Among the many things I like about our group coaching program, Next Level Leadership, my favorite is when high-potential leader participants share with each other what they learned in their senior-executive shadow days. I’ve kept notes about the senior executive traits that the group coaching participants admire the most. Here are five traits of that show up on the list again and again:

Pull audience members' attention away from their BlackBerrys by asking a lot of questions, says Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group ... How did Apple sell more than $150 million worth of iPads on the product’s launch day? It spent 25 years earning the privilege of delivering personal and relevant messages to their customers, says blogger and author Seth Godin ...

A little healthy competition can be, well, healthy. Internal competition allowed to go too far, though, can be destructive. Dick Brass, a Microsoft vice president from 1997 to 2004, says that at Microsoft, internal competition has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which big, established groups prey upon emerging teams.

Evidence is mounting that seeing things as an outsider has advantages. When you’re on the outside looking in, you’re more likely to notice failures and anomalies. Sociologists long have wondered whether Albert Einstein, if he’d become a physics professor on the tenure track instead of a lowly patent clerk, would ever have noticed the anomalies that led him to develop the theory of relativity.

Must you pay hourly employees for … a cab to the airport? … a drive to a second work site? … a flight to a conference? Here is an analysis of these challenges, using a case study for each question:

Like the color magenta? Apparently, many leaders do. Among 900 CEOs who took a one-minute online personality test based on color preferences, the purplish-pink hue arose as a part of a profile that stands out clearly from about 750,000 others who’ve tried the test.

All along, Gen. Ambrose Burnside had supported an unorthodox plan: Dig a long tunnel, load it with dynamite and blow a hole in the Confederate lines defending Petersburg, Va., a vital rail hub. But a last-minute change from above threw Burnside into a funk, and he made a leadership error that cost the Union a speedy end to the Civil War and relieved Burnside of his command.

As health care attracts more attention, so has the importance of teamwork. One stunning development is the proliferation of checklists asking simple questions before surgery. These checklists, although clearly useful, often meet with hostility because they challenge doctors’ self-image as grand soloists. Here’s how Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author of The Checklist Manifesto, suggests that doctors can speed up innovation.

If you are used to accepting a lax summer work ethic from your employees (and maybe even taking on one of your own), it's time to stop. Use this summer season to push employees to ruthlessly focus on improving the business.

DaVita was a company on the verge of bankruptcy when CEO Kent Thiry took charge. In 10 years’ time, he led a great turnaround that took the business from a market capitalization of $200 million to more than $6 billion today. A few tactics Thiry used to turn around the organization:

Heads-up when you hear arguments about who’s in charge. That means no one’s in charge ... The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in April points to more than a pile of ad hoc exceptions to safety rules. It also points to an epic failure of leadership. Who was in charge: BP, the well’s owner, or Transocean, the rig’s owner?

The success of Amazon points to the importance of building a business with the capability to transform itself. Shorter business life cycles are one reason organizations must focus on transformation. The challenge for leaders, says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, is not to know all the answers, but to ask the right questions.

When Steven Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan in 1998, Hollywood hadn’t made a successful World War II film in two decades. Yet, it earned $440 million worldwide and won five Academy Awards. How did Spielberg succeed so well where so many others had failed?

One important way to judge your success as a manager is by the success of your employees. The best managers aren’t just the ones who can extract the most productivity from their people, but the ones who produce great future managers. How can you be sure that your best people will someday be top-notch leaders themselves? Start with the following basic yet effective tips for developing managerial skills among your employees.

If you’re having fits because your employees, your kids or even you think one person can’t make a difference, consider Michael Pollan. Today, when you pick up a package of English muffins that reads “Now No High-Fructose Corn Syrup,” that was one man’s doing. You can make a difference.

Don’t let the big boys shoot down an idea just because it’s new and weird. Another word for “new weirdness” is innovation. Consider Will Wright, the first leader of modern game design. Big companies couldn’t see the point of his game in which nobody “wins,” so Wright joined with two partners and self-published SimCity in 1989. Within a year, the game was a monster hit.

The U.S. Labor Department has announced it will no longer individually answer employers' specific questions about complex wage-and-hour issues. Instead of issuing opinion letters to respond to employers' questions, DOL will now offer "administrator interpretations" designed to offer general guidance on how to comply with federal pay laws.

In the never-ending quest for who is really developing raw talent, Fortune magazine, along with HR consulting firm Hewitt Associates and HR services firm RBL Group, created a system to rate the world’s largest companies. In choosing their top 25 firms, judges found that the best organizations go beyond the basics in developing strong leaders and come up with new ways to test employees.

To most Americans, King George III was a tyrant. In reality, he was a relatively kind and generous leader who was not responsible for the laws that drove the colonists to revolt. Parliament was. George even offered the Americans full autonomy under the British crown ...

Unless you have a god or goddess willing to intervene on your behalf, it’s never smart to let revenge drive your decisions. Consider the story of Odysseus, who succumbs to anger and slays many of his wife's suitors. Their families revolt against him and only an intervention from the goddess Athena saves him.

From his early days as a reporter covering wars in Somalia and Burma and genocide in Rwanda, CNN newsman Anderson Cooper often traveled solo, learning to handle perilous situations—and fear. With experience came wisdom and a greater measure of security, but in the beginning, Cooper overcame fear by plunging in. He simply made a fake press pass, borrowed a camera and went to war.

Policymakers can learn plenty about health care from Delos Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, a hospital consistently ranked as one of the best in the world. Leaders also can learn from the longtime surgeon who became the hospital’s top executive in 2004. A few of Cosgrove’s secrets:

By 2007, some cell phone makers realized they needed stronger, scratch-resistant screens for their gadgets. A team within the specialty materials division of Corning Inc. saw opportunity in an old formula for a superstrong but flexible glass—a material dubbed “Gorilla” ...

Think about your workforce. Do some of your employees require more “managing” than others? Do some enjoy pushing the limits, while others seem totally clueless about the problems they cause? From emotional drama queens to lazy slackers, all of these aggravating folks can be considered “challenging employees” — people who consume an inordinate amount of your time and energy, but are not really bad enough to fire.

After crushing Texan resistance at the Alamo and at Goliad, Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was confident that Sam Houston’s ragtag army of 800 volunteers posed no threat to his superior force. But because of his overconfidence at San Jacinto, Santa Anna ended up, in 18 minutes, ceding some 260,000 square miles of territory, which Mexico never would regain.