High Impact Leaders

Business leaders who learn how to improve their conversation skills have a dramatic (no pun intended) advantage in their professional lives. These good conversation skills enable them to communicate their needs more effectively and also brainstorm innovative ideas with their team members. However, corporate cultures with rigid rules and coworkers that resist change can quash this creative process...

On this week's episode I'm going to be talking about listening skills. Now, hold up, I'm sure when you read that the first thing you think is "welp, guess I'm skipping this week's episode, I already have excellent listening skills, I know several people that could certainly use this episode though" but the truth is, there's probably people who think the same...

Merry Christmas, everyone. Happy Hannukah, and Happy New Year. I hope your new year gets started off with a lot of growth in your business and happiness for you and your team members. In order to help, I wanted to start the new year off with an episode about how to become more organized as a leader. If you recall, a few weeks ago, I did an episode about creating a specific vision of where you want...

Last week, we talked about how to motivate your team. This week, I want to back up a little, and talk about how to stay self-motivated as well. The self-talk -- what we say to ourselves as the day goes on -- can either help you get ahead or ensure you stay behind. I'll give you an example of how I used this to start my business. In my 20s, I was working myself to death trying to get ahead. I...

Leadership and management skills are not coded into our DNA. Even the best leaders must hone their skills over time with hard work. You can do this through study, research, experimentation, and sometimes... trial and error. Even during the optimal times, keeping a motivated team is one of the greatest challenges. And no matter how good things are right now, every company will go through some hard...

I have to admit that I am uncomfortable when given constructive criticism. You know why? Because I’m human. Guess what… You are too. (You are also human.) So, if most people are uncomfortable receiving constructive feedback, is it really constructive? In addition, is there a real difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism? Well, the answer is both “yes” and “no.” Any type...

You’ll hear people tell you that you need to create “SMART Goals” or that “You have to make your professional goals line up with your personal goals.” Or, “The best way to develop your future self is to create an action plan of smaller goals moving you toward more attainable goals.” I suppose that all of those things are true. But my advice is not to overly complicate the process. In “plain speak,...

For the entire month of November we have focused on increasing revenue for your company, and the steps you need to take to do so. A few weeks ago, we started off by telling you about networking and how increasing your sphere of influence is the first thing you can do to make people interested in your company.  After that we looked at how to generate new customers for your small bussiness, then las...

Many small businesses pay thousands of dollars for pay-per-click ads and content marketing for lead generation, only to lose their qualified leads because they wait way too long to follow up. The truth is, timing can make or break your lead conversion process. When website visitors search for valuable information, products, or solutions, they expect instant results. If they fill out your web form ...

So, last week, I showed you how to network more effectively in those business networking events. And, when we got to the Business-to-Business networking, I mentioned that you want to focus your business networking on the problems you solve for a specific market. The more narrowly defined the market, the better. On this episode, I'm going to show you how small businesses in 2025 and 2026 can f...

I hope you had a fun and scary Halloween. Happy November to everyone. For the month of November, we'll be covering a series of episodes about how to find customers for your business and/or how to increase revenue through sales. Most companies, big and small alike, are ramping up for the end of year and trying to crush the lofty sales goals you set this time last year. So, in this series, we&a...

Hey everyone, I'm Roma, filling in for Doug this week to talk about a few of the most successful ways I've found useful in climbing the corporate ladder as a woman.  There are a lot of things working against us both societally and culturally when it comes to specifically corporate life, and there's a few tips I've found extremely useful in navigating this environment and persev...

We recently brought a few new team members onto out staff here at The Leaders Institute. And during the hiring process, we were flooded with dozens and dozens of highly qualified candidates who all told us the same thing. "Companies just aren't hiring right now." I thought that was odd. Although GDP was -0.6 in the first quarter of 2025, GDP is growing at the highest rate it has sin...

There will always be difficult employees in any organization. Be it a 2 person group, a mom and pop operation, or a fortune 500 company. Rotten tomatoes are inevitable, and your job as a leader is to make sure those couple rotten ones don't spoil the bunch.  The problem is, how can you handle them when you don't even know which ones they are? Difficult employees come in so many different...

Now I know it's only October and we haven't even seen Halloween yet, but I wanted to do a short episode on Christmas parties, end of the year parties, holiday activities, that type of stuff cause whenever it comes to planning those, now is the time to start.  Here at the Leaders Institute, we help companies and clients organize team building activities year around but right about now unt...

This week I've got a special guest, Amy Maybury who is one of our senior consultants, sales people, and instructors here at The Leaders Institute.  Amy is in the process of writing a new book about owning your job and position and as we start getting into the interview she'll tell us how she kind of accidentally became an expert on this topic we're about to talk about.  Through her...

On this episode, I'm going to focus on how to really develop leaders because it's a major goal for really every organization, no matter the size of your company, and right now is a great time to start planning for your future.  In fact, if your organization has a culture of internal leadership development programs, you're going to be able to attract new team members as well as retai...

What if you could transform a routine training session into an unforgettable team experience that sharpens your groups skills and leaves a far deeper emotional impact on them. Well on today's episode, I'm going to reveal a powerful method to make communication, problem solving, leadership skills; make the training for those type of concepts stick with your team way more, and leave way mo...

Since we are at the very start of the holiday season, at least for businesses (and yes it is the start of the holiday season for business), company leaders both big and small have to start planning.  Whether it's holiday parties, sales kickoffs, or, of course, annual meetings, the planning has to begin now, and it's worth planning them the right way. In the case of annual meetings, the i...

A couple of weeks ago, I released an episode about how people learn by doing, and I touched upon how to make training sessions more interactive so that your participants actually learn better and the information sticks longer.  Well, on this episode, I'm gonna show you how to make training sessions way more fun and way more interactive. I'm going to give you five of the biggest things th...

In today's episode, I'm going to cover a few of the several ways that managers or supervisors can learn a lot from looking at the skills that coaches possess.   A common issue across so many managers, supervisors, and bosses out there is, regardless of how qualified they are as managers, they struggle desperately with being good leaders. Being a good leader, creating an effective environ...

One of the most common things that we hear after we lead a workshop or training seminar is, "I have to be honest. I was really dreading having to come to this class. But I think I had more fun and learned more in this session than I have from any other training program." The reason why we get such good results is that we learned early on that people learn by doing -- not by hearing and s...

I was traveling recently, and the person sitting next to me on the plane asked me what I did. I mentioned that companies hire me and my team members to come in and make meeting more fun and interesting. She said, "Give me your card. I just left one of the most boring and taxing meetings ever organized." And actually, that happens a lot. When event planners organize meetings, their time i...

When people hear the phrase “ corporate team building event ”, they usually think of outdated or awkward activities. Maybe it’s trust falls, a pizza party, or that cringeworthy moment when everyone shares “something interesting about themselves.” In other words, not exactly exciting. But team building doesn’t have to be cheesy. They can be fun. They can be powerful. And most importantly, they can...

Learning how to develop a growth mindset can transform a businessperson’s career from good to great. The Growth Mindset person sees every challenge as a chance to grow, not as a dead end. For example, they turn a botched deal into a lesson that lands bigger clients. In this episode, we cover what a Growth Mindset is (and why we should even care about it). Then, I give you a bunch of real-world exa...