How to – Plan to Lead At its most basic, leading is setting direction and guiding others to follow that direction. A critical skill for leaders is the ability to manage their own learning. If you are a highly motivated and self-directed professional, you learn by reading, listening to mentors, asking questions and being a good observer of people and your organizational culture. If you are responsible for the development of your organization’s future leaders, you have some guiding to think about.
Leadership Development in your Organization:

• What is your impression of the areas of knowledge and skills recommended for effective leadership? Does your organization have a list of core competencies for leaders?
• Is training and development for leaders informal, formal, other-directed or self-directed?
• How does your organization handle the short life span of useful knowledge that can result in training?
• How is the passing down of acquired competencies to succeeding employees dealt with?
• Can your firm accommodate the demands of productivity while providing for the continuity of learning?
• Does your organization pursue activities that correspond to different learning styles and needs or is it “one size fits all?”
• Does your organization have a formal mentoring program, or does it allow for leaders to obtain professional support in the way of coaches, consultants or counselors?

Without a well thought out and developed plan for leaders, employee growth will be haphazard at best and a waste of time at it’s worst. If you want your future leaders to learn how to set direction, influence others, provide guidance and feedback, develop persistence, initiative and risk – ask them if they see these leadership characteristics in you.  1:58 PM •  0 Comments •

How to – Lead the Best

You know that list of qualities you use as a leader in your organization? Creating and exporting your vision, confidence in yourself and others, a unique charisma that inspires followers as well as your experience, skills, expertise, or your network of associates and colleagues. Other leaders share some or maybe all of these qualities with you.

The potential contribution of the leaders who work for you is critical, but the opportunity for friction is even better if you don’t manage these relationships carefully. How do you leverage the assets of these talented and powerful employees while making sure that their egos remain intact?

You may be aware that the following behaviors are critical to people who are leading the leaders. The exceptional leader knows that these skills need to be attended to on a daily basis in an observable way.

To lead your organization’s leaders well:

§ Unite your leaders into a cohesive group and make your stars a team.

§ Provide direction and negotiate a vision for the organization that other leaders will buy into.

§ Mediate and resolve conflicts over turf and power among other leaders so the organization can move forward.

§ Develop other leaders, providing education for people who think they are already knowledgeable.

§ Motivate leaders and figure out how to move those who already seem “to have everything” to do the right thing for the organization.

§ Trust creativity by obtaining and keeping other leaders’ trust, the vital capital that your own leadership depends on.

  6:27 AM •  0 Comments •

How to – Be the Best Manager

Everyone has a different idea about what makes a great manager and most people can tell me what their boss does wrong. The Manager has to communicate Executive Management’s objectives to employees and convey their employees concerns to upper management. It’s a squeeze play that can leave even the best of us anxious, vulnerable and lonely. If you are unable to manage these feelings, you can end up dumping on your employees. That may get you the results you want in the short term, and turnover and dissatisfaction in the long run.

Some Managers are more concerned with the content of their work than in developing and coordinating the work of others. Employees run around getting minimal management support while the boss is doing what they think is more interesting or more important.

The best managers can absorb the pressure from above; and they enjoy and get satisfaction from seeing employees growing, developing, succeeding and having fun at work.

Want to be the Best Manager you can be?

• Control your emotions: handle the pressure from above without jumping all over your employees.

• Manage the expectations of your boss so you can minimize the stress being placed on you in the first place.

• Spend 80% of your time managing, training, coaching, delegating, training, facilitating and motivating your team. The other 20% should be spent dealing with the strategic matters that you find most interesting.

• Spend time each week with individual employees, learning about what they are doing, how they are doing, and listening to what they are saying.

• Get the input of the people who are doing the work. You show them they are a valuable resource when you ask them to contribute their opinions and ideas.

  3:02 PM •  0 Comments •

How to – Lead Leaders One thing that defines Leaders is that they have Followers. For organizations that want to grow and thrive, that just isn’t enough. Leaders also need to be able to find and develop Leaders. Granted, not everyone can be a Leader and not everyone should be a Leader.

There are certain things Leaders do to produce Leaders:

Talk – tell others about the experiences you’ve had and what you’ve learned from the successes and non-successes.

Coach – provide feedback and opportunities for guidance and direction so others can learn with someone helping rather than waiting.

Train – review the strategy planning required and the skills needed to insure strategy success. Provide opportunities for management development programs where they develop critical skills and you support the application of what they’ve learned.

Mentor – be the touchstone for potential leaders and provide the support they need to risk successfully.

Above all else, this requires the most precious commodity: Time. To grow Leaders actual time must be set aside to teach, show by example, and discuss how leading is actually done. Few people learn leadership well by being tossed into the leadership waters to see who can swim. The best leaders spent a significant amount of their time developing the leadership skills of others rather than looking how best to develop their own career.

Think about if you are a true Leader, or simply a person who is eager for followers. Your employees already know which you are.  3:29 PM •  0 Comments •

How to – Seek Risk It is often cited that while managers are risk-averse, Leaders are risk-seeking. When a Leader has a vision that they want their employees to embrace, they consider it natural to encounter hurdles that must be overcome along the route to success. Leaders are comfortable with risk and may see routes that hold potential opportunities that others avoid because they view them as potential problems. Leaders can see the possibility of an advantage and are willing to break a rule or two to get things done.

Ask yourself:

• Do you seek change or stability?

• Are you thinking long-term or short-term?

• Are you proactive or reactive?

• Do you seek to take risks or reduce risks?

• Do you take the blame or give it to others?

• Do you break rules or make rules?

• Do you have followers or subordinates?

Ask others how they see you to get a more objective picture of how you appear to others. You can see yourself as both a Leader and a Manager, but how you see risk can reveal how other people see you.  10:38 AM •  0 Comments •

How to – Stop Workplace Bullying In an ideal world, a bully may be a childhood rite of passage that we deal with as we learn how to become adults. In reality, they exist in the workplace and drain of us of energy and focus needed to do the job. They are present at ALL organizational levels, in all industries, and in all functions.

Bullying behaviors in the workplace involve a lack of regard for others and include observable behaviors such as:
• Verbal intimidation
• Harassment
• Incivility
• Teasing
• Gossiping
• Physical intimidation
• Withholding business information
• Overruling decisions without a rationale
• Sabotaging team efforts
• Demeaning others

Suggestions to regain control of the situation and diffuse the impact of a bully include:

Get out of the Crowd
Address them by name in a calm, low voice and suggest that the conversation be moved to a more private area.

Turn down the Volume
If they are yelling or the volume begins to escalate, remember to keep your voice calm and speak in a normal tone. Many people cannot sustain a shouting match if they are the only ones doing it.

Slow Things Down
Tell them you need to think about what they’ve said. Give yourself some space to think about things by walking away.

Is This Business as Usual?
Determine if this person often exhibits over the top behavior or if something unusual has happened to set them off.

YOU are in Charge of You
It is your responsibility to take care of yourself, not theirs. If your rights are not being respected, you may have to refuse the request.

Keep it Short
Be brief in your response. Forget about explaining why you are unable to comply with their demand. You don’t want to get into a negotiation.

Let Them Know Their Impact
It can be very powerful to simply state: “I don’t know if you are aware of this, but your behavior (screaming) is really scaring me right now.”

Déjà Vu
A bully doesn’t like it when they don’t get what they want and may want to get involved in “Round #2.” Simply repeat your stand using the same concise phrases.

Disengage
Without an audience or a target, a bully has nothing to do! Agree to disagree and depart.

While you may not be able to eliminate a bully and their boss may not be able to manage their behavior, you can reduce the impact they have on you.  8:34 AM •  0 Comments •

How to – Ask the Right Questions When Interviewing Candidates When job candidates tell me some of the questions they are asked during their job interviews, I cringe.

• “What are your three biggest strengths?”
• “What are your three biggest weaknesses?”
• “Tell me about yourself.”
• “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

If you are asking these questions, consider yourself among the lazy hiring managers who deserve exactly what they get: a poor fit for the job, the department and the organization.

There are many things that go into a good, targeted job interview; and questions that probe weaknesses and validate strengths are essential. The next time you find yourself sitting across from a potential employee, ask questions that will get you some useful information to help you make a better hiring decision:

How much can you learn about them to determine if they will be a good fit?

What did you think of our website?

How do you think we compare with our competition?

What unique attributes, skills or talents could you bring to our team?

How do they deal with stress?

Can you tell me about an ongoing and stressful part of you last job and how you dealt with it?

What makes you the best fit for this position compared to the others I’m interviewing?

What type of person is the most challenging for you to deal with as a co-worker and how do you address that?

Can they do the job?

When you worked at ABC Financial, what was the most challenging part of learning their system?

When you ran the HR department at XYZ Systems, what were the steps you took to create your senior team?

I see you were in charge of a system conversion at 123 Bancorp. How did you transfer data and maintain field integrity?  9:36 AM •  1 Comments •