The Management Team section should include biographies of key team members and detail their responsibilities. It is important that these biographies are not merely resumes that include educational backgrounds and previous job titles and responsibilities of team members. Rather, biographies should highlight most relevant past positions that individuals have held and specific successes in each. These successes could include launching and growing new businesses or managing divisions of established companies.

Team member biographies should be tailored to company's growth stage. For instance, a start-up company should emphasize its management's success launching and growing companies. A more mature company should emphasize how team members have successfully operated within framework of larger enterprises.

Plain and simple, leadership is about getting others to take action. If leadership effectiveness is lacking, less than best effort is put forth. The better leadership, better effort. Exceptional leadership inspires best effort in others.

Effective leadership is a function of both individual competencies and organizational culture. What are some signs that leadership isn’t as effective as it could be? There are a number of them. They are indications that something is missing in leadership equation.

* Inability to Motivate People * Difficulty Attracting/Retaining Right People * Low Productivity * Poor Customer Orientation * High Stress * Isolation * Declining Profits * Ineffective Delegation * Lack of Creativity * Lack of Initiative * Ineffective Teams * Poor Communications * Lack of Vision * Diminishing Revenues * High Turnover

What can be done to improve leadership effectiveness? The answer is simple to understand and yet not so simple to implement. It starts with understanding foundations of what makes someone an effective leader and what kind of organizational culture is most effective.

Effective Personal Leadership

When I ask workshop participants about characteristics of both good and bad leaders, list never includes issues of intelligence, technical skills, or effective decision-making! Instead, list is full of people-related traits – good listener, respectful, good communicator, develops others, …

Effective personal leadership can be summarized as being competent in these skill sets:

* Becoming Influential * Facilitating Teamwork & Collaboration * Being a Catalyst for Change * Managing Conflict * Developing Others * Having & Communicating a Compelling Vision

Unfortunately, improving one’s competency in these areas is often a challenge. Let me explain why… Unlike factual information, which gets processed in neo-cortex of brain, people-related skills are processed in part of brain called amygdala. This portion of brain regulates emotional insights and responses rather than logical insights and responses. Improving leadership skills set forth above require one to break old habits/responses and form new ones, and we aren’t able to do this simply by learning and acquiring knowledge. That’s difference between neo-cortex and amygdala.