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.

March 28, 2016

Ignore the Experts

Expert opinion has built up a long rap sheet of error, ranging from amusing misdemeanors to flagrant acts of ignorance. I’ve collected a long list of expert error, which is […]
March 17, 2016

Are the most popular leadership traits masculine or feminine?

When we talk about the most effective leadership traits, our clients often ask us if these traits apply to both male and female leaders. Our frequent answer is, “Of course […]
February 1, 2016

Doing Business Globally with Cultural Intelligence

Shaped by our everyday personal interactions, we humans expect each other to behave in somewhat prescribed ways. Politeness pleases us and bad manners offend us. Trouble is, manners and courtesy […]
January 18, 2016

Six New Training Programs MakeEight Great Ways to Lead Better in 2016

Anyone familiar with Align4Profit must be familiar also with our popular leadership development programs—Leadership Attraction Powers and our consistently award-winning CoachQuest: Leader-as-Coach program. We stage both training programs as open-enrollment […]
January 4, 2016

Three Ways to Beat Anxiety with Optimism in 2016

Late last year researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign established a relationship between optimism and anxiety. Common sense would suggest, of course, that optimistic people suffer less anxiety, […]
December 21, 2015

Girl’s Christmas Question Prompts Lesson for Leaders

The most popular and most often reprinted newspaper editorial of all time, “Is There a Santa Claus?” appeared in The New York Sun in September of 1897. Written by Francis […]
December 7, 2015

How to Achieve Leadership Balance of Power

We all come to leadership loaded with qualities and shortcomings. We call this unique combination of pluses and minuses personality. On a level we cannot always discern, personality determines whether […]
November 23, 2015

Thanksgiving for Leaders

It’s no secret that many leaders, especially women, push themselves too hard these days. We drive ourselves to the brink before we step back to breathe. Many of us fail […]
November 16, 2015

How Tomatoes Can Save You Time and Money

In the late 1980s, Francesco Cirillio developed and introduced a technique named after the tomato. Despite the playful name, his time-management discipline can help leaders like you be more productive […]
November 2, 2015

Emotional Intelligence: Why Relationships Always Trump Skills.

Here’s a fact that should be obvious, but some leaders tend to overlook it and fail to address it. Humans are emotionally driven. There’s no getting around it. When deciding […]
October 19, 2015

WARNING: Don’t Try to Lead Without Ikigai

According to the Japanese concept of ikigai, everyone needs a reason for living. The French call it “raison d’être.” Literally “reason to be.” But no matter how you say it, […]
October 5, 2015

Six Questions that Engage Employees

One of the most disheartening statistics for leaders concerns employee engagement. Only 13 percent of people employed around the world are fully engaged. As many as 24 percent, actively disengaged […]
September 21, 2015

Imagine: A World Without Labels

It would be impossible to live without labels. From food labels to record labels, birth names to regal titles, labels help us navigate life. They enable us to communicate. Words, […]
September 7, 2015

Passion or Service. How do you labor?

Young people have asked me, “What should I do with my talents? Should I go into management, sales, science, academia…?” Recently a very gifted leader confessed that she was seriously […]
August 31, 2015

Zen Attention: Understanding vs. Responding

If you are not familiar with Zen, a school of Buddhism, you may have at least encountered one or two paradoxical Zen koans like, What is the sound of one […]