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Executive Coach
The Rutgers Basketball Fiasco: Leadership, Responsibility and Accountability
- By Scott Eblin
- April 10, 2013
- comments
If you follow sports or even just the news in general, you’ve likely seen the video of Rutgers men’s basketball coach Mike Rice shoving his players, hitting them with thrown balls and screaming homophobic slurs at them during practices last year. Make that former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice because once the tape was aired on ESPN this week, went viral and commentators started calling for his head, he was fired within 24 hours.
The key phrase in the previous paragraph is “during practices last year.” As reported in the New York Times, Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti and university president Robert Barchi both knew about the way Rice treated his players months ago. When they found out, they suspended him for three games but also renewed his $700,000 annual contract. It was only after the video got out and people like the hosts of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption demanded Rice’s dismissal before their show ended that the coach was fired.
Which brings us to the distinction between being responsible and being accountable. It’s pretty simple actually. If you’re responsible, you do it; if you’re accountable, you own it. In the Rutgers ...
What You Can Learn from Google's Most Popular Training Course
- By Scott Eblin
- April 8, 2013
- comments
In this installment of Mindful Mondays, I’m sharing two resources brought to us by Google’s Jolly Good Fellow, Chade –Meng Tan. Even though he started out as an engineer at Google, Jolly Good Fellow is Meng-Tan’s job title today. He earned it by coming up with the most popular internal training course at Google, a program on mindfulness and meditation called Search Inside Yourself.
Last year, he released a best selling book of the same title
If you want a preview of the style of the book, check out this week’s second resource from Meng Tan, a talk he gave at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this year. In it, he’ll tell you how a simple mindfulness practice (10 seconds a day!) can help you be more charismatic as a leader and have a happier marriage. (I’m guessing that at least one of those two is of interest to you.)
So read, watch and enjoy ...
How Do You Deal with an Abusive Leader?
- By Scott Eblin
- April 3, 2013
- comments
Five years ago, I wrote a blog post that recapped reporting fromThe New York Times on just how tough mayoral aspirant Congressman Anthony Weiner was to work for. (Yes, the same Anthony Weiner who resigned from Congress a couple of years later for sending risqué direct messages to select followers on Twitter.)
And last week the Times profiles the leadership stylings of another candidate for mayor, New York City council speaker Christine Quinn. An abridged list of her attributes includes:
- Regular high volume dressing downs of colleagues that are so loud her staff sound proofed her office so visitors couldn’t hear them.
- Establishing a 15 minute limit for her staffers to respond to her emails or texts with the understanding that there are consequences for missing the window.
- Casual and frequent references to cutting off the private parts of her adversaries.
One of the most commented upon posts on this blog was one I wrote a few years ago called Seven Simple Rules to Create a Fear Based Culture. Managers like Christine Quinn and Anthony Weiner pretty much check all the boxes on that list. Unfortunately, these kinds of leadership horror stories extend beyond the occasional candidate for ...
3 Ways to be More Present In the Moment
- By Scott Eblin
- April 1, 2013
- comments
In the closing session of a recent Next Level Leadership® group coaching program, I asked the participants to talk about what had changed for them over the previous six or seven months. A number of them talked about how they had made changes to be more consistently present with their families during the course of the program. They had made simple changes like getting home by 6:00 pm at least three nights a week or staying off email for at least a full day during the weekend so they could focus on their partner and kids.
Essentially, they were scheduling the act of being present. The pace of professional life today can have you running so flat out that you don’t even realize you’re doing it and don’t realize what you’re missing in the process. By taking some time to recognize what they’d been doing, these leaders renewed their relationships with their families and, at the same time, renewed their own perspective. To a person, each of them said they felt more productive and creative at work because they had scheduled some regular time to be present with their families.
This past weekend, I ...
3 Reasons Every Man Should Read Sheryl Sandberg’s 'Lean In'
- By Scott Eblin
- March 28, 2013
- comments
So, it’s pretty clear that Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, doesn’t need any help from me in promoting her new book, Lean In
The week Sandberg’s book launched I was at a management offsite with one of my executive coaching clients. I suggested to him the first night we were there that we both needed to read Lean In. I haven’t checked in with him yet, but I’m about two chapters away from finishing it ...
