Author Archives: Arnoldo Mata

Arnoldo Mata heads Leadership Resource Group and has more than 30 years of experience in leadership training and development. Leadership Resource Group works with nonprofits, governments and private businesses on strategic planning projects that provide focus and direction for organizational growth. He also provides training and services in creativity and ideation.

Explore How Business Helps People

How Business Helps People

It’s a simple question, but one that is often hard for people to answer. Instead of asking someone what they do, I ask, “How do you help people?” It may seem confusing because most people assume I’m asking about volunteer efforts, as in, “Do you help little old ladies cross the street?” However, the question is aimed at getting to understand how the work we do helps someone else. Every…

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Be Prepared with Solutions

In each and every organization, you will find problems. Sometimes big, sometimes small. There’s no getting around it. Like everything else, how an organization responds to problems comes from the top. This a lesson I learned from my wife, but it really came from her principal. As a teacher, my wife would often find she had trouble dealing with some issue that had come up. The first time she approached…

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Feeding Growth in Employees

employee growth

As important as feedback is, we get and give too little of it – and often too late. Whether you’re the leader or not, you need to keep feedback as a ready tool for yourself and your team. For most organizations, feedback is given once a year during the annual performance review. It’s generally not a pleasant experience because most managers don’t know how to do it well, and most…

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Take Five for Creative Thinking

creativity

Everyone and every organization needs a dose of creativity. We can’t survive without it. We face new challenges every day, and we have to find new ways to respond to them. Unfortunately, we don’t often look for truly creative ways to address these new challenges, but prisoners do. Prisoners spend quite a bit of time coming up with creative ways to get by, whether it’s how to smuggle in, hide…

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Will This Be On the Test?

More than likely, you or one of your classmates asked this question in just about every class you took from middle school to high school to college to graduate school and beyond. You might have even asked the question during your company’s training sessions. I’ve used the question in many other situations. It is a great clarifying question. It is a way to get to what is essential in any…

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Culture Reflects Leadership

There is a saying in counseling circles that goes like this: Every happy family is happy in the same ways; every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own unique way. While this is vast generalization, it is something that can be applied to organizations as well. When you look at successful organizations, there are some things these organizations do well: Clear vision and mission; strong, effective communications throughout the organization;…

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Real Leaders Find Solutions

solution

We often see leaders as people who take action, and that is certainly part of leadership. But, action in and of itself is not leadership. Real leadership comes when someone offers a real solution. Anyone can take action at any time. Worse, people often act out of a need to do something, anything. This is just reflexive action, something done without much thought. Reflexive action is done out of frustration.…

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Chasing Dreams: Do It Now

truth

I sat up when saw this missive. It was scribbled on a social media post. I can’t find the source, but it truly impacted me: We all understand that time is precious, but it rarely sinks in. We know we have a limited time in any relationship, job or situation. We realize we will all die some day.” But, we also think that the end is really, really, really, REALLY…

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Don’t Just Paint It Black

In the early days of car manufacturing, Henry Ford said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” For Ford, this was an issue of costs and efficiency. By only offering one color, he could lower his costs by being able to buy that color paint in mass quantities at significant discounts versus higher prices for smaller amounts of many…

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