Intelligent Leadership: How to Help Your Team Succeed

4 Reads to Make You a Better Manager or Team Lead

What got you here is what’s holding you back: this proverb is profoundly true.

Once you step into a leadership role officially, you have to learn new skills.

Here are three recommended reads from our archives, and one killer article from earlier this month you might have missed. Each one of them will make you a smarter, more effective leader.

How To Win The Day — Our Team’s 5 Morning Rituals

You likely have a personal morning routine. It’s a productive, healthy, and energizing way to begin your day. But do you have a morning routine for your team? Dry Farm Wines implemented a team-wide morning ritual that incorporates mindfulness and journaling into their stand-up meeting. Read more.

Motivate Others By Not Trying To Motivate Others

It’s nearly impossible to motivate anyone in the long term, but you can shape the environment in ways that help them find their own motivation. Here’s how to identify the primary motivating needs in the people you work with, and how to shape the environment to connect with these needs. Read more.

Complete Guide to Delegation for Leaders

When done right, delegation makes your life a whole lot easier AND motivates your team by giving them new challenges. Delegating isn’t difficult, but it requires having an understanding of what to delegate (and why), how to assign tasks with crystal clear expectations, and how to check in to make sure that everything is progressing smoothly. Here’s how to do it well. Read more.

How to Fail When You’re Used to Winning

Innovation is a buzzword for our era. It evokes the promise of profiting tomorrow from today’s changes in technology. But fact, innovation requires enormous amounts of failure — which then presents leadership challenges. Any team that must experiment constantly will fail a lot, and repeated failure almost always depresses people. Learn how to counteract this so you team can cope more effectively. Read more.