Coach Train Learn

Leadership – One Change Is All You Need

When we lead others, we carry a set of challenging responsibilities with us. Responsibilities to the organisation, to our people and above all, to ourselves.

In ourselves, we carry other burdens too. We are responsible for our well-being as a start and we also look after the needs of our family and friends as well.

So it’s vital that we are in great shape to do the best leadership we can, for the sakes of all these responsibilities.

Within this, we can find it a rather friendless existence. We need to be close enough, but distant from those who direct us from above. we need to keep a distance too from those we lead, because being too familiar with them creates its own problems, which can easily come back to bite us in the future.

Such as a closeness that prevents us from being honest with people. A closeness that clouds our judgement and prevents our objectivity from being sharply focused.

It can be difficult to understand, from the perspective we read our performance by, to appreciate who we are as a leader and who we might be if we refined our performance slightly. If we just tweaked our leadership, even by a bit.

And Perspective?

It defines seeing the same thing in many different ways, dependent on who we are; where we’ve come from and where, right now as we study things, exactly where we sit.

Changing the way we look at things can be on of the biggest – and indeed scariest – challenges we face, when we lead others into battle. From a different perspective, it is possible to see challenges in ways we can be different, when we see them in the different light that a change of perspective offers.

Whilst changing something about ourselves can make profound differences in how we do things and indeed, what we are able to deliver as performance, perhaps the one, most impactful change we can make, is to develop the capability to see things differently at all.

And then everyone, including those we take responsibilty for, can all be the beneficiaries too.

Leading for Commitment

Every leader needs people to lead. As a hint, it’s in the title!

Yet leaders come in many shapes and sizes. They also come with a range of capabilities to lead others and an even smaller minority are those leaders who gain exceptional commitment from their team.

Leaders need a team around them to ensure that the results demanded by the organisation can be delivered. A leader cannot do this alone. By default, the workload is far to much for one person.

And there is a difference between the leaders who lead others by name – and those who lead others and have the full engagement – or commitment – of those they lead.

Whilst many employees will be engaged by the Mel Gibson style ‘Braveheart’ speech, in which he rallies his troops against the English, this showman style motivation will only suffice for a while. Leaders who gain exceptional commitment from their people, are more.

Many of us carry experiences of those leaders we worked with once who we would follow to the ends of the earth.

For some it will be a memorable schoolteacher; for others it might be a mentor manager who engaged them during their career. It might be a family friend who they not only admire, but who took the time to be with them.

The key to driving commitment is not ‘Gung-Ho’, but ‘Softly-Softly’. The best leaders know this. In fact the best leaders might not actually acknowledge this, because it is so inherent within them, that they are who they are, quite naturally; quite innocently. They don’t have to work at it.

Memorable. Mentoring. Inspiring.

Someone others will follow to the ends of the earth.

Great commitment comes more from ‘who’ the leader is, rather than ‘what’ they do. That said, it is ‘what’ they do when they are being ‘who’ they are that makes the difference. It’s just that they don’t have to work at it in big ways. They don’t need the ‘Mel Gibson’ moments to drive it. There is something else.

The best leaders who drive commitment are those who are simply great people. They demonstrate qualities such as humanity; humblemness; caring; supportiveness; understanding; challenge and consistency.

They are trustworthy; gossip-free; follow through on what they say they will do; they apologise if they ever let others down (which is rare). They have even more qualities like this too.

Great leaders drive commitment though the person beneath, layered over with a bit of management skill, vision and strategy too.

Then their people truly will follow.

Key Tips For The New Leader

In this week’s blog post, Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements, shares his thoughts on ways to start out best as a new leader. You can find out more at his excellent blog at goalsandachievements.com

Key Tips For The New Leader

If you are like most of us you initially feel great when you secure your first leadership role.  A few months down the line you can easily find yourself in a position where you are lacking confidence and finding it a struggle.

So what are my 5 key tips for the new leader?

Key Tip 1: Be Prepared For The Dip

Stepping into a first role as a leader or even into a new leadership role, you are going to hit some sort of dip.  Rather than being surprised by it, recognise that it is going to happen.  After all you have probably moved from the top of the tree at the last level to the bottom of the ladder in your new role.

Key Tip 2: Don’t Be Over Ambitious

Yes you want to achieve results.  At the same time it is important to remember that being a leader is a marathon rather than a sprint.  You don’t have to achieve everything straight away and the reality is that it is not feasible either.  Focus on small things first and build momentum.

Key Tip 3: Listen Before Implementing

There will be things that you will see as the new person that others are missing.  Armed with this you could easily get into implementation mode.  A much better strategy is to focus on listening to others ideas, insights and contributions.  After all it might just turn your good idea into a great idea.

Key Tip 4: Take Care of Yourself

Leading is demanding.  To stay on top of your game you need to take care of yourself.  Leadership is as much about leading yourself as it is leading others.  Try to take consistent actions to keep you on top of your game.

Key Tip 5: Create A Support Network

It’s tough and often lonely at the top.  That is why a support network is vital.  It might be a mastermind group, a coach or mentor or even a membership forum.  Find what is right for you and get the support network in place.

Bottom Line: Leading is tough.  However, doing some simple things well can set you up for early success as a new leader.

Duncan Brodie is a leadership and management expert who can help you and your people achieve extraordinary success. Check his website out at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

Cleansing Life’s Little Irritations

In everyones’ lives there are minor irritations that get in the way of making us feel fulfilled and let us get on.

So often, they seem so trivial that it would feel a bit silly to be making a fuss in getting them resolved, especially where it might necessitate some sort of confrontation with someone else.

Yet when we do accept things that bug us, we are starting down a road of tolerating that slowly and surely begins to build up.

Once these are things in our lives that we allow to pass by without resolution, it can move from being a series of small annoyances – each in their own way trivial – to a much bigger animal that causes stress and frustration.

In business, when we lead others, the most effective are able to quickly find these sources of irritation and firmly resolve them.

Be they issues with people, resources or external factors, the strongest leaders understand clearly what is within their own influence and actively – pro-actively even – take steps to fix these issues fast.

Capable leaders fix them before they get anywhere near a big enough accumulation to become the bigger problem.

Indeed, for those who can act this way and do, problems are minimised. For those who don’t – often blaming the world and his mother for their challenges, with ‘it’s not MY fault’ – it’s their own behaviors which are the bigger problem.

It’s difficult for anyone not to carry a few unresolved matters around, yet accumulations of such things we tolerate are really a choice that we personally make. Choosing not to resolve such issues is therefore a choice too.

And, where we accept this – our own, conscious choice – it an indication of shortcomings in our capabilities, as much as anything.

So, here’s the challenge – notice those things that you’ve been tolerating recently and resolve, today, to stop. To get them off your back, right away, today.

Once a month, rinse and repeat.

Give yourself clean space to do what you do best – lead your people effectively.

You might find this link to the ‘Mark and Angel Hack Life’ website helpful too.

Let Your People Find Their Answers

It’s almost second nature to managers. Their team members come and share a problem with them and seek solutions. The manager, on cue, solves the problem and everyone’s happy.

For managers, here’s where the problems start. Although it’s ever so nice to feel the pride of being ‘the one who knows everything’ in the eyes of their people, it can be both repetitive and time-consuming for the manager after a while.

You see whilst it’s nice to be a hero and help everyone, the more you do it, the more they come to see you and get help.

Which actually helps no-one.

The manager ends up with a permanent knock on the door to fix the issues their people find, stopping them doing their own job; the individuals fail to develop properly because, well, they have a manager who fixes everything for them!

For the individual team members this can become quite frustrating, because they are always waiting for the boss to be available to solve their problems. It can seem arrogant that the boss is the only one with the answers.

The solutions given might not be quite the fit they want to deliver and even more of a problem, it can be boring when you simply get told what to do, rather than challenged to find solutions yourself.

And the solutions the manager finds are simply the thinking of one person, so others who might want to air their thoughts may find that the potential synergy of many, simply gets lost as our hero solves the problem all by themselves.

There’s an easy way round this.

Managers need to ‘not know’. When faced with an issue or a problem, a simple discipline to ask questions first will always create better outcomes both for relationships as well as results overall.

A simple ‘Well, what are you thinking…’ to ‘How do you think we can fix this…’ and everything in between, will get the best from your people. The phrasing of the language is vital. Softly supportive will build the relationship. Hard and challenging might scare team members off.

As you build their confidence to solve problems themselves, your office might become a much lonelier place and, as eventually people only rarely tap on your door, you can feel warm inside that they are all much better employees because of it.

Too often as managers we are the ones who know all the answers. Too often those answers are not the best fixes, and too rarely will our people develop and grow unless we facilitate that growth.

Step back; let go; be creative with your ‘not knowing’ and reap the benefits.

Be Timely With Confrontation

Confrontation is a challenging activity to undertake. It’s one that many managers fail to achieve in their role, all for the want of a seemingly easy life.

The challenge comes when those things which they have failed to face into accumulate and then come back to bite them.

The overwhelming level of challenge when so many matters have been unresolved will reach the tipping point and disaster strikes.

Confrontation when performance is below requirements is challenging enough; leaving it to brew – for the manager, the individual and the rest of the team, leads to an overall insecurity and stress levels that will lead to bigger consequences.

Many a time a manager has complained that they either cannot retain employees.

Yet further, deeper scrutiny will show that their own inability to confront their employees and maintain consistency and standards had a significant part to play.

When poor performance or indiscipline need to be faced up to, small and often is much more effective and less stressful for all than big and rare, particularly at the start of a workplace relationship.

By challenging these standards regularly – especially at the start of a role – a manager’s expectations quickly becomes understood by all and compliance will follow.

When you disagree with what your people do, ensure that you tell them fairly, promptly and simply, with a hint of firmness thrown in.

By ensuring it’s timely and relates to the one incident at a time, you will ensure that you are seen to be fair and determined and the occasions will happen less and less often.

By leaving important interventions too long, the matter becomes a big one and much more effort – more confrontation – is needed.

And this helps no-one.