Kairology

Last month I left you with some thoughts about the common lies around leadership, and how they impact on people and business. As promised, here is the other side of the coin – the truths that underpin good leadership.

The 7 Truths of Liberating Leadership by Ian A. Williams

This article was published in NZ Business Magazine Jan/Feb 2010

In business and life, we are always on the lookout for key information to help us with leadership. I believe is keeping this simple rather than looking for over-complex solutions to relatively simple issues. My passion for good leadership often leads me to observe and reflect on what happens in the workplace for individuals and teams. I listen out for success, quality and enjoyment, and have collected some common threads of successful leadership, which I have summarised as the seven truths of liberating leadership.

1. The focus of leadership comes from the heart

While management comes primarily from intellect and thinking, leadership is governed from the heart – using the head of course! Leadership is driven from values and spiritual core, and from real self. Emotional intelligence is also more akin to leadership, while IQ more akin with management thinking. You carry in your heart what drives your head, and carry in your head what drives the heart. Both are important and need exercise. Using both demonstrates balance.

2. The drive for results is often the wrong focus

While results and outcomes are essential, the route to reaching them can often be misunderstood. Task focus will keep minds on the goal, but without ‘people-thinking’ a dead horse is being flogged! What really gets results is focus on the individuals and team; people are the route to achieving anything. It seems obvious, so why do so many leaders and managers overlook it constantly. John Adair’s action-centred leadership model demands the need for balance between task, team and individual. This provides the integrity for success.

3. Leadership is a journey, not simply a skill set for the individual and the team

The word leadership is derived from an ancient word associated with taking a journey. Ancient people used this work in connection with planning a route over land, or a course across the seas. This implies heading for what was unknown territory, with a mysterious adventure to be had. That required huge vision, imagination and faith. That’s the excitement and terror that leadership can produce.

4. Calm, humble, servant leadership is king

When you really think hard about the best leaders you’ve ever known or heard of, who did good things for the planet, a nation, a cause, or just a damn good job, you will find they are all likely to have one thing in common. That is a sense of humility and calm in their leadership. The best leadership role models are likely to be those serving others, and serving their cause. That’s how they get people on board, and that’s how they become loved and respected. It’s a key part of what we now call engagement.  Calmness of spirit in a leader promotes trust and confidence in followers. They make leadership look so natural that they create leaders from their followers. Being calm is not always being quiet; good communication is always key but calm leaders are often inspirational in a way that followers think they thought of an idea themselves. The humility of the leader lets them carry on thinking they did!

5. Leadership needs to be simple and common

As one of the most sought after qualities in humanity, leadership is a big subject. The Google statistics for leadership, and aspect of it, are vast. It’s so big a subject that people are often baffled by it, and fearful of aspiring to leadership. The good news is that leadership can be very simple, and is for everyone. Many who aspire to leadership forget that they are already leading themselves, and those closest to them. And if they are not, they should be! Leading yourself is the only safe place to practice, and practice makes perfect! Let’s get out of denial, and out of limiting ourselves. Lead yourself as if you were leading someone else – with respect and tolerance. Everyone leading themselves and others (if only by example) makes leadership a very common activity – and so it should be!

6. What people carry with them from childhood and teens is always with them, and surfaces in crisis and pressure

Adults are just children who grew up – some more than others. And while we think we left our happy and sad memories and experiences behind, we carry them with us constantly and unconsciously, in who we are, what we do, and how we respond. The best thing we can do with all that stuff is to let go what needs letting go, and face up to what has to stay. And whether it’s happy or sad, or whatever emotion it raises, let’s use it positively in our leadership now. Let’s also recognise that everyone else is carrying stuff too, so give them some room. If you want to be an exceptional leader, and a great human being, take no interest in who people are, and especially if you’d like them to follow you.

7. The heart of one person determines a whole culture

This is the responsibility that comes with leadership. Whether a leader of a huge organisation, a few dozen people, your family, or even just yourself, recognise that the heart that drives the blood through your body is the heart that drives your spirit. How you lead your thinking, your responses and your outcomes has a ripple effect on everyone else. So do it all with care. Everyone in an organisation or family has an impact on culture, but the one person at the top – on whom everyone else is focused – will have the biggest stone and make the biggest ripple. The ripple response in responsibility!

These seven aspects of leadership are contagious. If you lead an organisation or team, or even yourself, with these characteristics being evident, congratulate yourself for being exceptional, and go all out for continuous improvement. If this doesn’t sound like your experience, start work on these aspects now, and look forward to reaping the benefits. Happy people make happy and productive teams.

©Kairos Development Ltd. 2009 - All rights reserved

Introduction by Ian Williams

I was recently reading a book by Abbot Christopher Jamison regarding the ancient virtues that provided a platform for modern values and laws. Sometimes we need to look at the what is negative and works against us, in order to recognise what kinds of things we should be doing that work in our favour, or in other words turn a sin into a virtue!

The Seven Deadly Sins of lifestyle in ancient times were described as: Pride, Anger, Envy, Sloth, Greed, Lust and Gluttony. Perhaps we can recognise how they are still at the root of our problems! The positive comes from establishing values and virtues that counteract these negatives – turning what works against us into what works for us in building positive relationships and getting the right results. For example, switching leadership from pride to humility is a great one!

Mary Gorski highlights eight deadly sins of leadership in the following article. The challenge for us as leaders is to look at what we do to turn these negatives to positives in our own lives and organisations. I’m amazed in my work in organisations how underused evaluation is in relation to people and tasks – and that limits efficiency and effectiveness.

If you run out of ideas for righting some wrongs, or need some great solutions, contact me!

Ian

Eight Deadly Sins Of Leadership by Mary Gorski

What has happened to enthusiasm in the workplace? For many employees, it has seemingly disappeared. They gripe and mutter about their frustrations at work. You hear them complain about managers - and to be fair, managers complain about them. Both complain about the company.

In many businesses, everything seems out of whack. The company has one agenda, the worker has another and the manager can’t mesh the two. Core competencies fail to support the company vision. Worse, company policies and procedures impair efficiency rather than help get the work done in a timely manner. Everyone but the worker doing the job defines the way it should be done and quality improvement means doing faster rather than doing less more profitably.

Sadly, many companies today operate in an atmosphere of distrust where corporate loyalty no longer exists, not to mention “fun” on the job.

“What’s going wrong” is the million-dollar question. For the answer, we can turn to a boatload of self-help books that tell us how to do things right. But sometimes learning what can go wrong so we can determine how to avoid these problems is just as valuable.

Beginning with five people-management transgressions, here are eight deadly sins of leadership for your consideration:

1) Assuming your employees know the company’s objectives and purpose.

You have a vision and a great plan in place. Now who will implement it? Even the best plan is worthless if it’s misunderstood or your employees - at all levels - fail to embrace it. After all, your workforce powers your plan. For success, integrate your strategic workforce planning into your business planning.

2) Approaching selection and hiring in a haphazard manner.

Hiring employees in a haphazard manner is like drawing to an inside straight in poker. Odds are you’ll lose. Statistics show you will hire a less-than-stellar worker 86 percent of the time if you use poor hiring practices. Worse, without careful hiring practices, you could get sued.

If you want your odds to improve, use pre-employment screening. Although rigorous interviews and background checks can help you form an accurate picture of past behavior, pre-employment screening is a better predictor of future behavior. It assesses attitudes toward integrity, substance abuse, reliability and work ethic.

3) Not training your employees.

Training to ensure that your employees have the right knowledge and skills to get the job done are fundamental to a company’s continued efficient and profitable performance. Yet some companies overlook training, often because of the expense.

It’s true that training costs money. But failing to develop your people’s talents, costs more money.

If you truly believe your employees are your number one asset, give them the training they need to do their jobs. Think of creative ways to develop employees so they grow, and stay on the job and with your company. Leadership training is also essential and one needs to consider the wide variety of management training tools that are available.

4) Failing to provide appropriate feedback. We’ve talked before about engaging employees, and how important communication and appropriate feedback is to helping engaged employees stay that way.

Unfortunately companies and their employees often disagree about the effectiveness of feedback in their companies. In a recent Salary.com study of 2,000 employees and 330 HR professionals, two thirds of companies believe their performance reviews are effective while only 39 percent of employees agree.

Make sure you and your employees see eye to eye on the effectiveness of your evaluation processes. Giving meaningful, constructive feedback through performance reviews and conversations during the course of daily activities boosts employee engagement and performance, and their career development.

5) Treating employees as a commodity.

Any company that has experienced the high cost of employee turnover understands its toll: replacement costs, loss of productivity and decreased morale. Treat employees like a commodity and they will respond in kind: They’ll leave as soon as possible for the next best offer.

Your bonus: three business management sins

So there you have them: five deadly “people” leadership sins. Now here, as a bonus, are three business management mistakes:

6) Failing to evaluate and measure.

It’s easy to fall into the “business-as-usual” habit - that is, performing tasks by rote or doing things the same way simply because that is the way we have always done them.

Yet rarely, can we meet changing customer needs by doing “business as usual”.

To avoid this trap, continually assess your business’ activities. Are they necessary and relevant? Track them to determine their effectiveness and efficiency. Further, if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.

7) Assuming you are doing a good job and your customers are happy.

Are your customers happy? Have you asked? Assuming customer satisfaction simply because you have had no complaints, will most likely give you a false sense of security.

Use mechanisms to encourage customer feedback. Carefully listen to and act on that feedback.

8) Not marketing.

Marketing and its related disciplines, public relations, research and advertising, identify new markets, communicate to prospects and clients, and establish your brand and message. In other words, marketing works hand-in-hand with sales.

Unfortunately, many companies do not understand this marketing and sales relationship.

Failure to pursue marketing strategies handicaps your ability to compete. Even if you have an excellent sales force, you should actively market your business.

Feedback and responding to it are keys to correcting leadership Ills

Do any of these “deadly sins” look familiar? Have you seen them in your company?

If so, it’s probably time to “regroup”. Your company’s success depends upon effective leadership. But how in the world do you get effective leadership where it’s lacking today?

It’s not as tough as you might think. Correcting leadership ills begins with simply identifying what they are, and you’ll find leadership tools to help with that process in the marketplace. One of the most powerful being the 360 degree performance evaluation feedback system

With these tools, you can provide your leaders with feedback from people who observe their performance - their supervisors, employees and peers. The objective is to gather specific, job-related information they can use to make positive changes. And then, with the self-knowledge they gain from his feedback, they can:

• Improve their performance.
• Identify training needs.
• Improve their leadership, goal setting, interpersonal and organizational skills.
• Increase their leadership accountability.

Of course, your leaders must be open to this feedback and willing to respond positively. Given this willingness, however, feedback tools can positively impact their individual growth and your organization’s success.

To prosper - even survive - companies must constantly rethink the way they do things. Begin your own evaluation process soon. Then turn the above deadly sins into positive action to leverage your new leadership practices.

You’ll soon discover a new, enthusiastic workplace. Your people will have fun on the job again. They’ll like what they do and do it well. Corporate loyalty will return and so will rising profits.

—

Mary Gorski has more than 15 years of corporate human resource management and assessment experience. She has worked with many levels of leadership and understands the needs of a well-run, efficient business. At the same time she understands the human factor and what motivates people to maximum performance and efficiency.

Using her experience and tools from Profiles International, Mary works with business owners to identify their people talent and help them understand how their workers drive results. She begins with diagnosis, and then designs a plan for improving workforce effectiveness. As a result of her assistance, businesses profit from a more motivated, engaged and productive workforce.

Visit her Web site at http://www.mgassessments.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Gorski

by Steve Betsworth

Success

Success is what everyone wants, but how can you get it. There are three key strategies to ensure your road to success. You first need to acknowledge that as the cliché states, ‘Success doesn’t happen overnight.” Success is a process and not a singular event in time, so you must embrace the journey of discovery that is the finding your own personal recipe for success, success is something that once you think you have obtained, you can go on developing, so it is also not a destination. Success is about growing as a person, so you need to go through that process, which may take time and patience. Acquiring skills and traits that attract success is part of the process and expanding your skills base will only lead to personal and even spiritual growth. Prepare yourself for success. You must be ready to travel the road. As long you recognise that it is a process then you can better adjust for disappointments along the way, which there will be. But once you start seeing the benefits of your personal investment, you will recognise that you are starting to success in attaining your goals.

Leadership 

By fine tuning your leadership skills you stand a significantly increased chance of achieving tangible success in the workplace. Here are a few tips on how to improve your personal leadership attributes. There are always lessons to be learned from every situation, and if you can focus on those learned form previous experiences the next time something happens, then your personal performance will improve each time. Sharpen the performance of your people. People are the most important part of any organisation and time spent maximising their potential is time that is rarely wasted. An employee who feels valued will work harder for you and the company. Clear communication is the key to maximising time and performance. If people know what you want then they will deliver a better produce, mixed messages make for an unpleasant atmosphere is uncertainty. Clearer communication will improve the self-confidence of those around you to perform better. 

Attraction is important

If you want other people, employees and clients, to like you, then you have to begin to like yourself first. Being liked is important no matter what you think. You are less likely to get the contract if they people on the other side of the desk don’t like you. This does not mean pander to them and appear weak, it means being genuinely self-confident in your reflections on your own self. The key to success here is reading the other people and treating them as you would like to be treated yourself. As you build self confidence in this area, you will see your success increasing proportionally. Don’t think that all people will like you, all of the time, this simply won’t happen. If someone appears not to like you, it may have nothing to do with you as a person; it may merely be a misconception of the environment you are working in. Focus on the positives and make them work for you.

About the Author

Steve Betsworth is an Internet Marketer who runs a website which currently offers a free five day e-course and an introductory video which explains not only the principles in this article in more detail, but more methods of finding success. The website is wealthmindmap.com

This month I have selected three articles which have a theme around personal style in relation to others. If as leaders we want to get the best from people, we have to value them. That means ensuring they feel included, that their confidence and skills are being built, and that we lead others as we would like to be led ourselves. Leadership comes from position, knowledge and character, and we should be prepared as leaders to demonstrate all three. That includes being attractive and likeable – I know firsthand that people leave leaders, not organisations. Don’t be shy of wanting to be liked! Why else would people want to be around you?

Keep watching Kairology.com for a range of articles on these personal values and leadership styles.