, and World-Class.”

In early 2013, Kyle Salyers walked into what he thought would be a typical post-financing board meeting. As Managing Director of CHV Capital and recent investor in Salt Lake City-based Health Catalyst, Salyers’ job was to ensure that his company’s investment was in good hands with the Health Catalyst management team. What happened in that meeting, however, was anything but typical. Rather than address the 128-page board packet previously submitted to Salyers and other attendees of the board meeting, Health Catalyst’s management team chose to focus on just two slides: 1) Cultural Attributes, and 2) Operating Principles. The team explained that they would put the new capital to work by hiring smart, hardworking and humble people. [Read more]

11. Danone North America, “One Planet. One Health.”

You may not immediately recognize the Danone logo, but you’ve likely enjoyed some of its many yogurt products like Dannon, Wallaby, or Oikos. Not only is Danone North America one of the top food and beverage companies in the U.S., but its commitment to social and environmental responsibility is evident in its products, its people, and its impact. The origins of the company’s slogan, “One Planet. One Health” can be traced to 1919 Barcelona, Spain, when the founder’s son, Daniel, was among many of the city’s children who suffered from digestive problems. That’s when Isaac Carasso dove into making yogurt, convinced of cultured milk products’ ability to strengthen the children’s digestive systems. [Read more]

12. Fiasco Gelato, “Enriching People’s Lives One Tiny Spoonful at a Time.”

The fire of 2009. The flood of 2013. The fire in the new headquarters in 2015. Each of these incidents in the past ten years might have made the owners of Fiasco Gelato seriously consider a name change. Instead, the Calgary-based small-batch artisan gelatiere kept cleaning up the damage and racking up recognition for its unwavering pursuit of greatness. All this while earning a B Corp rating of 110.9, slightly edging out Ben & Jerry’s. [Read more]

It’s been an honor to feature organizations that are clear about their why this year. Their show that a for impact business model can thrive regardless of whether they’re selling real estate, baking brownies, or mining data. We look forward to finding and sharing 12 more such organizations in 2020.

Question: What thought leaders did you follow most in 2019? Did you learn anything that helped you become a better leader?

Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!