The Dip: A Surprisingly Common Scenario for New Leaders

By Dr. Francis Eberle

I was recently asked how I would coach a highly successful employee who had been promoted to supervise a team. After the promotion, this individual’s performance, and subsequently that of the team, dropped dramatically. He experienced what might be called “The Dip.” 

I wish this was an uncommon scenario. 

Companies often make the mistake of taking employees who are succeeding in non-supervisory roles and promoting them to management roles—without adequate support for the new function—and expecting them to thrive. Read More

Can I Be a True Leader?

Avoiding Judgments as an Introvert Leader

By Dr. Francis Eberle

This past year three coaching clients taught me to remember that this is a complex question.  All of them were already in substantial leadership roles but were questioning whether others perceived them to be leaders, including their supervisors. For me there was no question; it was obvious that they were true leaders. For them it was a different story.

Their confidence in their ability to lead was waning and causing them stress. The company was growing and they wondered if they would fit in the new model. Each of them had a unique personality with firm ideas about their leadership, while exhibiting a more quiet, thoughtful and detailed approach to their work. Read More

Think Differently About Competition at Work

By Dr. Francis Eberle

Every spring I get reacquainted with my bicycle. For me cycling is recreational, social, competitive, and great exercise. While riding, cyclists talk, solve the problems, reminisce, “take a turn” at the front and wait if someone lags behind. The first group rides of the year often take a slightly different tone. The pace quickens when the road is flat, or someone will likely push themselves hard up a hill to get to the top before everyone else. On these rides everyone is checking their fitness in comparison with others as the season begins. Most do this to note their own personal expectation of fitness and not to try and beat someone else. It is a ritual that is repeated over and over at almost every level of cycling. Read More

“DISC Is a Swiss Army Knife”
How Elizabeth Roberts Uses DISC to Help Start-Ups Succeed

When Elizabeth Roberts, Partner and Head of People at Ulysses Holdings, took the DISC TriMetrix HD Assessment over three years ago, it made an immediate impression on her.

“I thought, ‘I don’t really understand this, but I feel like they might have cameras in my house’,” she jokes.

She had taken assessments before, and hadn’t been overly impressed. She hadn’t bought into the idea of an algorithm telling her about herself and had been put off by tests that attempted to tell her who she was. “Different tests told me I was an introvert, an extrovert … and the feedback was never in a language that I understood.” Read More

How Much Should Leaders Know?

By Dr. Francis Eberle

Clients have asked me how much they really need to know about leadership. This is not a simple question, and usually I share one of my favorite quotes by Henri Poincaré, a late 19th century French mathematician: “Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”

The point is, what we do with our knowledge is just as important, if not more important, than the knowledge we possess. Being an effective leader requires knowing many things, such as the company’s ideas, strategies, practices, plans, culture and people, but that isn’t everything leaders need to know. Read More

Change is as Good as Rest
Using Transition and Flexibility to Improve Performance

By Dr. Francis Eberle

As an avid cyclist, I’ve learned how to rest while riding on long routes. In fact, a common cycling axiom is, “Change is as good as a rest.” When riding, your leg muscles get tired with the same motion, particularly with the same effort. However, if you change the gear and cadence (the number of times your feet complete a pedal cycle), you will use a different set of muscles. This gives a break to the original muscles. When riders are going 100 miles for days, such as the 21 days and 2,000 miles in the Tour de France, they need to rest their muscles whenever they can.

This technique applies to the weekend warriors too.  The idea of resting while moving has a corollary in leadership. Read More

Is It Really Lonely at The Top?

By Dr. Francis Eberle

I know you have heard or read more than once that it is lonely at the top. If you believe this then it is likely you will be a lonely leader. Results of decisions do ultimately lie with the leader alone, but why does it have to be lonely?

It can start with small things. One day as a new Executive Director, I was in rush and needed to get a few copies for a meeting. I went to the copier and was interrupted by an assistant who said, “Oh don’t do that. I will do it for you from now on.” It was very nice of her and her intention was in line with her job. However, the idea that I couldn’t make my own copies was foreign and led me to wonder if I had changed. Read More

Diversity Is a Competitive Differentiator

By Dr. Francis Eberle

Several years ago, as a CEO, I hired a talented and experienced professional woman for an executive position who also happened to represent a minority group. That in of itself is not worthy writing about, and should be unremarkable. What happened next was.

She was often questioned about what she was doing. I was sometimes asked to intervene about her decisions without evidence, except it was not the way they would have done it. This did not occur with the same frequency for others on the leadership team. Read More

Creating a Two-Way Conversation

By Dr. Francis Eberle

How many times have you left a meeting with a colleague feeling good about the outcome, only to find out later that they did not complete what you talked about? Weren’t they listening?

My last experience with this was a few years ago. A colleague wanted to work on a new idea to present to the CEO. We discussed it, and I felt the new idea was very valuable. However, until we finished the project the CEO wanted, introducing a new idea was not a good plan. At the end of our meeting, I thought we had come to an agreement: They would finish the final report and then develop the new idea to present. Read More