Michael Lee Stallard

Research by psychologist K. Anders Erikson has shown that it requires approximately 10,000 hours of intentional practice, with coaching, to become an expert. Ten thousand hours is roughly equivalent to ten years of putting in 20 hours of practice a week. The importance of perseverance and practice is obvious. Every bit as essential to becoming great, yet less obvious, is the importance of the character strengths of humility and love. Humility encourages you to seek and truly accept coaching, and love is what allows you to give and receive the relational support of others needed to persevere through the inevitable...

The New York Times has had a number of great articles related to connection and how it leads to success at work and in life.  In an article about what Google discovered from Project Oxygen, a rigorous study of its successful managers, Laszlo Bock, the leader of the study stated: "In the Google context, we'd always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you...It turns out that that's absolutely the least important thing. It's important, but pales in comparison....

Several facts recently caught my attention. In 1940, 7.7 percent of Americans lived in one-person households. By 2000, that number more than tripled to 25.8 percent.  (In Manhattan, 48 percent of all households were one-person households in 2000.) Between 1985 and 2004, the number of people with whom the average American discussed "important matters" dropped from three to two. During that same time period the percentage of people who had no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled to nearly 25 percent. A study by Norman Nie and his Stanford colleagues found that as people spend more time on the...

My mind must have been on something else as I began to edge out a bit from a side street to make a left-hand turn onto a main thoroughfare.  At the same time, another driver was turning left onto the street I was on. I slammed on my brakes in time. Admittedly, the near miss was my fault and the driver I almost pulled in front of had every right to be upset.  What surprised me, however, was the intensity of his reaction.  He came unglued, turned blood red, repeatedly flipped me off and began spewing expletives and spittle.  The...

A leader I know and much admire is Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks North America and Starbucks International.   Howard tells about the time 14 years ago this month when he received a call in the middle of the night at his home in Seattle alerting him that three Starbucks employees at the Georgetown store in Washington, D.C. had been shot and killed, including an 18-year who had just recently begun working at Starbucks, his first job.   Behar immediately called Howard Schultz, Starbucks? CEO, who was in New York City at the time. What Schultz didn?t do, says...

  In Leadership Is Dead: How Influence Is Reviving It, Jeremie Kubicek, CEO of the leader development company GiANT Impact, makes a clear and compelling case that ?dominators? who lead by coercion are on the decline and are being replaced by ?liberators? who lead through influence.  Kubicek observes that leadership has moved from a noun to a verb.  It has become a means or vehicle for appropriate change rather than a goal or end in itself (i.e. to become the leader who exerts power over others).  Peggy Noonan, President Ronald Reagan?s speechwriter, once stated it this way: ?Poor leaders want...

  Today is Presidents' Day in the U.S., a day in which we primarily celebrate our first president, George Washington. After reading the article "George Washington's Tear Jerker" in The New York Times, one might ask, was Washington really the great leader he has been made out to be?  I asked myself that question during the summer of 2002 and began a journey to unpack truth from myth.  I went as far as contacting and speaking with Edward Lengel, the foremost historian on Washington's generalship.  After doing my own research I wrote the following which became one of the chapters on...

There have been times in my life when I've been stuck.   Although I was giving my all, I wasn't progressing.  Early in my career, I tried to figure it out on my own. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't.  What I learned over time was that I needed someone to coach me.  I simply couldn't see where I was going wrong. It was a blind spot for me.  An outside expert's perspective was required to put me on the right path. Here's an example.  When I first began speaking about leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation, I was not...

Bono, megastar of the rock band U2, frequently shines the light on his fellow band members.  In this photo Bono is shining a spotlight on The Edge, U2's innovative lead guitar player. Bono does this in a metaphorical sense too.   Bono, has stated that he's a lousy guitar and keyboards player, and that his gifted fellow band members bring to life the melodies he hears in his head. He's also said that being around his fellow band members makes him a better human being. Furthermore, Bono has said that when one of one of his fellow band members is...

by Howard Behar and Michael Lee Stallard American leaders need to wake up and smell the coffee. Research from two well-respected organizations makes it clear that we have a big collective blind spot that?s dragging down productivity, innovation and economic performance. Earlier this year, a Conference Board research report showed that job satisfaction is at the lowest level since the organization began measuring it more than 20 years ago. The report went on to show this has been a long-term downward trend rather than a temporary decline due to the Great Recession.   Another well-respected organization, the Corporate Executive Board,...