Leadership: First Step to Success

Cherie Ang

Have you ever heard of a business where there is no leader or in a more technical term, a boss? Perhaps it is quite inconceivable, since it highly significant in every field that one directs them towards their goal. For instance, if you want to employ a change in system within your business, a leader would have to stand out for you to get through the swamp.

Changing an entire business won't come easily especially if the employees do not have faith with the capacity of the senior who is leading them towards their end. But, doing so is never really that impossible as you have thought it was.

The part played by leadership

If you are a part of an organization, you may have noticed how important it was that the subjects have faith on the capacities of the leaders since they are supposed to be the living models that the subjects must look up to. Actually, in every area where people are involved, there's a great need that someone be responsible enough to lead everyone, because if not every organization would be distinguished as futile for they won't be able to achieve any goal that they have set.

Putting it under the setting of employing sudden change within a business, the subjects or the employees would anticipate for an improved, sensible, effective decisions and regular if not absolute communication from the leader to the employees. During these moments the employees expect more from the leaders such as confidence, support and commitment.

When all things has been said, it all boils down to the trust of the employees to the leader which in the future might bring them better working relationships and would possible strengthen their confidence with each other.

Consequences of poor leadership

Suppose it is inevitable that every leader would possess the essential leadership skills, then you ought to familiarize yourself with the ramifications of this possibility. It is but normal that when the leader is not able to exude any act of leadership that the employees begin to assume that there won't be any positive outcomes with their relationship.

There are certain incidents when the organization gets clouded by distrust and the chance that the employees would act in an illegible manner that they start to be apathetic with the goals of the organization. Feeble leadership would only result to the deficiency of hope which might probably go on for too long and in turn would lead to the organizations inevitable decline.

Leadership then is very significant in every organization because with its absence the whole team under the organization won't be able to function accordingly and they will not be able to operate with a harmonious relationship with one another.

Dream And Uncover Your Own Leadership Qualities

By Authors

Last summer I had the pleasure of taking a trip which included a drive through 19 states in 10 days. It was a considerable amount of driving but a wonderful encounter with history and nostalgia. Each city and town seemed to boast a special person or event that helped shape our country. One thing that really impressed me was the how many times I found myself on Martin Luther King Jr Blvd in so many different cities and towns.

There are Martin Luther King Jr Blvds in Dallas, Chicago and Chapel Hill. There were other streets and highways named after him in other cities that I wish I had counted them all. At one point on the trip, I recall seeing another sign for Martin Luther King Jr Blvd and I briefly could not remember what city or state I was driving through at the time.

Just what qualities did this man possess that made so many considered him great? Even if a person didn't believe in what he was preaching, there was no denying his great influence. Why? To get the answer I did not have to look far. Martin Luther King Jr himself knew the answer - just have a dream or a new direction and funnel all your energy to getting that dream. With a dream or a vision anyone can learn to be a leader.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
( TE Lawrence, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom")

Everyone can learn to lead by discovering the power that lies within each one of us. We can make a difference by being prepared when the call to lead comes. Becoming a leader starts with acknowledging and learning about five qualities we all possess to some extent. Once we take a deep inventory about ourselves and get to know ourselves, the key is practicing and growing these five qualities.

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Leadership Skill: Get A Personality

By Harvey Robbins

There are lots of ways to lead. The best way is to try to lead in a way that takes advantage of your natural personality. In other words, don't be what you ain't. Learning how others behave, how they think, what they focus on and find important, however, will make you a better leader. Let's face it, most of us are self-centered and really don't care how others think or behave as long as they don't get in our way. To be a better leader, though, it is important to understand and be able to work with the differing behavioral patterns of others; those with whom you must interact to get your outcomes achieved. Partner up with individuals who continuously see the world differently than you do. Have some discussions over coffee. Try to find value in their points of view. Some of the best discussion groups are comprised of people with opposing views who learn to understand value and respect the opinions of others. Leaders lead differently based upon their different personalities. It is important that you find out which leadership personality is most suited to your situation. One, hopefully, that will align with your natural personality. If you are seen as changing your personality often, however, people won't know how to relate to you as a leader and won't trust you. There are a number of ways of describing typical personalities. One of the most common divides people into more or less assertive and either task or people oriented. This model, like so many others, breaks the complexity of personalities down into four types of people: Controlling (assertive/task oriented), Promoting (assertive/people oriented), Supporting (non-assertive/people oriented), and Analytical (non-assertive/task oriented). • The Controlling personality's strength lies in its ability to stay focused on outcomes. Controllers are goal driven, action oriented, and tend not to wander too much outside the current time frame. • Promoting personalities tend to be more futuristic, big picture types. Promoters are quite creative and intuitive, but bore easily. • Supportive personalities are the best overall communicators. Supporters are usually thinking about "how am I going to get the message to others...include others...and make them feel happy. • Analytical personalities are into detail and history. Analytical tend to be oriented towards the past, not the future, and want lots of explanations for why things are done the way they are. While most everyone has the minimum amount of flexibility required to move gingerly between these types, most people feel the most comfortable fulfilling roles that take advantage of their natural personality strengths. For example, if I had a project to complete on time, I'd want the Controller to be in charge of the time frame. Making sure people were aware of deadlines, keeping people on task and focused. I'd want the Analytical to be assigned the responsibility of auditing the project to make sure that nothing is left out or forgotten and that the policies and procedures that are in place are adhered. This takes advantage of their natural detailing strengths. The Supporter would be in charge of internal and external communication since they have a need to be inclusive of everyone and make sure that everyone feels happy. The Promoter would be in charge of the creative aspects of the project. Brainstorming, new product ideas, negotiations, deal-making are all part of their natural repertoire. The skills of versatility, the ability to deal with people based upon their personalities, is the single greatest differentiator between good and great leaders. It is a skill that allows the leader to see the best in everyone and assign roles that fulfill not only the needs of the organization, but also the needs of the individua About The Author: A world class speaker, author, and educator, Dr. Robbins focuses on transformational leadership by providing leadership skill training, team building / team leadership training, management development training, and executive coaching. See more on http://www.harveyrobbins.com.

Leadership Skill: Empowerment Uncertainties

By Harvey Robbins

Between the subjects of goal setting and decision making is an enormous crevasse, into which teams fall, then fester and stink up the joint. This is the area of boundary management - or in the case of team failure, mismanagement.

Empowerment is a form of decision making that involves individual, not team decisions. Yet it is probably the most important kind of deciding that occurs on teams.

Here's the deal: Organizations create teams to achieve certain goals. They may tell the teams, usually quite vaguely, that they are "empowered" to some degree to do whatever is necessary to achieve the goal.

Or they may not.

Either way the team has been set up to fail. Either the team feels it has no authority or leverage to carry out its mission, or it is confused about what its authority or leverage really amounts to.

It is deeply depressing to a team to go to all the trouble of learning how to solve a problem, only to be paralyzed, unable to implement that solution, because it doesn't know if it's allowed to. Or worse, to implement the wrong (but defensible) solution because it doesn't think management will go for the right (but ambiguous) one.

On the other hand, it is terrifying for management to empower people to make decisions in advance without any assurance those decisions will be sensible or defensible. Many an empowered team, thinking its decision-making authority to be vast and absolute, learns to its chagrin that its empowerment was really more of an expression, a figure of speech, than a blank check.

It's a drag on both sides when managers believe they have empowered a team to make decisions, only to find out later that the team didn't believe a word of it. The team gets into trouble, which was what it was trying to avoid, and now the manager has less reason to trust the team than before.

So, what can be done?

First, write the word "empowerment" on a clean sheet of paper, fold the sheet carefully into sixteenths, and then chuck it in the wastebasket.

From now on, instead of empowerment, think in terms of the phrase "boundary management". For there can be no empowering without defining what the power is, who has it, where it starts, and where it ends.

Boundary management is a method for negotiating and agreeing to a set of constraints or boundaries within which team members are free to make decisions on their own. These boundaries will vary depending on the degree of experience or expertise of each team member.

About The Author:
A world class speaker, author, and educator, Dr. Robbins focuses on transformational leadership by providing leadership skill training, team building / team leadership training, management development training, and executive coaching. See more on http://www.harveyrobbins.com

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Leadership Skill: Leaving A Leadership Legacy

Take a look at all the leaders who have left a positive legacy of organizational effectiveness, and what do you find. Breadth, depth, and talent. But what do they actually do? They develop themselves, they develop others, they develop big ideas, and they develop high performance cultures. They leave a legacy by leveraging their natural personality gifts to guide choices about acquiring skills and developing their organization's culture. One in which people have clearly defined goals, continuous feedback, and career alignment all within a culture driven by the excitement of achievement and the vision of destiny.

After a combined 45 years of experience in the field of leadership development, my wife, Nancy, and I have concluded that much of what is currently written about leadership is both confusing and misleading. It's mostly descriptive, not prescriptive. First of all, leaders are being encouraged to think "outside the box;" attempting feats of magic and leaps of faith that go well beyond what most normal people can do (baring some major life-changing experience like a near death experience or getting married). They are told to think like Queen Elizabeth, Buddha, Attila, Zen, Tao, Jack, Al Jesus. As a result, people start popping their heads out of their comfort zones, start looking around, grasping at straws, and ignoring what's under their noses. This is unreasonable, unnecessary, and contrary to human nature. Besides, thinking and acting are two different things.

Second, there are just too many leadership dimensions discussed (over 50) for any reasonable leader to master. Yet try they do. I've coached senior leaders responding to their organization's leadership competency model trying to perfect all dimensions in the model. It's hogwash! To invest across the board in development can result at best in mediocrity on many fronts. Average, no matter in how many arenas does not produce above average results.

Successful leaders don't waste their time acquiring skills they don't need. And since your brain is only so big and can only hold so much stuff, it becomes critical to optimize your capabilities. You don't need to master the 50 dimensions required to be the perfect leader, just those that you need to be successful right now.

Finally, not only are there too many leadership dimensions, but the words and adjectives used to define leadership overlap to the point of creating confusion, both in literature and practice. A recent factor analysis performed on a 360 degree feedback instrument (a questionnaire with self, boss, peer and subordinate ratings) found only two major factors underlying the 50 leadership dimensions: "smart" and "nice." The "smart" factor is action and thinking skills and the "nice" factor is people skills and character.

Becoming a legendary leader and creating a high performance culture is not that difficult if you are willing to follow a few rules.

1. Be outcome oriented

2. Be feedback rich

3. Create a balanced approach that gives people the motivation to move forward and a vision (and a pathway) to achieve success.

4. Know yourself

5. Coach others

6. Push for those ideas that will change the way you operate.

About The Author:
A world class speaker, author, and educator, Dr. Robbins focuses on transformational leadership by providing leadership skill training, team building / team leadership training, management development training, and executive coaching. See more on http://www.harveyrobbins.com

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Leadership Skill: Giving Feedback

By Harvey Robbins One of the hardest tasks of effective leaders is giving people feedback. "Giving people feedback" is really a neutral description for something decidedly un-neutral - telling people how they could be doing their job better. And because it is a loaded area, with a high potential for ticking people off and alienating them, just when you need them to be "on your side," lots of leaders get confused and inept. Why is giving feedback hard for us? Probably because people think it has to be done very cleverly - delicately - so as not to offend people. And most of us are not clever, so we despair. And procrastinate. And when push finally comes to shove, and we sit down with the person in question, we criticize crappily. How do we criticize crappily? Let us count the ways. We do it too formally. We invite the other person into our offices. We sit across from on another. We refer to reports for information, sometimes hiding behind the pages. Six-month evaluations may be good for record-keeping, but a better way to keep people on point is to evaluate them every single day, with attention, instruction, availability, and acknowledgment of a job well done. Fix a problem informally, and it need never appear in someone's file. We wait too long. "Harold, it's come to our attention you've been taking 2-hour naps every afternoon since 1994." The time to step in and advise is early, before it becomes a bad habit, and before you become irritated with the behavior's deep-seatedness. Also, workers have every right to protest. They would have been happy to make the change earlier - if someone had only asked. Delaying puts an unnecessary black mark on their record. We keep it one-way. Feedback is properly described as a loop. You tell them something, they tell you something, and so on. The process belongs to both of you. If it's just you informing a worker - much less, a teammate - that they have failed, doesn't that tell you something about the team? And if the other person's contributions aren't appreciated here, what does that say about their contributions? We apologize. We mince about. There is no way to tell someone an unpleasant truth and come out of it more popular than you went in. The proper and honest thing to do is say it directly: "Mary Ann, I'm concerned about the quality of your follow-up work. Several times I've had customers complain, and I want to fix the problem right now, before it becomes a real problem." They may not like you more. They may emerge from the talk bruised and a little scared. But they will know what is expected of them. Clarity will help them survive, where friendly gobbledygook could lead them to destruction. We beat around the bush. We say 19 positive nice things in order to soften the blow of the 20th item, which is negative. In all things strive for clarity. A good meeting has a single purpose. "Jack, I want to talk to you about your absence last week." We don't think it's feedback unless it's negative. We're not saying to camouflage the one negative observation behind nineteen compliments. But why is it that we only call workers in to see us when we have bad news? Invite them in when you notice something great. What a simple message to communicate: we value your positive contributions, and we want to encourage you to keep trying. We go in with too much certainty. "Dave, you've not been attentive in your work." Instead, try: "Dave, I'm concerned that you aren't giving your work your full attention. You make a lot of funny remarks at team meetings, but I'm not sure you're kicking in with the right amount of effort. Do you agree with that assessment?" We put it all on the other person. Maybe Esther isn't meeting quota for reasons that Esther has little control over. Maybe you think Esther has been properly trained, but she hasn't. Maybe there's something you can do that will help Esther perform. We criticize, but we are vague about future action. Feedback must be action-oriented or it is just blather. State a desired outcome, and slap a schedule on it. Then, if the teammate misses the outcome by the date agreed upon, who can complain about the consequences? About The Author: A world class speaker, author, and educator, Dr. Robbins focuses on transformational leadership by providing leadership skill training, team building / team leadership training, management development training, and executive coaching. See more on http://www.harveyrobbins.com.