Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger, Craig Sroda, author of YOU in the SWEET SPOT and Intentional Living. We hope you enjoy Craig’s wisdom and perspective.

The best gift you can give yourself or someone else is the gift of self-awareness. It is pretty much a fact that the highest predictor of success both personally and professionally is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Being self-aware can be a secret advantage if you can get there. Most people don’t realize that being self-aware can advance them in their career, in their relationships, and in their home life.

Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger Jesse Lyn Stoner, business consultant, coach, former executive, and bestselling author. We hope you enjoy Jesse's wisdom and perspective.

Sometimes leaders make bad decisions or harm team morale by making autocratic decisions without involving others. And other times they waste their team’s time by unnecessarily involving them.

How do you know when and how much to involve your team in decisions? Sometimes the answer is pretty obvious.

You don’t need to call a team meeting to decide to order pencils for your office. On the other hand, if one of your direct reports has the authority to make decisions about office supplies, your taking over might not be appreciated.

Do employees bring a renter’s bias to the job? Or is that bias fostered by leadership, compensation and rewards, structure, or other factors common to the job? It’s the question Harvard Professor James L. Heskett posed in a 2017 Harvard Business School article. Professor Heskett is seeing a trend of employees increasingly becoming renters.

Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger Terry Ploetz, Vice President of Business Banking for Centier Bank. We hope you enjoy Terry’s wisdom and perspective.

Time is a known and limited resource. In our daily lives we strive to save time for our own purposes. For those in a service market or sales position, growing your portfolio requires select and focused behaviors that take up quite a bit of time. To sustain future growth, you have to become more efficient or spend more time doing the work you did in prior years. At some point, the model breaks down; you can’t create or make more time.

Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger Todd Bruce, Senior Vice President & Regional Manager for Lake City Bank's North Region. We hope you enjoy Todd’s wisdom and perspective.

When you hear the words redemption and deliverance, what is the first word that comes to mind? I bet it’s not leadership. Leadership is about leading, coaching, developing, overcoming…to which I say, exactly my point, redemption and deliverance.

“While CEOs obsess over getting big-banged out of existence, odds are good that their companies will suffer a more pedestrian fate: they will simply cease to matter.” - Inc. Magazine editor Leigh Buchanan

How relevant is your organization? Have you asked yourself that question recently? It goes something like this: In 3 years will the services we’re providing still matter? The best companies ask themselves this question every year. I’d bet many have never asked it.

Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger Tom Henry, Mayor of Fort Wayne. We hope you enjoy Mayor Henry’s wisdom and perspective.

Engage, innovate, and perform. Those three words have helped serve as my mission and vision since becoming mayor in 2008. Engagement, innovation, and performance also drive my leadership staff and the future leaders we’re developing among our 1,800 City of Fort Wayne employees.

Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger Ron Kitchens, Chief Executive Officer of the Southwest Michigan First Group of Companies. We hope you enjoy Ron’s wisdom and perspective.

With the rapid pace of change all around us these days and the constant drum beat of crisis, it is easy to fall into the Nike trap of management: Just Do It! Just do something! Just do anything! We all remember playing the childhood game, “Don’t Spill the Beans,” at least one point in our lives. The concept is easy: you compete against an opponent by carefully considering how to place beans on your half of a balanced bean pot in order to tip the pot towards your opponent so he gets all of those rotten beans.

The game of business is similar. A great organization knows how to place its “beans” in order to achieve success. When talking about customers or profit, we want the pot to tip in our direction. In regards to bad collection issues or supplier time delays, we want the pot to tip away.

Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger Thomas Gryp, President & CEO of Notre Dame Federal Credit Union. We hope you enjoy Tom’s wisdom and perspective!

The world today seems obsessed with the topic of leadership. Specifically, what skills are necessary to rise through the business ranks to become a good, inspirational leader. The fact that there continues to be an insatiable appetite for material on this topic, strongly implies that the definitive answer to this riddle still remains elusively out of reach.

This year, I turn 60. Whether that labels me as being “over the hill” or “still in the prime of my life,” is a matter of perspective. What I know for sure however, is that the road I have already trodden is much longer than the road that still lies ahead. Throughout this journey, I have experienced several unconventional truths and momentary flashes of enlightenment about leadership not often discussed in traditional business literature. That is what I would like to share with you today.