The No. 1 reason employees hold back from taking initiative is because they feel that their ideas don’t matter because leaders make decisions without asking for input. If you want your team to take a more active role in your business, you need to listen to what they say.
In my new book, Stepping Up: [...]

What a month this has been. The pages of the newspapers are filled with fear—Italian bonds at record highs, congressional leaders locked in a battle to solve the debt crisis, persistent unemployment and businesses sitting on hoards of cash but afraid to spend it because of a “lack of confidence.” In the United States, Thanksgiving [...]

Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said that “we become the stories we tell.” Having worked with some of the best companies in the world on building great corporate cultures, I believe that the best organizations consistently use stories to drive culture. In fact, the ability to tell compelling stories is an essential [...]

Whether in our work as leaders or in our individual lives/careers, the ability to drive change (or to change ourselves and others) is a key competency for leaders. This month I’d like to suggest that focusing on the positive is a much better way to drive change than focusing on problems. This is as true [...]

OK so you think “Izzo has finally lost it”-Boiled Frogs! You all have probably heard that if you put a frog in boiling water they instantly hop out, but that if you put them in cold water which you slowly warm to a boil, they will simply die in the water. Well, trust me, [...]

As a child most of us looked forward to the occasional field trip at school which broke up the daily routine but also offered the kind of learning you can’t get in a classroom. It seems to me that any company, leader or professional who wants to keep learning should also take field trips on [...]

Airplane pilots have checklists that they follow for pre-flight and pre-landing preparation. The checklist has its genesis in 1935 when the U.S. Army received a new plane from Boeing that crashed and burst into flames soon after takeoff on its first flight. Why? It crashed because the experienced pilots forgot one important step, just one [...]

Leadership is not a position. You can’t be assigned or appointed to be a leader. Leadership is not about what your business card says, what your title is, or where you sit on the organizational chart in your company. Leadership is a posture, it is a decision that you want to have influence over others [...]

How many times in an average week will you hear someone utter these sentiments: It’s not my job! It was not my fault. What can I do about it? It is bigger than me. I wish someone would do something about that. My belief is that the more a person or organization focuses on the [...]

It was just a normal school day in September of 2007 at Central Kings Rural High School in the small community of Cambridge, Nova Scotia. A grade nine student, in his first year at the school, wore a pink shirt to school. A few bullies roughed him up a bit, called him a homosexual for [...]