Dan Erwin

Do Employees Want their Employer to Tell Them How to Vote?

With all that's going on about the 2016 presidential candidates, I thought it was time to visit an important issue about company support of candidates. Back in 2012, the HBR (Harvard Business Review) blog had a lead posting by Gregory Casey, arguing that employees want their bosses to talk politics—ostensibly so they can make “better decisions.” So what do you think about that?

My first response was total skepticism, leading to questions about the writer’s person and actual agenda. This is how he was identified on HBR: President & CEO of the Business Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC), Gregory S. Casey has a...

Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer?

It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to our knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to...

How to Use Networking as a Leadership Tool

Acting like a leader is not just about what you do. It’s also about the company you keep. So what kind of company are you keeping? 

In her brilliant new book, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, Herminia Ibarra describes the best ways to lead with far greater impact. She emphasizes the necessity of redefining your job to make more strategic contributions and “playfully evolving” your outdated leadership style. But the other strategy for...

Why How We Fight Matters Most

Analysis of business conversations inevitably reveals that they are chock full of misunderstanding, differences of opinion and inherent disagreement. Yet, it has been more than a dozen years since anything significant on managing conflict has been created. But in a recent and highly awarded study UVA’s Kristin Behfar and her colleagues have provided a new, very practical approach to conflict prediction and resolution.

Rather than focus on conflict types, such as task or relationship orientation, they found that by manipulating two dimensions—directness and intensity—they were able to predict conflict success or failure.

Directness is defined as how straightforward—or “direct”—measured by words and body language somebody communicates information to the other person. Intensity is seen as the emotional component. Is the information presented on almost a matter-of-fact basis—or does it involve...

The Four Competencies of Leadership

It’s wonderful—perhaps because it’s so rare—to reread something that you started using thirty years ago and discover that it’s still highly relevant. Desktops were just beginning to show up and technology organizations were starting to use organizational networks. Organizations began to flatten and the need for leading started to surface. The talk was all about leading, not managing.

The Pillsbury CIO had a lot of money but little leadership talent on his team. So he tracked me down and asked me to work with a number of his new managers. I had done some coaching in R&D--as an experiment--and on a fluke, he brought me in.

I’d first encountered leadership material in grad school in the 1960s. I understood the distinction between managing and leading and could observe the differences. I was also quite certain leadership could be learned—a minority position at the time...