Art Guest Posts on Leadership at Tanveer Naseer’s Blog
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Leading Change, Professional Growth, Project Management
At some point during the past year I became a regular reader and big fan of Tanveer Naseer’s blog. Tanveer writes on leadership, business and people with a level of authenticity that is both educational and inspirational.
My genuine regard for Tanveer and his work makes it all the more exciting to serve as a guest blogger on his site today, with my thoughts on the rapidly and radically changing role of leadership.
My post, The Great and Perilous Leadership Journey Ahead, reflects my perspective on the rapidly and radically changing nature of leadership in our emerging environment. Perhaps my subhead says it best: “Welcome to the Leadership Blender.”
I make no secret of the fact that I struggle with word count issues…so thanks, Tanveer for letting this one run a little long. And given the importance of this topic, I plan on including this essay in my forthcoming book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Stimulate Success.
For now however, please click over to Tanveer’s site and read the post, and better yet, check out the rich and thoughtful content created by this remarkable author. And don’t forget to drop a comment or two along the way.
-Art
Leadership Caffeine: How to Grow Your Leadership Credibility in 15 Easy Lessons
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Values
Like good health, you cannot have too much credibility as a leader.
Too many leaders swim through their corporate and organizational lives oblivious to the reality that their actions, utterances, decisions and even the most casual of their interactions are all monitored, evaluated and voted upon every day.
The people that work for us cast mental votes assigning a positive or negative credibility rating (CR) that ultimately determines our ability to influence others. And while your CR can move over time, it tends to move quickly and irreversibly towards the negative and only very slowly towards the positive.
You build credibility as a leader one interaction and one decision at a time over a long period of time, and you destroy credibility in great and dramatic fashion almost instantaneously through what I characterize as Dumb Ass Maneuvers (DAMs). While we’re all capable of mistakes, DAMs tend to reflect a series of mistakes or actions that cause people to question your intentions, wonder about your qualifications and speculate on your ethics. To optimize your credibility building and to minimize the probability of creating too many DAMs, consider my suggestions below.
How to Grow Your Leadership Credibility in 15 Easy Lessons:
1. Say what you mean and do what you say. Your do must match your tell.
2. Treat everyone with respect all of the time. Constantly. Always!
3. It’s never about you. Strike “I” from your vocabulary.
4. Make and communicate decisions. And then work hard to teach others to make and communicate decisions.
5. Stop! Pay attention and listen. You show respect by paying attention.
6. Ask questions. Questions show that you care. Questions also teach others how to think.
7. Create and reinforce accountability. People actually prefer to be accountable versus the alternative. People respect accountability. Wield it liberally and consistently.
8. Develop your people. Your willingness to support the development of others speaks volumes about you as a leader.
9. Master feedback. Use it daily to support growth and promote accountability.
10. Teach. Leaders teach…practice this role more often than the role of a critic.
11. Create context for others. Communicate strategies and goals and help everyone connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities.
12. Dispense all of the glory. Keep none of it for yourself. See number 3 above if this one doesn’t make sense.
13. Admit your mistakes. Quickly. Highlight the lessons learned and move on. Never, ever hide mistakes or attempt to transfer responsibility.
14. Hire smart people that share your firm’s values. Then respect the intelligence that you’ve hired by working to create an atmosphere where your smart people can focus on doing great things.
15. Be authentic. Be yourself and don’t be afraid to let people see you for who and what you are…a fallible human interested in doing your best for your team members and for your organization.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Credibility is the leader’s best friend. It’s also the leader’s source of motive power. Grow it, guard it and use it in good health to build great teams, great businesses and great professionals.
A Leader’s List for Giving Thanks
As we take a momentary time-out this Thursday in America from our challenges as professionals, citizens and family members and give thanks for what’s good and right in our world and lives, those of us that serve as leaders have a few additional reasons to be grateful for the opportunities that we have in support of others.
The Leader’s List for Giving Thanks:
- Be grateful for your unique chance to serve others. It truly is a privilege.
- Be thankful for the patience and forbearance that your colleagues and team-members show as you learn over time and through trial and error what it truly means to lead.
- Give thanks for your chance to learn from others.
- Pay honor to those that came before you and took the time to pass along their wisdom…even if you didn’t realize how valuable it was until much later.
- Be in awe of the opportunity that you have in front of you to positively impact lives in ways that few other jobs or professions provide.
- Be inspired to motivate, coach and teach those that invest valuable time in their lives and careers with you.
- Give thanks for the opportunity that you have to create value for your organization. You might not engineer new products or services, but the people that work for you enable others to perform their jobs creating or building or supporting at high levels.
- Be grateful that you were given or developed the patience to cope with the daily stresses and strains of leadership and to keep reminding yourself that it is all worth it in the end.
- Give thanks for your chance to participate in the journey of a lifetime.
- And most of all, just give thanks by speaking up and remembering that a well-placed, heartfelt “Thank you” is one of the most powerful and important of all leadership tools.
And yes, please accept my sincere Thank You for your readership and conversation. I am truly grateful for you.
-Art
Leadership Caffeine: Mistakes are the Raw Ingredients of Leadership Courage
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Marketing Yourself, Performance, Professional Growth, Values
I’ve made a number of mistakes over the course of my leadership career that make my head spin and my stomach turn just thinking about them. No life or death or business impacting mistakes, but, definitely some people and team impacting issues that created ill will and most definitely didn’t show me off at my leadership best.
Learning from those mistakes helped me evolve my thinking on the role of a leader and on my true priorities in supporting my business, my peers and my team members. While it would have been nice to skip these speed bumps, the lessons are forever burned into my cerebral cortex or wherever it is in our brains that those things are burned on to our hard drives.
Somewhere along the road to making my share of mistakes, an interesting thing happened to my fear of making mistakes. It disappeared! And don’t misinterpret the statement. I don’t seek out mistakes and I don’t not (double negative by design) care about mistakes, but, I just don’t fear them. In fact, I’m more concerned about not riding on the cutting edge of what I believe to be the right thing for my stakeholders than I am about falling off and getting shredded in the process.
A leader preoccupied with the fear of making a mistake is playing not to lose versus playing to win. It turns out that developing personal courage is critical to developing as an effective leader.
8: Situations Where A Leader’s Courage is Critical
1. Doing the right thing promptly and fairly when it comes to dealing with performance issues.
2. Screwing up the courage to deliver the tough feedback everyday.
3. Accepting accountability for your own and for your team’s mistakes or performance lapses.
4. Supporting the person that you believe in to your core, in spite of the prevailing opinion from your peers or leaders.
5. Supporting a person that you believe in, in spite of the fact that she may not believe in herself.
6. Advocating a direction that challenges the traditional thinking (Prahalad’s “dominant logic”) while taking direct hits from the slings and arrows of, “We’ve never done it that way before.”
7. Being smart and confident enough to understand the politics of organization-life, and tough enough to avoid the traps and land mines that others attempt to draw you into on your journey.
8. Learning to say “no” to people and projects for the right reasons. “No,” may be the toughest word to learn in the leader’s vocabulary.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Writing this post is like cueing Sinatra’s, “My Way,” but Ol’ Blue Eyes had it right, in my opinion. You’ll make more than a few mistakes, and if you’re committed to developing as an effective leader, you’ll learn to quickly seize the learning opportunities, adjust your course as needed and move on to better performance. Here’s to our mistakes and the lessons learned as we develop our leadership courage!
Leadership Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Watch and Learn
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth
Most great leaders that I’ve encountered are astute observers of their environment. They are good at reading people and situations, and they apply the insights gained through observing to improving their performance as leaders and to navigating the ever-present corporate politics.
We spend a great deal of time helping individuals develop their skills as speakers, but when was the last time that you attended a workshop on improving your observation skills?
We also spend a great deal of time in our corporate lives struggling and striving to be heard and somewhere along the way, many of us forget how important it is to shut up, listen and importantly, to observe.
Watch, Listen and Learn:
- People communicate more non-verbally than they do verbally. Study people over time in different settings and situations and you’ll gain an understanding of what’s important…what’s core and what’s context to them. We’re remarkably expressive and amazingly open in what we show about our true feelings and opinions. Fortunately or unfortunately, most people are busy either listening to our words or ignoring us completely.
- Everyone has a tell. Actually, we all have multiple tells that describe to careful observers when we’re stressed, when we’re out of our comfort zones and when we believe to our core in what we are expressing. Good observers notice the dissonance between the verbal and non-verbal messages and use this insight to probe and gain clarity.
- Good observers develop an understanding of what’s truly important to a person, and good leaders use this insight to develop authentic connections with their team members and colleagues.
5 Suggestions for Improving Your Power of Observation:
1. Spend time in meetings carefully observing people talking. Note their habits, body language, gestures, how they handle questions and objections and even where they sit and what their posture says about them.
2. Spend time in meetings watching how others react to those speaking. What’s not said, but shown by the other participants in the meeting, speaks volumes about the status of the speaker.
3. Find ways to test your observation hypotheses. I always look for the quietest people in the room during creative or brainstorming meetings and seek them out after the event to attempt to discover what great ideas might have been lost to a doodle on a note-pad due to an individual’s shyness or evaluation apprehension.
4. Find ways to test your hypotheses, part 2. Don’t assume that you’ve suddenly received Holmes-like powers that allow you to draw remarkable conclusions from momentary observations. Use your powers of observation as a means of strengthening another important ability: the art of asking questions. Observations are raw materials for questions.
5. Watch other leaders carefully. Find one that you deem particularly good and study how she conducts herself in various situations. What impact does she have on people? Why is her presence strong and positive? How does she conduct herself to convey respect, show interest and command authority without invoking authority? Do the same for those leaders that you don’t hold in high regard and compare and contrast your observations.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The old mantra of “seek first to understand and then be understood” is priceless advice for all of us. Spend time developing as an “active observer” and you’ll gain some remarkable insights into people, their motivations, their fears and their passions. Fail to develop as an observer and you’re at risk of just being part of the noise in your workplace. “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.”
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