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How Abraham Lincoln Mastered Collaboration: 4 Key Elements

Abraham Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washongton DC

Do executive leaders always have a clear idea of what powerful collaboration looks like? Do they always understand what it takes to build high-quality, result-focused collaboration between and across teams? What can we learn from Abraham Lincoln when it comes to collaboration? Read more …

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3 Rules of Thumb for Building Smart Cross-Company Networks

Net with yellow connections under a blue sky

How well do people in your company work together across organizational units?  Is your company structure rather hierarchical and formal or does it stimulate people to create cross-company networks? Are people able to collaborate effectively with people working in different…

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Building Your Executive Team: 3 Valuable Lessons from Andrew Carnegie

Photo of Andrew Carnegie sitting in chair in front of a black background

“Here lies a man who knew to enlist in his service better men than himself.” This is how Andrew Carnegie, the (Scotland-born) U.S. steel magnate who gave away the vast majority of his fortune, wanted people to remember him. (Among…

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6 Contrarian Reasons Why You’re Lucky to Be a Leader Today

Our Guest Post on Switch & Shift: Nobody ever said that being a leader is simple. Certainly not in today’s world where changes seem to happen at the speed of light; where communication and collaboration are heavily impacted by new…

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Cross-Cultural Leadership: How to Create People Alignment (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series I wrote about the importance of people alignment as a crucial competence for today’s leaders. Especially in a globalized world, where cross-cultural and multinational challenges are becoming more and more a normal part of…

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Leading Change: Breaking Through the Fear of Mistakes

The word fear ingraved in a white background

“The team is already four months involved in this change process. They are informed in detail about the reasons for the change and the objectives that were set by the executive board. The phase of ‘not knowing’ or ‘not understanding’…

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Leading Cross-Cultural Teams: How to Create Openness? (Part 2)

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the importance of openness within teams. About how our perception of openness can vary much from culture to culture, and how this can seriously hinder teams from being successful. In ‘Leading Cross-Cultural…

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Leading Cross-Cultural Teams: How to Create Openness? (Part 1)

When you observe successful teams in action you witness that an atmosphere of openness is always one of the success factors that drive the team’s behavior and performance. But as we all have probably experienced a few times in our lives,…

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Organization Development: The True Meaning of ‘People come First’

Lego puppets

A few weeks ago I received an unexpected call from a senior executive (I will call him Thomas) of a company I worked with some years ago. We had not seen each other for a long time and it was…

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