There’s an awful bad case of the “serious” malady running through our society right now, and for just a moment, we all deserve to unclench our jaws, breathe and even form that rare but powerful facial expression, the smile.
Consider this my attempt (albeit a weak one, I’m certain) to take a little of the seriousness out of your day while offering ideas that might just have something to them. Or, they might not, but, I’ll leave that for you to judge.
I grew up to the refrain of “be a leader, not a follower,” and the drive to lead is part of who I am. Part and parcel of that has been a natural resistance through much of my early career to the notion that, “to be a good leader, you need to be a good follower.” For me, and I know for many others, our ambition is to drive change, right wrongs and challenge the status quo and to advance. Mentally, it’s hard to connect those core professional drives with the passive and even weak sounding notion of “following.”
The art of asking questions is a leadership power tool. A good question from a leader is like a pebble thrown into a pond. While the splash occurs at the impact point, the question encourages people to think experiment and even innovate, long after the initial asking.
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.
You’re good, but do you have it in you to be great? I work with a lot of good professionals. These are smart people, all technically adept at their jobs and committed to working hard for their organizations. Only a few of these good individuals push themselves to become great.
Power and influence are not dirty words. Both are components of every organization’s environment and both must be carefully cultivated to succeed as a formal or informal leader. Power and influence provide the motive power behind organizations and initiatives and the lubrication that keeps the parts and people from binding and grinding and self-destructing. Here are 6 key reasons why cultivating power and influence is good for your career.
You heard it here first. It’s OK to Have Some Fun as a Leader. Most of the popular press on leading and leadership focuses on the challenges, strain and pains of leading, leaving one to assume that signing on for the role is akin to a vow of chastity or at least a vow of silence. Here are 5 ideas for safely infusing more fun into your workplace. The increase in performance might just surprise you.
A great friend and talented product manager once offered in a moment of frustration that he viewed his principal job as one of “managing reduced expectations.” This brilliant, but depressing turn of words reflected bigger business problems, including a logjam in development that effectively precluded us from doing anything to enhance the competitiveness of our products in a timeframe shorter than something that you might find on a geologic time-scale. The “managing reduced expectations” seems to be a theme inherent in our society right now, and it is a dangerous mind-set.
Most leaders struggle to understand whether they are helping or hindering the cause. Except of course for those leaders/narcissists who believe that their every utterance is sheer genius wrapped in pure motivational gold. The feedback from your manager, while important, tends to be based on either numbers or fairly casual observation. And feedback from your team members is welcomed, but you never really know for sure whether it’s the unvarnished type. The “Am I Helping?” issue is particularly important when a troubled team or organization gains a fresh leader. Here are 4 measures that will help you gauge whether you are truly helping or hindering:
If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.
