It Might Be Time for You to Start Acting Like The Leader You Want to Be
A blog post at on Looking and Acting Like a Success at Alan Weis’s Contrarian Consulting site triggered some thoughts on what it means to look and act like a leader. While Alan’s post emphasizes how a successful person might act to present a desired image, how does a leader portray himself or herself as competent? If this seems superficial to some, I would challenge that a leader is responsible for acting (and to an extent looking) the part.
Leader: Are Your Meetings Straight Out of A Dilbert Comic Strip?
Consider the last team meeting that you attended or led:
-Was the agenda well organized?
-Did problems and polite (or not so polite) bickering dominate the airtime?
-Did people show up with an agenda of their own?
-Were the same topics that were debated in the last meeting still being debated in this meeting?
-Was much time spent on discussing ideas to create value for the firm and stakeholders? Was there substantive progress or even agreement on problems and priorities?
-How good was the action plan that came from that meeting?
-Was it clear who owned what follow-up and in what time frame?
-Did people leave feeling like their questions were answered and their priority clear?
-Were meeting notes promptly distributed?
Why Strategy is the Leader’s Most Potent Tool
As a leader, imagine having a metaphorical tool at your beck and call that was capable of catalyzing action, focusing the collective energies of your team members and providing a greater sense of purpose to everyone around you. This tool is strategy and all too often and for varying reasons, this tool is left idle in the bottom of the leadership toolbox, brought out only for special occasions like the annual off site or in preparation for budgeting. The best tool misapplied is no better than a crude implement. Unfortunately, strategy as a leadership tool is widely misunderstood and rarely or poorly applied.
Training for the Swimming Leg of the Leadership Triathlon
My casual poll of business friends and gym associates that are also amateur tri-athletes (admittedly, a small sample set) indicates that the least-enjoyable, most difficult segment of the triathlon is the swimming leg. (No surprise here, especially for someone who feels fortunate to swim a lap across the width of a pool.) Most, but not all admit that they train the least for this leg, and all indicate that improving their performance here is the key to improving their overall event time.
In researching the habits and challenges of leaders at all levels with my Practical Lessons in Leadership co-author Rich Petro, we discovered that delivering constructive feedback to associates as well as peers and even the boss is viewed as the least enjoyable and most difficult part of leading by many.
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