Posts by Jennifer Eggers
4 Qualities of Aligned Organizations
“The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths, making a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.” – Peter Drucker Imagine a company where everyone – from the CEO to the newest intern – shows up knowing EXACTLY what they need to do every single day, even on those days where plans fail and…
More informationThe Secret To Alignment
What Alignment Looks Like Is your team 100% aligned around your organization’s goals for 2019? Are you absolutely certain that you are making the right or “bests” projects to drive change and build organizational muscle? Can you deliver with what you have been budgeted, or less? If you are not 110% aligned and committed, 2019…
More informationHow Personal Fulfillment Drives Business Strategy
“Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you’re proud to live.” – Anne Sweeney The Path To Fulfillment If you plan to take a long journey, you need a compass or a map (or at least a GPS). The journey from overweight to healthy and fit…
More informationPurpose: The Key To Better Decision Making
“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” – John F. Kennedy Your Purpose As an avid outdoor kid, one of the first things I remember asking for at Christmas was a good multi-purpose tool. Back then it was a Swiss Army knife called the Huntsman. It had two knives, a little saw,…
More informationNo One Said It Would Be Easy: Business Architects In The Digital Age
Defining Business Architecture Today, many organizations still struggle to define what the role of a Business Architect should be and how to clearly articulate the value of Business Architecture to leadership. So let’s start by dispelling some popular myths about Business Architecture. Business Architects are NOT: assigned the next ‘hot potato’ project that has been…
More informationHow Your Comfort Zone Is Holding Your Organization Hostage
“A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” -William Shedd Our comfort zones are protective boundaries we construct over time. Most of our boundaries were imposed long ago for self-protection and have become coping strategies. We all use the coping strategies we have personally designed to keep us…
More informationAuthenticity: The Catalyst To Building Resilience
“Your authentic self is who you are when you have no fear of judgment, before the world starts pushing you around and telling you who you’re supposed to be. Your fictional self is who you are when you have a mask on to please those around you.” – Dr. Phil Authenticity Can’t Be Copied Everyone likes…
More informationThe Secret To Choosing Resilience
“In the power to change yourself lies the power to change the world around you.” -Anwar Sadat Choices & Resilience How many times have you made a choice that did not result in the outcome you intended? Our choices define us. Improving our ability to make tough choices in the moment shapes our ability to be…
More informationFilters: Your First Step Toward Resilience
Resilience. It is the single most important characteristic of leaders today and almost no one is talking about it. We are. The journey to becoming a resilient person or organization begins with our window to the world, the way we see, sift through and interpret events, and our ability to extract meaning from it. We…
More informationNo Training Budget? No problem.
Do you have a great team that needs development but lack a budget for training and access to an internal world-class learning team? Perhaps you’ve been limping along sending people to local conferences when you can to try to develop them. But while that may appease your team for a while, you know it’s not…
More information#1 Leadership Skill Most Teams Miss
Resilience Isn’t About Bouncing Back Today’s landscape is one of unprecedented, rapid, disruptive change. With little margin for error, leaders are expected to adapt to change and react to setbacks quickly. Unfortunately, the skills required to tackle these challenges, process quickly, and come back stronger require thinking differently in ways that are rarely mentioned in…
More informationThe Shocking Truth About Binders
I want to tell you about a pet peeve of mine…binders. For me, this realization struck hard before LeaderShift® was a twinkle of a business plan and carried through most of the executive roles I played throughout my career. Maybe you’ve been there. For me, it started at the mercy of those shiny tie consultants.…
More informationHere’s What Is Missing From Your Organizational Structure
Remember when your organizational structure used to be something we hardly thought about. They were clear. We reported to someone (my boss) and often someone reported to us (my team). But things change. Now we have matrix structures, project teams that pull people into hidden conference rooms (that suck life and time from our schedules),…
More informationWhat No Consultant Will Tell You
Imagine a company with 10 senior leaders. Carol is the CEO and she’d new to her role. Her leadership team must come together and make one decision on which the future of the company hangs. They prioritize the company’s investments to drive the strategy. Here’s the catch: Every one of them (and every other leadership…
More information3 Most Forgotten Components of A Successful Transformation
3 out of 4 HR leaders are facing some sort of transformation in their business. Too often they are brought in late in the game, … and typically to help “manage the change”. Code words for “exiting displaced employees and helping the survivors cope with the new environment”. Sound familiar? Coming late to transformation puts HR…
More informationThe Single Most Important Characteristic of Leaders
I recently had the honor of closing Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business’s Executive MBA Alumni Summit. I realized that the audience would be full of people with enough leadership potential to have their MBA paid for by a company and enough stick-to-it-iveness to get that work done while juggling high powered jobs, kids, family…
More informationHow To Tell If Your Organization Structure Will Drive Transformation
Is Your Organizational Structure A Relic? Was your Organizational Structure designed strategically or was it bolted together by necessity? Was the last structure change done when an executive shifted roles or to give someone a ‘stretch assignment’? Do the roles make sense in terms of why people are doing them (maybe someone had extra capacity…
More information3 Skills Needed for Adaptive Leadership
Traditional Training Doesn’t Produce Adaptive Leadership Skills People are constantly facing business issues they have never seen before, and they are coming at an increasing rate. Too often employees feel like running on a treadmill, going nowhere fast. The harder they run, the more worn out they become and have no progress to show for…
More information3 Golden Rules for Successful Transformation
Matrix Organizational Structure: Love it or Hate it? Does the matrix you have to work through to get things done drive you crazy? Does it make things difficult or does it drive collaboration and better solutions? Matrix organization structures can make people cringe or act as a way to accelerate decisions and outcomes. Some people…
More informationWhy Transformation Consistently Misses The Mark
Has Transformation Left You Disappointed? Are you frustrated waiting for the improvements in efficiency or effectiveness promised by the last project? Was the last ‘big idea’ not quite what it was cracked up to be? Is there a promise that the ‘next’ project will actually deliver results? Does it sound like you are being sold…
More informationWhy Playing Nice Doesn’t Work
Imagine you are a manager and you are called to a meeting by your boss to talk about team building. You walk into a room and are introduced to Fred, the ‘team building guy’. Oh, and all your peers, including the marketing guy that you hate and the HR woman that you have no time…
More informationHow To Stop Struggling With Organizational Change
How Are You Handling Organizational Change? Does your organization miss some of your strategic objectives each year? Do you have goals that are recycled from last year, with new names? Do departments struggle to see how they fit into the overall business strategy? Is your team tackling new projects while struggling to get the existing…
More information#1 Way to Lead A Successful Digital Transformation
Are you struggling to keep your business organized while transitioning to a more digital experience? Is it becoming less obvious who owns what…and why? Are silos in your organization structure getting in the way as the shift to increasing automation accelerates? More and more, organizations are realizing that as they become more digital, their structures…
More informationWhat’s Your Legacy? Are You A Value-Add or a Seat Warmer?
A Human Resources executive walks into a bar with a duck on their head. One of the long-time customers, though a bit intoxicated, recognizes the difference between a hat and a duck and shouts, “… you’ve got a duck on your head. The HR executive calmly replies, “… of course, that is the only way…
More informationThe Secrets to Decoding Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation Is Here! Just when you thought they couldn’t come up with a new buzz word, now there is Digital Transformation! For those who want a deep dive, check out the new book, Leading Digital. For those interested in jumping to what needs to be done … read on. Digitization is here and the…
More informationIs Work Keeping You Up at Night?
Are ‘What Ifs’ Keeping You Up At Night? Do you ever wake up late at night in a cold sweat wondering if all the hard work you are doing to execute your strategy is really going to make a difference? Sure, your strategy is sound, after all experts helped pull it together, but what if…
More informationWhat’s Next for Human Resources?
As 2018 dawns, two questions are being asked by many IBHR leaders and Chief Human Resource Officers: Is this year’s plan for my Human Resources team good enough to deliver strategic value across the organization to truly differentiate our organization from the competition? What is the next key capability that Human Resources needs to front…
More informationThe Blueprint for Strategic Alignment
Ever feel like your team is not hearing you? You turn around and either they are squabbling about who gets their share of limited resources, or they are off in their own space ‘working really hard.’ Unfortunately, you just can’t tell how all that work is driving your strategic agenda. All those countless meetings were…
More information5 Tipping Points Where Mergers Fail
One Too Many Mergers? Strong economies bring growth which inherently brings change. To achieve growth, there has been a significant increase in mergers and acquisitions over the last several years. While mergers and acquisitions clearly grow organizations, there are unintended consequences that can limit and, in some cases, undermine growth. Leaders seeking growth acquire organizations…
More information4 Steps To Tackle Relentless Change
Is Your Organization Staring Down Relentless Change? Organizational change. It’s real. It’s big. And it’s flying towards you like a 10-ton meteor you have no hope of stopping. The kind of change that causes you to question the work you do as you know it, your relationship with co-workers, and what you need to deliver.…
More informationBlasting Personal Agendas
The Number 1 Way to Blast Personal Agendas Have you been in a meeting when personal agendas take over? Usually, everyone politely ignores Fred, the VP who’s gunning to expand his empire a bit further, all while hoping someone ‘above’ will reign him in. It’s hard not to think of the good Fred would do,…
More informationWhat I Learned at Harvard About Leadership
I expected ego. I expected challenge. I thought I had a target on my head. And I was wrong. This year, for the first time, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government permitted a small percentage of non-Harvard scholars to participate in Ron Heifetz’s Adaptive Leadership Network. It was humbling to be included, and when the…
More informationAdaptive Leadership That Doesn’t Adapt
The Case for Resilience in Organizations There is a lot of talk about building adaptive leadership to thrive in the face of rapid disruptive change. Sometimes this has to do with merely adapting to a lot of change and sometimes it is a full blown effort to find ways of thriving while facing down the…
More informationLeadership Secrets for Every CFO
Resilience & Change Agility: 100 Global Finance Leaders Can’t Be Wrong At one global company, equipping leaders to increase resilience and adaptive leadership in the face of rapid, disruptive change has strengthened the partnership between Finance and the business it supports. Recently, over 100 Finance leaders from twenty countries convened for a three-day conference to…
More informationThe Secret of Adaptive Leadership
Adaptive Leadership: The Antidote to VUCA VUCA. The acronym that reminds us we live and work in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world. As if we needed reminding. I don’t think we have one client that isn’t trying to compensate for the pace of rapid, disruptive change, whether it be through restructuring, prioritization, building…
More informationSecrets to The Most Compelling HR Strategy
Which comes first: Human Resource Strategy or Business Strategy? We know intuitively that the Business Strategy must come first, yet how well do we in Human Resources truly understand the business strategy and its implications for our own HR Strategy when we must ensure that our business clients are equipped to plan and deliver our…
More informationThe Bully in the Boardroom
Is There a Bully in Your Boardroom? If you’ve been in corporate America very long, you have probably met a bully in the boardroom. They exist at every level and it is surprising how many actually get to the boardroom. Often it’s narcissists who believe it’s their duty to rule the world. For example, the…
More informationAdaptive Leadership: Leading Without a Map
Adaptive Leadership Do leaders really know where they’re going? In today’s ever-changing business environment, even the most seasoned leaders cannot always anticipate the waves of rapid, disruptive change that seem to crash at every turn. Of course, there are still stable industries, but even the stodgiest of those are working to be more innovative. Why?…
More informationNew Chief Human Resource Officer: Sink or Swim In 48 Hours
New HR Leader or CHRO: 5 Questions to Ask in the 1st 48 hours Earlier this year I took an assignment as the interim Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA), affectionately known as the ‘T’. This is the organization that moves people to and through the city of Boston via…
More information4 Tricks: Asking Questions To Drive Strategy
Do Your Questions Drive Strategy? Becoming a “strategic partner” has become a bit of a cliché. It’s a tired phrase that is often ill defined and confusing, particularly to people so focused on the day-to-day, transactional work of getting things done. It’s easy to ask the right questions when we know the content; however, it can…
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