Welcome to Forbes. 10 Things Only Exceptional Bosses Give Employees. Leadership. Credibility-book.com. The Core Beliefs of the Delightfully Successful. Leading in Chaos – Six Essentials to Stay Focused & Enable Success. Can you imagine anything more disconcerting than driving at 100 mph in a thick fog – with the radio blaring, cell phone ringing, and the kids in the back seat asking, “Are we there yet?” Yet, isn’t that what it is like operating in business today? The fog is thick, the pace is rapid, and the distractions are constant. Where can business leaders find solutions to be able to navigate through this chaos and produce results in this very uncomfortable environment? Perhaps our military leaders can offer some ideas. If there is anything that today’s military leaders are comfortable with it is in being…uncomfortable.
In places like Afghanistan (and Iraq before it), spans of control are so broad, geographic distances are so immense, and challenges so diverse that leaders cannot possibly be everywhere or know everything that is happening. 1. What is important to us and why? 2. Where are we going? 3. How do all of our actions align to get us out of this chaos and into calmer waters? 4. 5. 6. Complexity is Here and it’s Time to Get on Board.
Efficiency is the bugbear of modern organizations. Our culture—particularly our business culture is steeped in industrial-age metaphors of assembly lines, and economies of scale. We are continually looking for how to do things faster and cheaper, with the assumption that what follows is a better—read “more profitable”—organization. We work hard to simplify and hone our human systems to a machine-like efficiency, so we can be the envy of neighbors and the crusher of competition. In the industrial age the focus on eking every last bit of productivity from humans usually had a heartbreaking cost to the people doing the work—but was beneficial to the bottom line. So we developed strict labor laws to control Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s. In the information age the playing field is entirely different.
We aren’t building machines or buildings anymore, we are building complex systems. When I say complex I mean something very specific. Your Business is a System What is your business made of? Words of Wisdom: 8 Famous Quotes to Help You Embrace Fear and Achieve Success. Four Pillars Of Leadership. Dr. Deming’s “Role of a Manager of People” Dr. W. Edwards Deming ‘s last book was The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education . In Chapter 5, Deming writes, “Transformation in any organization will take place under a leader. It will not be spontaneous.” A leader “possesses knowledge, personality, and persuasive power.” How does a leader accomplish transformation? The leader has a theory and “understands why the transformation would bring to his organization and to all the people that is organization deals with.” Deming writes about the balance between head and heart, that the “head is not enough.”
The first point about understanding WHY is familiar to those who have read the Toyota Production System literature. I like how Deming emphasizes the understanding of benefits to ALL the “organization deals with.” In Chapter 6, Deming writes about the “role of a manager of people” in an organizational transformation effort. A manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. .
Lots of great stuff here in Dr. 11 Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader. The Influencing Formula. Leadership Practices to Stop Today. The 11 Leadership Secrets You've Never Heard About. Walking the Leadership Tightrope. The Tightrope of Leadership As leaders and change-agents, we walk a daily tight-rope between how we “should” do things because that’s how they’ve always been done … which may be contrary to what believe matters today and tomorrow.
Leadership is no different. To be a true leader, we must walk this tightrope in our daily actions. While most people would not want to be in our leadership shoes for fear of ridicule, being ostracized or publicly called out … they secretly and silently cheer us on. For almost 20 years I”ve been writing, speaking and coaching leaders to courageously use the “F” word and the “V” word. At first, I treaded lightly, because I was told if I didn’t, no one would listen. Sure, after about the 10 year milestone, and with the help of platforms like the Lead Change Blog, I no longer felt like a fish out of water. But who am I, one who’s never walked in a CEO -of-a-Fortune-500′s-Company’s-Shoes to tell YOU how to be a successful leader as a card-carrying MBA, CXO? Seven credibility blind spots and how they can derail your image. Whether you're meeting one-on-one or presenting to a packed audience, your credibility is immediately being assessed.
While there are numerous behaviors to look for, here are seven blind spots that are most common. Beware your credibility blind spots. These bad behaviors are unintentional, yet they can derail your image. What's more, they can be irritating and distracting to everyone ... but you. The good news is that once you identify your blind spots, you can take steps to eliminate them. Today your credentials may get you in the door. So how can you uncover your credibility blind spots? 1. Speech fillers are superfluous sounds or words, like "um" and "you know. " Fast Tip: Embrace the tactical pause. 2. Extraneous movements, such as jiggling your knee, bobbing your head, or shifting your weight, weaken your personal power.
Fast Tip: Test your ability to literally have a level head. 3. When you feel self-conscious, it's easy to overreact to your every mistake. 4. 5. 6. 7. 5 Subliminal Tricks That Make Employers Adore You | JOBSTAR.INFO. 8 Rules For Creating A Passionate Work Culture. Several years ago I was in the Thomson Building in Toronto. I went down the hall to the small kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee.
Ken Thomson was there, making himself some instant soup. At the time, he was the ninth-richest man in the world, worth approximately $19.6 billion. Enough, certainly, to afford a nice lunch. I looked at the soup he was stirring. “It suits me just fine,” he said, smiling. Thomson understood value. In 1976, Thomson inherited a $500-million business empire that was built on newspapers, publishing, travel agencies, and oil. He left both a financial legacy and an art legacy, but his most lasting legacy might be the culture he created.
For the long-term viability of any enterprise, Thomson understood that you needed a viable corporate culture. Thomson created a culture that extended out from him and has lived after him. 1. Hire for passion and commitment first, experience second, and credentials third. 2. 3. 4. To obtain passion capital requires a work ethic. Six behaviors that could come back to bite you | Ward Wired. As project managers we want our team members to have a commitment to deadlines, be optimistic about their work, stay focused on the goal, have a competitive mindset, stick to the budget, and please clients and management don’t we? And yet, these 6 behaviors, which most of us would readily agree are important, can precede a scandal, cause morale problems, and sink projects. In an interesting blog post David Gelber, author of The 3 Power Values provides some pertinent examples of disastrous business results from being obsessive about these behaviors.
They intrigued me so I decided to write about them in a project management context. See what you think. Commitment to deadlines—While this is at the core of successful project management, when the schedule becomes sacrosanct and we do everything in our power to meet it, we create more problems than their worth. A colleague of mine once called this phenomenon SOT, or “you know what the S means” On Time. Changing Your Culture by Bringing Humanity to the Workplace. Managers, from the senior level down to the front line leaders, often have the misconception that to manage effectively, neither they nor their employees can actually show their human side at work.
These managers believe that to allow personality, humor and humility gives away too much of their power, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Maybe back in the command and control era of management, when employees clocked in and clocked out and were expected to repeatedly perform routine tasks, this type of emotionless management style may have worked.
But the workplace is different now. Today, we call on every employee to use their creativity and innovation to help companies compete on a global level. And to create an environment where that will happen, the command and control management style doesn’t work. Employees must know that they can suggest new ideas without those ideas being immediately shot down. It’s a common belief that money is the great motivator. Why Leadership Means Listening. Today's employees want to be asked for feedback and they want to be heard. Here are four tips to help you become a better listener Over the past several weeks, I interviewed a half-dozen well-known business leaders for a new book on communications. One theme came up repeatedly—great leaders are great listeners. Extraordinary men and women solicit feedback, listen to opinions, and act on that intelligence.
The differences they found were striking. 1. The other week I asked a newspaper reporter who he considered the most inspiring person he had ever met. This reporter meets plenty of famous people, yet Clinton made an impression on him because in Clinton he found someone who seemed to show a genuine interest in what he was saying. When you speak to someone, maintain eye contact with that person. 2. Great listeners ask questions in response to a question asked of them. Just as eye contact makes people feel important, asking questions makes them feel as though their opinions count. 3. 4. Want to succeed in IT? Five tips from the top. How to reach the very top of the IT profession may remain a closed book to most technologists, but leading CIO Paul Coby has some simple advice on the best way to get there.
So, you want to be a top CIO? Sounds like a reasonable career aim, but how do you climb the greasy pole and reach the highest echelons of IT leadership? If you want best-practice career advice, it makes sense to listen to people who have already excelled - and are continuing to excel - in the technology chief position. Paul Coby is one such CIO, IT director at UK retail giant John Lewis and former technology chief at British Airways. Coby spent a decade as group CIO of the airline, a role he prefaced with 17 years at the forefront of the UK public sector. As well as running IT for John Lewis, Coby holds a senior position at advisory body e-skills UK. Here, he draws on his experience and offers his five top tips to IT professionals looking to become a successful next-generation CIO. 1. 2. "Don't talk jargon," he says. 13 ways to tell if you’re a “bully” project manager | Ward Wired.
Your next project manager? Are you a bully? Do you bully your teammates, vendors and weaker stakeholders? Most bullies don't even know that they are one. Do you? Well, to find out, see if the 13 statements below describe you. By the way, I recall on a trip to Australia that my colleague there said that “bullying” is actually against the law which I found very interesting. Zp8497586rq. Good Managers Lead Through a Team - Linda Hill & Kent Lineback. We consider the ability to manage a team so important that, in a recent book, we made it one of the “3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader:” Manage Your Team — the first imperative — is about creating a real team and managing through it. For the record, the other two imperatives are Manage Yourself — which is about building relationships based on trust, not authority — and Manage Your Network, which is about connecting and collaborating with those you don’t control. “Manage your team” might seem clear and straightforward.
Yet when we talk about it, we often find it’s not an intuitive concept for many managers and for some it even cuts against the grain of what they think they should do as bosses. Perhaps the easiest way to explain the problem, as we’ve come to understand it, is through the phrase we used above — manage “through the team.” By that we mean you should use the social dynamics of the team to manage individual members, rather than managing members primarily one-by-one. For Great Leadership, Clear Your Head - Joshua Ehrlich. By Joshua Ehrlich | 10:17 AM September 14, 2011 Getting stuff done is overrated. Knowing where you are going and how to get there — strategy — is everything. But many managers still spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking. Your first challenge is learning how to stop the action. But focusing and thinking about the big picture are not as simple as blocking out time and turning off your devices. It is about managing your attention, or what I call “mindshifting.”
I once coached an executive who was a high potential on the fast track, with tremendous charisma, drive, and analytical skills. Remove the obstacles. Quiet the noise. Percolate. Clarify your message. Keep reflecting and adjusting. Staying focused on the big picture in your business is no easy task, but increased mindfulness and reflection can help you to convey and execute your leadership strategy.
4 Secrets of Great Critical Thinkers. In 2009, J D Wetherspoon, a chain of more than 800 pubs in the UK, was facing declining sales. Demand for beer had been down for five years. In addition, pricing pressure from super market chains was intense, and higher alcohol taxes further squeezed its already tight margins. What would you say is the company's real business problem? Most people see it as a sales problem and recommend better marketing and promotion. But this reflex may be wrong.
In Wetherspoon’s case, the company examined the problem more deeply, looked at data, and framed the situation from multiple angles. In the end, they found the real problem: A subtle but profound shift in consumer preferences. The strategy worked. If you fail to do this, you risk solving the wrong problem. Ironically, the more experience you have, the harder it will to break from conventional mindsets. 1. 2. 3. 4. The best problem solvers see a complex problem through multiple lenses.
The Persistence of Vision @ LeadershipNow. I Think, Therefore I See Biologists tells us that the eye does not function to replicate the world we come into contact with, but instead to sense, process and encode the motion, patterns and colors of the light we see into something our minds will interpret. Our minds interpret the data given to us by our eyes in connection with all of the other organs that respond to our environment. It combines this new data with similar information it has already stored in our memories.
As a result, no two people see anything exactly alike. Now the default setting that our mind comes with, operates in much the same way. Call it a persistence of thought. Just as what we see is governed by what we think, so what we perceive as real—our feelings, thoughts and assumptions—is based on what we think is real. Our mind is constantly trying to make sense of our world. Self-validating Illusions Additionally, it can cause us to be rigid and un-teachable thus impeding our growth and the growth of others. U.S. The Manager's Cheat Sheet: 101 Common-Sense Rules for Leaders. Six tactics of natural leaders. Please, Make a Decision. Leadership and Change Research. How Great Bosses Motivate Employees.