How to focus on higher-level strategic work by cutting down on routine interruptions. The post How to Stop Recurring Requests from Eating Up Your Time first appeared on The Eblin Group ..read more

Being on the 'first team' means prioritizing the business over your function. Discover the key behaviors of successful senior executives and how they play the bigger game. The post What It Means to Be on the First Team first appeared on The Eblin Group ..read more

As a senior executive coach, I get to work with a lot of really smart people who have serious processing power upstairs. Smart, however, doesn’t always mean wise. In a nutshell, intelligence is usually about generating or acquiring knowledge while wisdom is about exercising good judgment in applying that knowledge. There are other simple distinctions between intelligence and wisdom that you can use as a guide to determine in which direction you lean or, better yet, what it looks like to strike a productive balance between the two. Here are a dozen distinctions on smart vs. wise that you can us ..read more

Bill Walton’s Philosophy of Joy Why is it that the death of NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton this week hits me harder than the passing of most celebrities that I’ve never met? I think it’s because he so clearly sought joy in his life and that a big source of joy for him was giving it to others, including me as one of his many fans as a player and especially as a broadcaster. Watching and listening to Bill Walton call a game was a joy for me and countless others. He tapped into and fed some of the best aspects of the human experience.  Bill Walton’s joy, enthusiasm, and quirky intellect had a ..read more

Lead long enough and it’s eventually going to happen. Your team is going to come up against a tough run. Things were going great and then, suddenly, they’re not. The tough times could last for weeks, months, or even a year or more. The causes can be varied – competitive pressures, customer service challenges, a financial squeeze, uncontrollable externalities – and aren’t mutually exclusive. They can come all at once. So, when your team is deep into dealing with the muck, what do you do? Here are some guidelines that work for my senior executive clients and their teams: Balance Content with Con ..read more

One of the constants in my more than two decades of executive coaching is the desire and need to build the muscles required to develop and execute competitive and innovative strategies. It came up with a client again as recently as this month. With a few modifications, here’s the quick outline I offered him on five ways to build your strategic muscles. Have a long-term vision: Think in years and decades, not quarters and years. What is your point of view on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to both your industry and your company? How does that analysis inform what your visi ..read more

The picture that accompanies this post was taken this morning, Thursday, April 4, 2024. It’s the photographic record of my fourth annual birthday handstand. So, this is me at age 63. My yoga teachers would certainly point out ways that I could improve my form, but I’m happy enough with this one. Honestly, if you had told me on my 43rd birthday that I’d be doing handstands on my 63rd, I would have politely told you you were nuts. Beginning my birthday with one this morning is an example of something I’ve learned through experience over the past decade – progress comes incrementally, then sudden ..read more

Over the course of this year, I’m going to develop the agendas and facilitate around a dozen strategic offsites for C-Suite executives and their senior leadership teams. Most of these will be day-long offsites for client company leadership teams to help them make sure they step back from the day-to-day swirl three times a year to set a course, assess their progress, and ensure that their time and attention are focused on the things that matter most. For three of my client companies, this is the third consecutive year that they’ve asked me to do this kind of work with them.  With all that ..read more

In a phone conversation with a senior executive last week, he greeted me by exclaiming, “Happy January 39th!” He’s not the only one that feels like the beginning of 2024 has been overstuffed with things to do and deal with. Pretty much every senior leader I work with has a plate that is overflowing with big issues – return to office initiatives, higher performance goals, huge investments, achieving operational excellence, you name it. The impact of trying to stay on top of all of that is that they end up feeling, to use the title of a book I wrote in 2014, overworked and overwhelmed. And, from ..read more

This is the time of the year when I spend a day with my C-suite clients to give them some space to get up on the balcony to consider what success will look like 12 months from now and what they and their teams need to focus on to make those outcomes more likely. While the process varies and is customized for each executive, there are some core questions that I almost always pose. Over the years, they’ve proven to be useful in helping leaders align their time and attention against the outcomes that matter most. Here are ten of the questions on my core list. While I recommend working with a coac ..read more