Art’s Weekly Leadership Message-9 Credibility Builders to Lead By
Note from Art: the list below was adapted from my first book as co-author, Practical Lessons in Leadership.
If you’re responsible for getting work done through others, you will be as effective as you are credible. Of course, those of us working for you take our time in assessing your words, actions and motives before we deem you credible as our leader.
While a leader’s credibility is a qualitative assessment of the individual’s character, there are a number of good habits that anyone in a supervisory or management position can apply daily on their road to building credibility and growing as a leader.
9 Credibility Builders to Lead and Live Every Single Day:
1. People mirror the boss’s attitude. Your positive attitude and high energy level are infectious to everyone around you.
2. Respect is contagious. Paying attention and truly listening to your team members is one of the strongest ways for you to show your respect.
3. Honesty is not an on/off switch. Talk openly about tough topics.
4. Share your agenda. Your visible agenda builds trust.
5. There’s only one time to do the right thing. All of the time.
6. ABCDEFGH JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ No I. Remove I from your vocabulary.
7. Results count. You own the failures and the team owns the successes.
8. Mistakes happen. Encourage experiments and support the constructive assessment of mistakes on the road to achievement.
9. Humility is a virtue. Practice it daily.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Feel free to add to the list of credibility builders. However, take care of these 9 and they’ll take good care of you.
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About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance.
Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, is available at Amazon.com for paperback and kindle versions. For team/group orders, contact Art directly.
Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.
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.
Leadership Caffeine: In Praise of Consistency
Filed under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth
Take a few minutes to think about the best leaders that you’ve ever worked for. What terms best describe them?
Chances are the word “consistent” didn’t show up in the top five.
Perhaps it should.
Consistency may just be the very unsexy and uninspiring element to your leadership style that will help you grow your credibility and allow you to create and sustain a working atmosphere that allows your team members to prosper.
It may also help you stand out with those charged with choosing you for success.
As leaders and professionals, we have a need to communicate and reinforce our brand and our professional value proposition every minute of every day. We are after all, constantly under observation.
In case you missed that memo, your every utterance and your every non-verbal cue is subject to ordinary and extraordinary scrutiny by those that work for you and with you. Send out conflicting messages, act in a manner dissonant from what people expect, and you inadvertently start a game of “guess what the boss meant.” There are no winners in this game, except your competitors.
12 Leadership Activities Where Consistency is Priceless:
- Setting expectations.
- Making decisions.
- Communicating and reinforcing values and ethics.
- Reinforcing accountability.
- Responding to adversity.
- Engaging others in pursuit of solutions.
- Responding to the mistakes of others.
- Supporting the development of others.
- Encouraging learning.
- Treating others with respect.
- Providing feedback.
- Following up.
And in case you’re not yet convinced, consider…
6 Reasons Why Consistency is Critical to Your Success:
1. Your consistent behavior over time strengthens your professional brand and value proposition. Consistent behavior where it counts, like the 12 items above, provides tangible evidence that your “do” matches your “tell.” Consistency becomes a key part of your authenticity, and this authenticity is visible to all.
2. Consistency removes useless “noise” from the working environment by minimizing the guessing games about your intentions or about your responses to possible situations.
3. Your consistent behavior helps minimize the gap between the type of leader you think you are and the type others perceive you as. Most leaders struggle with a perception gap. We see ourselves in our mind’s eye as one type of leader, and others perceive us through their own eyes as something potentially very different. The action of striving to remain consistent in your behaviors helps minimize this awareness/perception gap.
4. Your consistency helps reduce fear and uncertainty in the workplace. With a nod to Dr. Deming, one of your key tasks is to create a healthy working atmosphere, and the best way to do that is to eliminate fear. When people understand who you are and what you stand for and how you approach core issues, they are free to pursue their work without worry of surprises from the boss.
5. Used properly, consistency reinforces accountability. How you set expectations and respond to performance issues goes a long way towards setting the tone and tenor for the performance of the larger group.
6. Consistency creates confidence in those above you. Never forget that while we own our careers, others choose us to succeed. Those in positions of power are looking to minimize risk and make choices that further their careers. Your visible consistency in core areas and the resultant clear value proposition improves your odds of selection.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Don’t confuse consistency with lack of creativity or some strange obsessive-compulsive leadership disorder. You need to be consistent and easy to read where it counts. This doesn’t mean you can’t encourage creativity, experiment with the tools of management and leadership and push the envelope on risk in pursuit of even bigger rewards. It just means that you’ve decided that there are certain behaviors where consistency gains you a lot more than it costs you.
The Nine Credibility Builders of Effective Leaders
When it comes to leadership, your intentions count. Blind ambition might help you climb the ladder as an individual contributor, but it won’t help you galvanize groups of people to move mountains, conquer markets and develop a culture that sustains excellence.
Step one on your journey towards becoming an effective leader is to ensure that when people look and listen they find you believable, honest empathetic, consistent, capable and interested. And remember, credibility is hard earned and easily squandered. Guard yours well.
The Nine Credibility Builders-Rules for Effective Leaders to Live By:
1. Your positive attitude and high energy level are infectious to everyone around you.
2. Your attention to others and your willingness to listen are the ultimate signs of respect that you can pay your team members and colleagues.
3. Honesty is an all of the time policy.
4. A visible agenda builds trust. Broadcast yours constantly.
5. Do the right thing. All of the time.
6. ABCDEFGH JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ-It’s not about you. There’s no “I”
7. Your job is to support the career development of others. This is how you positively impact the lives of the people around you.
8. Mistakes are the best teachers. From IDEO: “Encourage people and teams to fail often to succeed sooner.”
9. Humility is a virtue, practice it.
Bonus #10-One of my favorites from a survey participant
10 The “Do Must Match the Tell” for a leader to have credibility. Actions count!
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note: “The Nine Credibility Builders” partially excerpted from Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro
A Fresh Voice and Leadership and the Art of Apology
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Values
There’s an excellent post entitled, “Sorry is not the final word, just the beginning,” by guest author and Product/Project Management Consultant, Lisa Winter at one of my favorite blogs: The Art of Project Management. hosted by the UCSC-Extension in Silicon Valley.
Ms. Winter describes a situation where she inadvertently upset a valuable but delicate team member on a conference call, and then went to significant lengths to apologize and regain his support. In addition to the happy ending, this fine post prompted some thoughts on a topic that I confess I’ve not spent a lot of time thinking about: the role of the apology as a leadership tool.
I can’t help but feel a little guilty that I’ve not raised this topic in the past, and for that, I apologize. (OK, I had to work it in somewhere…)
I have written extensively here at this blog and in Practical Lessons in Leadership on the need for leaders to not mask their own faults and shortcomings. In the book, I suggest that the point in time where everyone on the team sees the leader’s mistake is a powerful moment of truth. The leader can run, hide, dodge and deflect or she can show the team that she is human and leverage the failure as a teaching tool. Of course, this only works if she practices this same technique in the other direction when groups or individuals face setbacks.
But what about the apology? How many times have you observed someone in a position of authority make a decision that turned out to be horribly wrong and come back with an apology?
What about the leader that responded to you in a curt or less than respectful manner?
Good thing you didn’t hold your breath, waiting.
At least one of our national leaders went to the opposite extreme, seizing the opportunity to apologize for all of the nation’s historic mistakes ad nauseum (in my opinion). Rumor has it however, that he might not have been quite so apologetic for his alleged personal mistakes. Frankly, it was hard to tell when he was being sincere and when he was selling. You can draw your own conclusion, but I think Bill would have been a powerful force on a used car lot. (Sorry to those that I offended and Bill, I’m sorry too! Hey, this is getting easier!)
OK, enough tongue-in-cheek. Here are some of my thoughts on the issue and use of the apology as a leader. I’m looking forward to hearing from you, and again, if I’ve offended…
Leadership and the Apology
- Learning how to say the words, “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong” should be mandatory training for all leaders. Part of gaining trust and building credibility is showing everyone that you are human. Knowing how and when to use the words is the art of apologizing.
- You can easily adopt “apologizing” as a tactic and that is as incorrect as avoiding the apology when you’ve erred. Abuse the tool and people will quickly see through your disingenuous approach. I’ve observed early-career and first-time leaders that would assert themselves (appropriately) and then apologize for having had to assert themselves. This destroys the leader’s credibility.
- As a leader, you have to make tough calls and often those calls result in some pain. There are many, and perhaps most circumstances where an apology is not needed and would horribly derail your credibility.
- In circumstances where you’ve slipped and truly offended someone, run, don’t walk to apologize to the individual.
- Too many apologies for program failures or not hitting your goals and targets, and you will find yourself apologizing to your significant other for losing your job. As a subordinate, you might get away with this once, but as soon as it becomes a pattern, your boss will see your apologies as a mask for incompetence.
The Bottom Line for Now
Does leadership mean never having to say you’re sorry? I don’t think so. Nonetheless, I suspect that most leaders rarely utter the words, more out of fear of showing weakness than due to their lack of remorse for their transgressions.
What are your thoughts? I’m interested and suspect many readers are as well on the role and use of the apology as a leader.
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