70 New Year's Resolutions For Leaders In 2017

With only one month left of 2016, it's not too early to start identifying your New Year's Resolutions for 2017.

To get you started, how about selecting one or more of these 70 New Year's resolutions for leaders?

Perhaps write down five to ten and then between now and December 31, think about which couple you want to work on during 2017.

1. Don't micromanage
2. Don't be a bottleneck
3. Focus on outcomes, not minutiae
4. Build trust with your colleagues before a crisis comes
5. Assess your company's strengths and weaknesses at all times
6. Conduct annual risk reviews
7. Be courageous, quick and fair
8. Talk more about values more than rules
9. Reward how a performance is achieved and not only the performance
10. Constantly challenge your team to do better
11. Celebrate your employees' successes, not your own
12. Err on the side of taking action
13. Communicate clearly and often
14. Be visible
15. Eliminate the cause of a mistake
16. View every problem as an opportunity to grow
17. Summarize group consensus after each decision point during a meeting
18. Praise when compliments are earned
19. Be decisive
20. Say "thank you" and sincerely mean it
21. Send written thank you notes
22. Listen carefully and don't multi-task while listening
23. Teach something new to your team
24. Show respect for all team members
25. Follow through when you promise to do something
26. Allow prudent autonomy
27. Respond to questions quickly and fully
28. Return e-mails and phone calls promptly
29. Give credit where credit is due
30. Take an interest in your employees and their personal milestone events
31. Mix praise with constructive feedback for how to make improvement
32. Learn the names of your team members even if your team numbers in the hundreds
33. Foster mutual commitment
34. Admit your mistakes
35. Remove nonperformers
36. Give feedback in a timely manner and make it individualized and specific
37. Hire to complement, not to duplicate
38. Volunteer within your community and allow your employees to volunteer
39. Promote excellent customer service both internally and externally
40. Show trust
41. Encourage peer coaching
42. Encourage individualism and welcome input
43. Share third-party compliments about your employees with your employees
44. Be willing to change your decisions
45. Be a good role model
46. Be humble
47. Explain each person's relevance
48. End every meeting with a follow-up To Do list
49. Explain the process and the reason for the decisions you make
50. Read leadership books to learn
51. Set clear goals and objectives
52. Reward the doers
53. Know yourself
54. Use job descriptions
55. Encourage personal growth and promote training, mentoring and external education
56. Share bad news, not only good news
57. Start meetings on time
58. Discipline in private
59. Seek guidance when you don't have the answer
60. Tailor your motivation techniques
61. Support mentoring - both informal and formal mentoring
62. Don't interrupt
63. Ask questions to clarify
64. Don't delay tough conversations
65. Have an open door policy
66. Dig deep within your organization for ideas on how to improve processes, policies and procedures
67. Do annual written performance appraisals
68. Insist on realism
69. Explain how a change will impact employees' feelings before, during and after the change is implemented
70. Have face-to-face interaction as often as possible

17 Ideas For Employee Programs

As you select the employee programs you'll offer at your company during 2017, consider choosing one or more from this list of 17 from Richard P. Finnegan, author of the book, The Stay Interview.

Employee Programs

1. Presentation opportunities at new employee orientations
2. Planning committees for holiday parties and other events
3. Employee referral programs and rewards
4. Flexible schedule
5. Work from home
6. Tuition reimbursement
7. Internal training programs
8. Mentoring programs
9. Internal input groups
10. Career day or fairs
11. Fund-raising walks, and other volunteer civic programs
12. Professional certifications
13. Reimbursement for membership in Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, and other professional civic organizations
14. Company-sponsored recreation teams from softball to yoga
15. Participation in the company's donation decisions
16. Transportation help via ride-sharing/van pooling
17. Company policy for matching personal donation to charities

There Is No Shame In Asking For Help

If you are new to managing, or if you are struggling with a management dilemma, ask for help. There is no shame in asking for help.

Seek the guidance of a colleague at work. Reach out to a mentor at or away from work. Turn to an online resource. Consult a book on managing.

Whatever you do, don't sit back and do nothing. Managing even one employee can be challenging. And many managers receive little or no formal training on how to be a manager. That means you have to be proactive about learning how to be a good manager.

Your team is depending on you, and to lead them effectively you need to know to how manage effectively. So, ask for help.

Great Ideas Come At Anytime From Anyone On Your Team

Great ideas for your business can come at anytime from anyone on your team.

So, as a leader, be sure you dig deep for ideas, and provide an easy way for all employees to make suggestions.

Did you know that the idea for the microwave oven came to the inventor, Percy L. Spencer, when a chocolate bar melted in his shirt pocket as he stood in front of a magnetron, the microwave tube used to power radar?

Carl Magee invented the parking meter when back in 1932 the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce asked Magee to solve problems caused by all-day parkers in the downtown business district.

To jump-start your idea sharing program, encourage employees to:

• Tell you the obstacles they encounter
• Share what they are hearing from satisfied and unhappy (or lost) customers
• Explain what they think your business can do better than the competition

Encourage Peer Coaching

Do you create an environment at your business/organization that allows peer coaching to succeed?

Hopefully you do. If you don't, encourage peer coaching among the members of your team. Peer coaching can be formal, informal or a combination of both.

You'll likely find that everyone on your team has a skill, technique, behavior that they can teach a fellow team member. That coaching is rewarding for both parties, and it helps everyone to learn an important skill for being a successful leader -- coaching.

SWOT Analysis and IT Strategic Planning

If you have been through a management course you would have certainly come across the 4 management functions: planning, leading, organising and controlling.

IT managers who are primarily focussing on the technical aspects of the job will fail in their primary role,  which is to manage the team. It is therefore important they know what their management functions are and how to perform them.

Planning

Planning is the process of looking forward in order to develop activities in advance. It encompasses defining goals, establishing a strategies to achieve those goals and developing a detailed plan to achieve a set of objectives. Planning is a vital part of the organisational and departmental strategic process, it establishes coordinated effort, reduces uncertainty and establishes goals and standards to use when reviewing organisational performance.

Organisations operate in two environments, internal and external.  Effective planning should include both, the internal and external, environments.

The internal environment includes the organisation itself and its culture. The IT manager needs to know how to influence organisational / team culture in order to lead individuals towards achieving common organisational goals. Another important reason for IT managers to know their role with regards to organisational culture is the fact that IT managers are sometimes hired to change the culture of an IT department in order to increase effectiveness and efficiency. 

There are many perspectives of an organisational / team culture that the effective IT manager needs to consider in order to plan and lead his team. These perspectives include:

• Attention to detail - degree to which individuals focus on precision, analysis and attention to detail.
  
• Outcome orientation - degree to which managers focus on results or outcomes rather than the process on how these outcomes are achieved.
  
• People orientation - Degree to which management takes into account the effects of organisational decisions on individuals in the organisation (hard or soft HRM, but this is for another post).
  
• Team Orientation - organising work in teams rather than individuals.
  
• Aggressiveness - cultivate a culture of aggressiveness and competitiveness in order to achieve organisational goals.
  
• Stability - degree of which decisions and actions are focused on maintaining the status quo.
  
• Innovation and risk taking - degree to which employees are encouraged to be innovative and to take risks.

The IT manager can work on any of these perspectives in order to manage  his team's culture. Take innovation and risk taking as an example. An IT Development Manager may take a critical look at the product developed and compare it to the market needs and other similar products. This exercise may include a Gap or a SWOT analysis. Once this is performed the manager can promote a culture of innovation to plan and position his product into the market and be the first to innovate in his niche and therefore achieve competitive advantage and potentially increase his market share.

With regards to the actual process of planning, there are a few tools that an IT manager can utilise to support the planning process. These include Gap and SWOT analysis. For the purposes of this article I will describe how a SWOT analysis can be performed to support the IT Development Manager in his planning process.

SWOT analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favourable and unfavourable to achieve that objective. The technique is credited to Albert Humphrey, who led a convention at Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s using data from Fortune 500 companies.

A SWOT Analysis will include the following:

- Strengths: attributes of the person or company that are helpful to achieving the objective(s).

- Weaknesses: attributes of the person or company that are harmful to achieving the objective(s).

- Opportunities: external conditions that are helpful to achieving the objective(s).

- Threats: external conditions which could do damage to the objective(s).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis)

The following table is an example of some topics to include in a SWOT  analysis for an IT Development Manager:

Plans can and should be periodically reviewed and adjusted should circumstances change.

In summary, planning is a vital activity performed by IT managers. It involves looking at the internal and external environments that an organisation operates in and devise goals and strategies to achieve organisational objectives.

In the next post we will discuss the organising management function.

Three Things Coaches Must Do To Drive Success

Former University of Kansas head basketball coach Roy Williams once told U.S. News and World Report magazine that there are three things that coaches as leaders must do to drive success:

1. "Have everyone on the team focus on the same goal."  And, the leader must effectively communicate that goal to the team.
2. "Emphasize those goals every day."
3. "Understand that although everyone has a common goal, individuals also have goals, needs and dreams that must be cared for."

According to Williams, in a commentary he wrote for the magazine, the third point is the most challenging to address and where leadership may be the most critical. And, I totally agree.

Therefore, if you lead a team at work or within an organization, one of the best ways to work with each of your team players is to tailor your motivation techniques for each individual, and then be prepared to tweak those techniques if necessary as each person grows.

Williams was the head coach at the University of Kansas from 1988 to 2003 and is now the head coach for the North Carolina Tar Heels. He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame on April 1, 2007 and has won the Associated Press Coach of the Year award twice.

How To Lead A Successful Business Operation

Here are some good tips for leading a successful business operation from the handy booklet, 144 Ways To Walk The Talk, by Eric Harvey and Al Lucia:

• Involve your team in setting standards that are achievable but also require everyone to stretch their knowledge and skills.
• Remember that regardless of what you say, it is the performance you're willing to accept that becomes your true standard.
• Work as a team to stay abreast of technology advancements. Have different employees read different trade and professional magazines and blogs.  Ask others to share key learning from workshops, webinars, seminars and conferences they attend. Make it easy via meetings and or within an Intranet forum/Blog area to share what everyone is learning and hearing.
• Ask each member of your group to identify the three most significant obstacles to their performance. Create a master list and develop strategies to eliminate them. Then, reward employees for identifying obstacles!

The 10 Things I Am Thankful For This Year

Each year, around Thanksgiving time, I think about what I am thankful for. This year, I decided to once again take the time to make a list. A list of 10 things I am thankful for.

What's on your list this year?  And, what's on your list this year that wasn't on last year's list?

Here is my list:

• Family and friends
• Employment, and a year of positive evolution for my workplace
• Technology, Blogs, Twitter and all social media sharing tools that help me to be a constant learner
• Health and all those who help me stay healthy and encourage me to reach my 2016 fitness goal -- which included running 80 races (a combination of 5K and 10K races) this year benefiting a variety of mostly Kansas City area nonprofits and charities, 
• Setting business and personal goals and working hard to reach or exceed them
• Good books (including ones the book club recommended)
• Nonprofit organizations that provide vital services and ways for me to volunteer and donate
• Music
• The ability to travel for vacations
• Readers, followers and guests of my Blog and of Twitter @ericjacobsonkc

Wow, I have a lot to be thankful for this year!

How To Build A Great Business

When you start reading Mark Thompson’s and Brian Tracy’s book called, Now…Build a Great Business!, you may feel like you are reading 200 pages of Blog posts, but the bite-sized approach to providing tools, practical steps and ideas, rather than theory, is precisely the authors’ intended approach.

The book thoroughly explains the seven keys for how to achieve business success:
1.  Become a great leader
2.  Develop a great business plan
3.  Surround yourself with great people
4.  Offer a great product or service
5.  Design a great marketing plan
6.  Perfect a great sales process
7.  Create a great customer experience

You’ll find a checklist at the end of each step (each chapter) where you can write down your action plan for applying what you’ve learned.

Particularly interesting is the chapter on strategic planning, where the authors recommend you should ask yourself these important questions before you act to create or reinvent the direction of your organization:
•  Where are you now? What is your current situation?
•  How did you get to where you are today?
•  Where do you want to go from here?
•  How do you get from where you are today to where you want to be in the future?
•  What obstacles will you have to overcome? What problems will you have to solve?
•  What additional knowledge, skills, or resources will you require to achieve your strategic objectives?

When it comes time to surround yourself with great people, Thompson and Tracy remind us that great people are:
•  Good team players.
•  More concerned with what’s right rather than who’s right.
•  Intensely results oriented.

And, great people accept high levels of responsibility for the outcomes required of them, and consider their company a great place to work.

Mark Thompson is an entrepreneur who sold his last company for $100 million and today coaches executives on how to lead growth companies. Brian Tracy speaks throughout the country about the development of human potential and personal effectiveness.

Six Things Effective Leaders Do That Don't Cost Money

I had the pleasure of interviewing Leigh Branham a few years ago. He's the author of the popular book called, The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave.

He said that in research that he has done about the leaders of companies that have won "Best-Place-To-Work" competitions in 45 U.S. cities, that there are six things these effective leaders do that don't cost money. They do, however, cost time and effort. But, that is time and effort that can pay big dividends.

Here are the six things you can do:

1. Make the commitment to create a great place to work.
2. Inspire employee confidence in decisions and clear business direction
3. Work to build trust based on honesty and integrity
4. Practice open, two-way communication, especially in times of uncertainty
5. Look out for the organization before you look out for yourself
6. Believe employees should be developed and retained; not burned out and discarded

Thanks for these great leadership tips, Leigh!

Resolve To Find A Mentor In 2017

Having a mentor is one of the best things you can do to advance your career as a leader. So, decide today to secure a mentor who will work with you during 2017. Make that one of your New Year’s resolutions.

A mentor can benefit leaders new to their leadership role and they can benefit experienced and seasoned leaders, as well.

A strong mentoring relationship allows the mentor and the mentee to develop new skills and talents, to build confidence, and to build self-awareness.

Proper mentoring takes a commitment from both parties and it takes time to develop and to reap the rewards of the relationship. Plan to work with your mentor for no less than three months, and ideally for six months or longer.

When seeking out a mentor, think about these questions:
1.  Will the relationship have good personal chemistry?
2.  Can this person guide me, particularly in the areas where I am weakest?
3.  Will this person take a genuine interest in me?
4.  Does this person have the traits and skills I want to develop?
5.  Is this a person I admire?
6.  Does this person have the time needed to properly mentor me? And, do I also have the time to devote to a mentoring relationship?

Most often, you’ll find your best mentors are not your supervisors, but instead are other individuals in your workplace, at other companies in your city, or are members of organizations to which you belong.

Before you start to search for your mentor for 2017, take some time to learn more about mentoring — how mentoring programs work most effectively and what to expect from a mentoring relationship.

One nice benefit of having mentoring as a New Year’s resolution is you’ll have a dedicated partner helping you to fulfill your resolution!

Follow Through On What You Promise

Set a good example for your employees and follow through on everything you say you are going to do.

If you promise to get an employee an answer, get it for him or her. If you say you'll send a team member a report, do so. As the Nike campaign/slogan so aptly says, "Just Do It."

Too many leaders don't follow through. Perhaps they get busy. Perhaps they forget. However, following through is critical to keeping your team effective and efficient. And it's necessary for gaining respect from your employees.

Following through also means doing so in a timely fashion. If you take too long to follow through, it's as bad as not following through at all.

How To Get The Feedback You Need

Getting feedback is an important way to improve performance at work. But sometimes, it can be hard to seek out, and even harder to hear. 

“Feedback is all around you. Your job is to find it, both through asking directly and observing it,” says David L. Van Rooy, author of the book, Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

As today's guest post, Van Rooy offers these six tips for how to get the feedback you need to improve performance at work.

Guest Post By David L. Van Rooy

1.      Don’t forget to ask:  One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming things are going perfectly (until they make a catastrophic mistake). By not asking, you’re missing out on opportunities for deep feedback: the difficult, critical feedback that gives you constructive ways to improve.

2.      Make sure you listen:  Remember, getting feedback is about improving your performance, not turning it into a “you versus them” mentality. Your reaction is critical. Do not rationalize the feedback or explain it away. Do not blame others or get angry. If you react in any of those ways, you are less apt to get accurate feedback from that person again. All too often, people let feedback that is given with positive intentions spiral into a negative situation by reacting destructively.

3.      Ask clarifying questions:  If feedback surprises you, it may be a matter of miscommunication or misperception, and asking questions will give you a clearer picture. Staying clearheaded enough to ask questions and listen to specific suggestions will help you understand the full scope of the feedback and ways that you need to take action to improve.  

4.      Take time to digest:  This is especially important if the feedback is difficult to hear. Taking time to digest and process before you respond helps you react constructively. Say something like “Thank you for the feedback,” and schedule a later time to follow up. Then, you can come back with additional clarifying questions and a plan to change and improve.

5.      Don’t just look to bosses for feedback:  Some of the best and most insightful feedback will come from colleagues and direct reports. These are the people who get to see and interact with you the most. Instead of relying solely on guidance from a supervisor, ask colleagues and direct reports to provide feedback, because they may spot potential problems before you or your boss would notice. Seeking feedback from people in other departments lets you hear different perspectives from people focused on other sides of the business.

6.      Get feedback through observation:  Learning from your successes and failures is a kind of feedback that helps you change your course of action. Consider the example of a speaker who notices people looking confused or inattentive and uses that feedback to change his approach and recapture their attention.

How To Be A Healthy Leader

If you're like many leaders, you're "too busy" to exercise on a regular basis. And, you don't give yourself time to renew and refresh. Truth is, there are ways to fit exercise and healthful habits into your busy day that will pay off in dividends.

From Experience Life magazine, here are 10 tips for how to fit even just moments into your day (at work, on the road and at home) to help you become more healthful:

1. Make a plan to exercise. Include exercise times, even if they are just in 10-minute increments, on your calendar.
2. Find time to exercise and build on that time. Start off by walking for five minutes at lunch and add to that every few days until you've worked up to 30 minutes every few lunch hours.
3. Limit screen time. Set a timer for how long you'll watch TV or surf the Net. Then, use the time you aren't in front of a screen to exercise.
4. When you are watching TV, do squats, pushups, lunges, yoga poses and crunches.
5. Think positive. Psychologists suggest that you replace "I am too busy to work out" thinking with "I choose to make myself a priority."
6. Hold a "walking meeting" where your group walks together instead of sits in a meeting room. This can be particularly beneficial for brainstorming meetings.
7. Work out when you're traveling. Pack a jump rope. Do push-ups and crunches in your hotel room. Use the hotel's gym. Ask the hotel if they have guest passes or discounted rates at a nearby health club.
8. Exercise first thing in the morning. Don't let a long day end with "no time to exercise."
9. Wear a pedometer. By age 60, most people are down to about 4,500 steps a day. Your goal should be to walk 10,000 steps per day.

10. Negotiate a discounted rate for you and your employees at a gym near your office building. And then use the facility and encourage your employees to do the same.

I participate in 5K and 10K runs throughout the year. They give me a goal to continually improve my times. My entry fees go to support local nonprofit organizations. And, to prepare for each race, I have to schedule times during the preceding weeks to practice and exercise.

Quick Brainstorming Activities

According to Brian Cole Miller in his book, Quick Brainstorming Activities For Busy Managers, there are 50 ways to improve your brainstorming at your company or in your organization.

My favorite is the Paper Swap brainstorming activity:

• A brainstorming technique where participants write their input on separate pieces of paper; then they swap papers and continue to add input.

Miller provides 49 other techniques in his book (released by Amacom last month), all of which take less than 15 minutes to complete.

For all brainstorming sessions, Miller reminds leaders that you should:

• Focus on quantity not quality
• Don't allow criticism
• Encourage wild ideas
• Combine ideas for more ideas

Miller also suggests that the best starting question for a brainstorming session is a Focus Question -- one that:

• Uses the participants' own language
• Is personal to the participants and not the organization
• Evokes responses with imagery

This is a must-read book for any manager who needs to effectively lead brainstorming sessions.

How To Be A Synergist To Lead Your Team To Predictable Success

Why do so many teams and groups fail to perform--achieving compromise at best and gridlock at worst?

According to best-selling author Les McKeown, the problem lays in conflicting personality types:

• the Visionary with big ideas and little execution.
• the Processor who insists on putting every detail through a system, slowing things. down
• the Operator who just wants to end the meeting and get back to the "real work."

It takes a Synergist, says McKeown to end the gridlock. A Synergist, who can take all three--the bold dreamers, the pragmatic realists, and the systems designers--and knit them together into a dynamic, well rounded team.

"Most importantly, the Synergist is a role anyone can learn," explains McKeown.
And, he teaches that skill set in his new book, The Synergist -- How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success.

A Synergist:

• sets their personal interests below the best interests of the enterprise as a whole.
• sees the big picture of what the team or group is there to do and works tirelessly to make that happen, without manipulating the process or its outcome to their own personal advantage.

According to Tom Rath, author of Strengthsfinder 2.0, How Full is Your Bucket, "The Synergist speaks directly to the single greatest challenge leadership teams face today: a lack of relationship and communication."

• In Part 1 of The Synergist, you'll learn about the root cause as to why most groups and teams are ineffective and fail to produce their best results.
• In Part 2 you will see how highly effective groups and teams subconsciously and intuitively address that root cause.
• And, finally, in Part 3, McKeown provides you the tools and techniques, as the Synergist, to consciously and in an accelerated and structured way bring success to the group.

McKeown is also the author of, Predictable Success, which hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-seller lists in 2010.

Six Questions To Ask As A Superboss

From Sydney Finkelstein's book, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, comes these great questions you should routinely ask yourself as a leader:

1. Have you answered the "why do we exist" question for your team? Could all of your team members share this answer with you right now?
2. Do you have people on your team who have followed non-traditional paths to their jobs, or do you find yourself attracted to cookie-cutter backgrounds?
3. Are people on your team energized to come to work in the morning? How would you even know?
4. Are you inspiring people to believe that they can achieve great things?
5. Are you removing the bureaucratic barriers and hierarchy that get in the way of meaningful interaction and getting the job done?
6. How often do you actively teach people how to do something, as opposed to just telling  people what to do?

How To Be A Catalyst Leader

"Catalyst leaders represent the gold standard -- energetic, supportive, forward-thinking mentors who spark action in others," explain Tacy M. Byham and Richard S. Wellins, authors of the new book, Your First Leadership Job -- How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others.

More specifically, the authors share that a catalyst leader:

• Asks and listens
• Fosters innovation
• Provides balanced feedback
• Builds trust
• Focuses on people's potential
• Collaborates and networks
• Empowers others
• Encourages development
• Energizes and mobilizes
• Aligns actions with strategy

In the book, you'll learn how catalyst leaders bring out the best in people. They do that by, among other actions, by:

• Encouraging the person to try new things.
• Giving the person input on things that affect him/her.
• Allowing the person to safely learn through failure, so they can take appropriate risks.
• Taking the time to find out what motivates the person.

The authors also cover the following topics in the book:

• How to build trust and ownership
• How to be authentic
• How to delegate 
• How to nurture business relationships
• How to become an adviser

Your First Leadership Job is certainly a good book for a first-time leader, but it's also equally relevant for any leader who wants to become that gold standard catalyst leader.

How To Identify A Leader During An Interview

The next time you are interviewing a candidate and you want to access their leadership skills, consider asking the candidate these questions:

• What personal qualities define you as a leader?  Describe a situation when these qualities helped you lead others.
• Give an example of when you demonstrated good leadership.
• What is the toughest group from which you've had to get cooperation?
• Have you ever had difficulty getting others to accept your ideas?  What was your approach?  Did it work?
• Describe a situation in which you had to change your leadership style to achieve the goal?
• One leadership skill is the ability to accommodate different views in the workplace, regardless of what they are.  What have you done to foster a wide number of views in your work environment?

Thanks to Sharon Armstrong, author of The Essential HR Handbook, for these helpful questions!

Eight Good Company Culture Guidelines

"The clearer your company culture, the less likely it will be hijacked by the weaker personalities in your team," explains Mary Christensen, author of the book, Be A Network Marketing Leader. "A few guidelines will ensure a level playing field for all team members as they pursue their individual goals."

Christensen's recommended eight guidelines are:

1. We respect each other.
2. We support each other.
3. We appreciate everyone's contribution.
4. We're always professional.
5. We operate in a spirit of fun and friendship.
6. We keep it positive.
7. We're a gossip-free zone.
8. We deal with our disagreements in private.

How To Ask More And The Power Of Questions

"Questions help us break down barriers, discover secrets, solve puzzles, and imagine new ways of doing things, But few of us know how to question in a methodical way," explains Frank Sesno, Emmy-award-winning journalist, and author of the forthcoming book, Ask More.

Set to publish in January 2017, Sesno's book teaches readers how the power of questions:

• Opens doors
• Uncovers Solutions
• Sparks Change

More specifically, he reveals:

• The power and payoff of targeted diagnostic questions.
• How strategic questions can ease the hardest decisions and support triumphant outcomes.
• How and when to use empathy questions.
• How asking creativity questions help to get people to imagine, set their sights high and soar above failure.

And, "when a leader fails to know where he/she is going, refuses to listen to what he/she doesn't want to hear, or relies on faulty information, bad things happen," adds Sesno.

Frank Sesno

Sesno also shares that some questions work best when they don't end in a question mark. Examples are:

• Tell me more
• Explain that to me
• Go on

Sesno is a former CNN anchor, White House correspondent, and Washington bureau chief, and is now the director of School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University.

Thank you to the book publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.