Leadership Skills

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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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). […]
July 14, 2014

16 Team Alignment Challenges You Can Solve

16 Team Alignment Challenges You Can Solve Unfortunately, strong and healthy team alignment is rare. But it’s not only possible to achieve, it’s absolutely within your reach. If your teams […]
February 6, 2014

More dollars for training means great gains for you!

When Forbes reports Spending on Corporate Training Soars: Employee Capabilities Now A Priority, leaders everywhere should at the very least start to consider scheduling leadership training dates. Karen O’ Leonard, […]