Helanie Scott

Align4Profit Leadership Development Blog

Helanie ScottLeadership development may be the most important activity in any organization. In my quest to helping men and women become more and more effective leaders, I share weekly articles that are a quick read with a promise to give your leaders actionable tips they can implement immediately.

It’s my goal to share my experience together with candid and pragmatic advice founded on deep research.

Read and enjoy! To make sure you don’t miss any updates, let me send you a weekly article to your email.

December 15, 2014

14 Ways to Celebrate the Holidays

If you’ve read Lindsay Learns a Leadership Lesson from the Platinum Rule, you’re aware of the danger that follows from assuming all your employees celebrate the same things the same […]
December 8, 2014

Four Japanese Leadership Lessons from Toyota

The Toyota production system (TPS) is recognized around the world for making Toyota an automotive manufacturing leader. I bring TPS to your attention because it is an integrated socio-technical system—that […]
December 1, 2014

Nine Leadership Lessons from Nelson Mandela

On December 5 of last year, Nelson Mandela joined the ranks of the 20th century’s greatest departed leaders. Along with Martin Luther King, Jr, and Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela transformed […]
November 24, 2014

Six Sure Ways to Inspire Action

It’s been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Amen. Everyone has good intentions, but fewer see their intentions bear fruit. In any political debate or […]
November 17, 2014

4 Ways Not to Fall Into the Training-Do Gap

Learning is meaningless unless you also achieve behavior change. Too many organizations invest time and money training in order to improve performance only to find that, when the training is […]
November 10, 2014

Do You Really Want to Be Yourself?

Like most people, you play a number of roles. You act differently when you’re out on the town partying with your best friends than you do when you’re coaching an […]
November 3, 2014

Small Wins Mean Bigger Grins

As often as you see success celebrated in victory laps, leaping athletes, parades, and street parties, it’s easy to forget that’s not the way success usually goes. Mounting the Olympic […]
October 27, 2014

How Great Leaders Tell Compelling Stories

Compelling stories do a much better job of delivering a message than any other form of communication. Stories communicate meaning far more effectively and powerfully. Numbers and statistics can confirm […]
October 20, 2014

Ten Human Givens All Leaders Need to Address

In order to achieve High Commitment and High Performance in their organizations, leaders must create workplace experiences that, first, satisfy the human needs of their employees and, second, motivate them […]
October 13, 2014

Ubuntu: Leadership Lessons from Africa

Boyd Varty grew up among the animals of the Londoloze Game Reserve of eastern South Africa. A place, he recalls in his TED Talk What I learned from Nelson Mandela, […]
September 22, 2014

Lindsay Learns a Leadership Lesson from the Platinum Rule

Lindsay (not her real name) was a bright, ambitious manager. Recently hired to lead a team at a software company, she was eager to start off in a positive way. […]
September 15, 2014

It’s Not a Contradiction When You See Both Sides

Some leaders don’t do well with contractions. You know who I mean. The “my way or the highway” type. Those command-and-control leaders, who think they have to be right all […]
September 8, 2014

A Lesson for Leaders from an 8-foot Bride

I’ve always argued that relationships trump skills. Eye-opening evidence for this comes from a street performer, the 8-foot Bride, turned rock star Amanda Palmer. Her brand of wildly creative and […]
September 1, 2014

The Cost of Losing Human Connections

At Align4Profit we train leaders in Leadership Intimacy, because it fosters the kind of human connections that result in High Commitment and High Performance. But we also see how important […]
August 25, 2014

Cap Bad Habits with CHAP

Working with Emotional Intelligence at Align4Profit has brought us success in helping leaders break habits. We begin by working with the three fundamental elements of habit—Cue, Action, and Pay-off (CAP). […]
January 24, 2018
compelling conversations

Leading Is Talking

But talking is much more than making conversation. Think of your workplace and count the astounding number of conversations, debates, disagreement, negotiations, and feedback discussions that take place daily, monthly, […]
January 23, 2018
bring it up

Bring it Up!

The skill leads to better performance. One could suggest, among the variety of definitions of leadership, that leadership is made up of a series of conversations with peers, managers, team […]
January 22, 2018
effective meeting management

What do good managers do once the meeting is over?

We love to hate meetings. But since they aren’t going away any time soon, we should think of ways to make them more effective. It can be challenging to keep […]
January 21, 2018
effective meeting management

Ugh! Another dreaded meeting to attend!

Too many meetings drag on without participants discussing the real problems. People talk around the important issues, check their mobile devices, introduce unrelated topics, and so on — which all […]
January 18, 2018
leadership attraction powers

Say what? Compelling Conversations Are Key To Great Management

Your managers’ main job is getting work done through others. Excelling at that responsibility relies on the quality of the relationships they build, which is largely driven by the quality […]
January 18, 2018
effective meeting management

Failing to plan effective meetings means you might be planning to fail

If you were to evaluate your managers on running effective meetings, what would success look like? One of my clients is a healthcare organization with 50,000+ employees who never fails […]