Tag Archives: Leadership

Employees, Leadership, Personal Growth

5 simple ways to improve your leadership

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Leadership is a set of highly integrated skills that, in many ways, are better learned in real life on the job than in other types of educational scenarios. 

Here are some simple ways to augment your leadership training I have found to be effective in my career. Their only real cost time and attention. 

Coach a team

Coaching a team helps you practice preparing, planning, communicating and making decisions in real time.

When my son was younger I coached his youth soccer teams for several years, even though I was not a soccer player in my own athletic pursuits. I had to schedule practice, communicate with parents and players, actually train, evaluate and coach the players to improvement and manage games.

I learned to communicate more simply and cleary and repeatedly – all of which are key skills for any level of leadership.

I learned to train our players in routine and I learned to use fun and competition to encourage effort. These concepts also apply directly to coaching your employees. 

Grow Plants

I am not a green thumb. Growing plants for me is not easy. I have to be persistent. However, I have noticed that growing plants can instill habits that serve well in leading organizations.

Plants require a certain consistency in checking and care. Plants require observation, diagnosis and corrective action. 

When plants are cared for you are rewarded with food or beautiful flowers or greenery.

Plants are a lot like organizations. Organizations need constant care and feeding. They also sometimes need observation, diagnosis and corrective action. I have a row of plants on my office credenza which are constant reminders to me of the care and attention needed for organizational health.

Teach Kids

Working with kids are great ways to practice your communication and your ability to think and plan ahead.

Managing a room of small children makes you think ahead and plan. You will become better at anticipation and acting to head off issues and problems.

Teaching kids also forces you to communicate clearly and repeatedly to make your message clear and understood. 

Kids also ask very direct and penetrating questions much like employees or customers. You get to practice forming clear, concise answers in a low risk environment.

When you teach kids you also get to deal with those times of kids are acting out or causing problems. Dealing with these situations in real time trains you on to think, act and reason quickly to regain control of the situation.  

Watching kids grow and learn and develop is also very rewarding. Much in the same way an organization grows and achieves goals and objectives. 

Teaching kids is amazing practice for leading an organization.

Serve

The best leadership is lived out by serving your organization. Practice service, meeting the needs of others.

Serving forces focus on another, specifically meeting their needs. It’s so easy to get so self absorbed as to be of little use to the people around us. Service puts the pause button on our self focus and invites us to focus on others for a time.

Service helps build your generosity muscles, giving time, emotion, experience, encouragement or resources for the good and help of others.  

And, as you serve, especially if you are working with those less fortunate than you, it builds your own sense of gratitude.

As an organizational leader the qualities of service, focus on others, generosity and gratitude are key to building your people and building their trust in you as a leader. 

Reflect

Have a time of daily reflection where you can quietly, calmly think about the events of the day and your reaction to them. 

What went right? What went wrong?

What could I have reacted better to?

How could I have handled that situation better?

Was my work today in line with my character, plan and goals?

What did I learn today that will change what I do tomorrow?

This type of reflection builds a feedback loop for continuous improvement and better planning for tomorrow. 

 

I have found these ways helpful in my leadership development, when I was willing and humble enough to learn the lessons these environments were trying to teach me. 

What are your simple ways to improve leadership capability?

Employees, Leadership, Teams

6 P’s of really bad leadership OR don’t inspire your employees this way

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Bad leadership can be highly inspirational. It inspires anger, mutiny, frustration, confusion, abandonment, resentment or just plain old apathy. All of which, negatively affect your business.

Use the 6 Ps below to see if you have any of the highly inspirational traits. And find out alternative mindsets for change.

Patronizing

When leaders patronize their team they are sending an implicit message that they don’t believe the team knows what they are doing. It is a message of superiority on the part of the leader. It’s saying “I’m smarter than all of you”.

Patronizing your team chokes the flow of ideas and communication. No one likes being spoken to in this way. It makes you feel like a child and generates resentment. Do this long enough and folks will stop ‘having your back’. That can expose the leader’s blind spots in public and sometimes embarrassing ways.

Smart leaders will use tone, words and body language that encourages dialog and ideas.

Pontificator

A close relative of the “Patronizer” is the pontificator. A pontificator expresses themselves in such a way as to convey that they are always right. And usually, they do it in an overly long-winded dialog. They may allow conversation and listen to other ideas. But at the end of the discussion they make it clear through their speeches that they are the ones who are correct.

This too, is a habit that limits real communication. It makes people zone out. It encourages your team to go through the motions. It undermines team effectiveness. Why bother fighting for a great idea when you have to be brow beaten with long winded diatribes about why your idea is not as good as the pontificator’s idea? People will give up.

Observant leaders will carefully structure their words. You as the leader may be right. If so, then communicate clearly why. Succinctly list reasons or constraints that eliminate other ideas or courses of action. Invite dialog. Explore counter arguments. You may well be right. Or you way well learn something new.

Platitudes

Leaders with nothing substantive to say often resort to platitudes. These statements are worn out cliche’s that have little or no value in the business context in which they are said. They are said so much they are meaningless.

Phrases such as “It is what it is“, or “You never know what might happen” are worthless. Jeff Haden has more great ones in this article.

Resorting to platitudes during a time when real debate, discussion, and collaboration is needed on hard issues will evaporate the confidence of your team in you as a leader.

Effective leaders don’t waste others time with meaningless phrases that serve only to derail substantive discussions. They speak clearly and concisely directly to issues, allowing their team to fully participate.

Petulant

So what happens when you don’t get what you want?

Maybe the software release is going to be late. Maybe you didn’t get the contract. Maybe marketing rejected your ideas on the new website.  Maybe the CEO rejected your product plan.

Do you react in anger? Do you throw a fit? Do you lash out in rage on unsuspecting subordinates when they had nothing to do with the issue?

If you react like this, you are a petulant leader. Think of a three-year-old not getting the toy they want, falling down kicking and screaming. Yeah, you’re an adult version of that.

Having a public negative reaction undermines confidence in your leadership and will cause employees think twice before bringing bad news to you. The bad leadership behavior clogs up the communication pipeline.

Good leaders understand that things don’t always go your way. They react professionally and use these times as learning opportunities. They focus on what improvements they can make when bad things occur.

Pretender

The pretender always seems to have done great things…somewhere else. They can regale you with stories of great business prowess from yesteryear. They are always they one who saved the day, rescued the sale, figured out the bug. They always have accomplishments that no one else has heard of. Pretenders spend more time in the neighborhood of make believe than they do making people believe in whatever they are doing.

The pretender knows the jargon but comes up short on execution and results. Excuses yes, accomplishments, not really. Pretenders are impressive at first glance but with any probing, you see quickly how shallow they are. And pretenders are highly skilled at pointing the finger of blame somewhere else. They wear Teflon jackets.

Fred Brooks said it well in The Mythical Man Month:

“In practice, actual (as opposed to formal) authority is acquired from the very momentum of accomplishment”

Pretenders may have titular authority, but true influence comes from results. Eventually, the pretenders have to move over for those who actually get things done.

Authentic leaders inspire more devotion because their words and actions reconcile.

Parsimonious

These are the leaders that will choke every last cent out of an organization. No toilet paper is cheap enough. No coffee is too watery tasting. No office supply cabinet is too bare for their tastes. Spending the tiniest amount of money, even on absolute necessities, is like pulling wisdom teeth without anesthesia.

Certainly, keeping a judicious eye on expenses is prudent and desirable. But if getting you to spend any money is harder than prying food from the hands of a starving man you are misguided. If you cling to every cent and are so maniacal about costs that you won’t buy sugar packets for the coffee machine you are missing the bigger picture.

There is a balance between expense control and putting out a few bucks to improve the business or treat the employees from time to time.

Balanced leaders know a little spent here and there can go a long way to adding fun,  improving morale and generally making people enjoy the environment more. All of which are shown to improve productivity and engagement. Happy employees are proven to take care of customers  far more effectively than their sad sack counterparts.

So What?

If any of these behavioral attributes ring true for you, the first step to change is admitting you have a problem. If you have leadership tendencies from this list know you can change your habits. These traits may not in singular cases cause you big problems but they all subtly undermine your leadership and effectiveness if the behavior is engaged in on a regular basis.

If you are an employee and see these attributes consistently in your leader or leadership team then it may be time to polish up that LinkedIn profile.

Maybe this was what Grandma was talking about with the admonishment to “mind your P’s and Q’s”.

Employees, Leadership, Teams

How emotional immaturity is like a clogged toilet and what you can do about it

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There are few thing more unpleasant to deal with than unclogging a toilet. Over the years I have heard those famous and dreaded words several times, “Dad, the toilet is clogged, again”. I am not sure who decided it was Dad’s problem when the toilet clogged but I would like a re-count.

Thankfully, most of the time the remedy is quick and the problem is literally flushed away in a few moments. Sometimes, however, the problem is more serious, messy and in need of professional assistance.

The last time this happened, while I was correcting the clog, it occurred to me that this is exactly what happens in teams of people where emotional maturity is lacking in one or more of the team members.

Emotional immaturity creates situations where things that should be flushed away quickly hang around and clog up other normal interactions and operations. And, like a clogged toilet, if they hang around too long things get ugly and very unpleasant fast. And everyone notices.

I have found that in order to best deal with these situations you have to act quickly as a manager or leader. The longer the situations are left hanging in the air the more team chemistry can be damaged.

So what can you do about an emotionally immature situation?

I have found that a quick, low key dialog as close to the point of the issue or incident is best. Think Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager. Try to be calm and focused, directly pointing out the observed issue, and desired action. Before you engage with the person, mentally rehearse what and how you need to say and try to anticipate their responses. If I am calm and low key in my approach I have found that the employee or colleague is more receptive. In most cases employees respond well and the issue is ‘flushed away’ and things are better. Most employees want to improve and when presented with actionable opportunities they will work to improve.

But what do you do when emotional issues  don’t change?

Some people lack the emotional maturity to handle basic relational situations like clear, open or honest communication, confrontation, conflict, compromise, or forgiveness. In other words, they missed the day in Kindergarten when getting along with others was taught. Others  remain emotionally opaque and can’t have meaningful relationships while some are just plain mean, devious and vengeful. These are the kind of people that can really ‘clog up’ your team and company.

In cases where someone is in that situation they have to learn and choose to make different choices, let go of anger, forgive, adapt, grow and become more open. It’s not easy. That person has to have a recognition that there is a problem and a willingness to make changes. Some folks can do that, others choose not to. And here, sometimes a professional is needed.

It’s not me it’s YOU

At one point in my career, there was a team member who basically operated with the attitude that if you ever did them wrong (actual or perceived) you were written off and nothing would change that. That person chose to remain full of anger and resentment toward their perceived injustices which led to deep seated bitterness. Their actions and attitudes created a negative atmosphere and affected team productivity and cohesion. Coaching, closed door meetings or pleadings could not change their anger or resentment toward the situation or the other team members.  And, in that case, it only got better when that person was no longer with the company. In this case, I was a victim of the sunk cost fallacy. I had already invested a lot of time and effort in trying to improve the situation so I didn’t take the necessary action when I should have. The delay hurt the team, the individual involved and me.

Necessary Changes

As a manager or leader in this situation you have to decide how critical the issue is, how disruptive it is to the team and how that on-going situation affects the department or company. You have to decide if the contribution of that employee is worth the disruption. Most of the time it is not. When your threshold is crossed and other forms of redress with the employee have not worked, you have to act in removing that troubling employee, either by re-assignment, moving to another department or division or firing them altogether. Dr. Henry Cloud, in his book “Necessary Endings” lays out clear guidelines and methods for these situations. I highly recommend it.

On a team that is operating at a high level, one bad apple can affect the whole lot. It is better to deal with issues while they are still small than to wait until the mess is really bad and stinky later.

Now, where is that plunger????