Gifted Leaders

The Top 7 Steps to Develop Leadership Skills

As someone who has devoted much of his life to the study of leaders, I find myself talking about transparency and trust whenever I talk about leadership. - Warren Bennis

In his online article by the same title, author Akhil Shahani says that successful management requires more than just assigning tasks to the team. It calls for a leader who can inspire team members to achieve their full potential. Here’s Shahani’s checklist:

1. Test the waters: Find out what people think about your style of leadership. This could be a real eye opener, and the key to making changes to become more effective. Ask for feedback from your team members and peers. A relaxed and open environment will help draw out their honest opinion.
2. Listen hard: GREAT LEADERS ARE GREAT LISTENERS!!!!!
3. Connect: Take complete responsibility for how you are heard. Effective communication is a fine art and takes practice.
4. Be a people’s person: Learn to respect your team’s capabilities. Let team members make decisions. Trust them with their work; don’t be a watchdog.
5. Lead by example: Your team must believe that you really mean what you say. Be prepared to put your money where your mouth is.
6. Share leadership: Distribute tasks and responsibilities among group members based on  individual strengths. You become a better leader by involving more people in the leadership process.
7. Evaluate your success in tandem with that of the team: Focus on building their skills as this will enhance motivation and team performance. Remember, their success is yours too!

Which of these steps will you focus on to improve as a leader?

The Entrepreneurial Spirit and Your Career

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You’ve got to find it on your own terms. - Harrison Ford

In the September 2009 Leading News e-Newsletter, Marshall Goldsmith talks about the importance of being entrepreneurial in how we each approach our own careers. Here are some of his suggestions:

1. Love What You Do. Years of hard work (which generally precede success) don’t seem so hard if you are doing what you love.
2. Be Curious. Always be open to learning and on the look-out for potential opportunities.
3. Find Your Own Market Niche. You can work to develop a special competency that differentiates you from everyone else. Be creative. Look for market needs that everyone else may not have considered. Anyone can do what everyone else is doing. Great entrepreneurs provide products and services that are better or different than what everyone else is doing. You can also do this at your present job: What should be done that isn't?
4. Become a World Expert. As intimidating as this sounds, achieving serious "world-class" expertise may not be as daunting as you might believe. If you pick a reasonably narrow area of specialization, focus on it, and learn as much as you can, you will start to accumulate serious knowledge within a few years. While you can never become the world authority on everything, you can definitely become a world authority on one thing.
5. Learn from the Best. As you ponder your career options, ask yourself: "Who do I want to be like in 10 years?" or "Who are the world's experts in fields that are related to my desired area of expertise?" Try to learn from these people's lives. You may be surprised. Some may even go out of their way to help you.
6. Build Your Own Brand. Peter Drucker once told me that companies should be able to 'put their mission statement on a T-shirt.' The same can be true for individuals. For example, my own mission is to be the world authority in helping successful leaders achieve positive, lasting change in behavior. Your customers (or employers) will respect you more if you do not pretend to know everything about everything but instead have a unique brand.
7. Pay the Price. It is possible that you may just get lucky and become incredibly successful without having to work very hard. Don't count on it. The successful entrepreneurs - and the successful people - who I know work very hard. The "luck" that they experience is often impacted by the years of effort that have prepared them to take advantage of fortuitous opportunities.

How can you be more entrepreneurial in how you approach your career?

Self-Connection = Fulfilled Potential

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been!  How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own.  How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity - the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation. – Parker J. Palmer

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer explains that vocation does not come from a voice 'out there' calling us to become something we are not.  It comes from a voice 'in here' calling us to be the person we were born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given to us at birth by God.

Heady stuff to be sure but a recent European consulting study underscores the importance of this idea of being connected to our truer selves in the workplace. Krauthammer International, a consultancy-based training and coaching company, recently reported that the more "self-connected" employees are at work, the better their performance. Interestingly, 66% of employees believe that they need to connect with themselves to fulfill their potential but 33% are not confident that they know themselves.

What opportunities to you have to develop greater self-awareness for yourself and the people you work with?

Who’s Got Your Back? - Part II

“The more I work on my own life and help others on the path toward success the more I see the importance of loving relationships.” - Dan Miller

Here are several other quotes from Dan Miller's e-Newsletter on the importance of supportive relationships:

“If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.” - Samuel Johnson

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” - Henri Nouwen

“Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.” - Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

What are you doing to keep your friendships/relationships “in constant repair?”

Who’s Got Your Back? - Part I

“Success cannot be achieved in isolation. It is the result of combined efforts – yours and that of many others around you. Look for ways to strengthen your relationships and your success will soar.” - Dan Miller

Dan Miller shared the following in his 48 days e-Newsletter on July 28 ...

Last Thursday my daughter and I drove down to Atlanta to attend author Keith Ferrazzi's presentation on his new book, Who's Got Your Back? 

Keith talked about the critical importance of having 3 deep personal relationships and said that if you have these 3 trusting relationships you are set up to experience a disproportionate level of success. In the research for the book he found that roughly 50% of Americans could not identify one person who has their back.

If you’re struggling, perhaps the next step in releasing your success is not another degree, a guaranteed salary, a bank loan, a secure patent or a winning lottery ticket – but rather a friend you can confide in.

Who's got your back?

Only the Optimists Survive

"Good organizations and good leaders, especially in our tense and uncertain moment in history, have the capacity to bounce back; to adapt as necessary; to persevere with an expectation of success; and to engage others in a shared sense of purpose; and to win a reputation for integrity through these other qualities." - Warren Bennis

This is a quote from a recent feature on The Case for Optimism on the BusinessWeek web site.  Bennis contends that, in the current and the future business climate, optimism is not merely a recipe for good cheer, its a blueprint for survival. In the article he highlights some of the benefits of optimism:

• Optimists have a sixth sense for possibilities that realists can't or won't see. That gives the optimist the ability to "define reality" for others in a compelling way - which is the first task of a leader, as author Max DePree has observed. This is not sentimentalism: It is the essence of creative pragmatism.
• The exemplar of optimism is Franklin Roosevelt. In study after study, the Rooseveltian trait of "hardiness" has been found to be crucial in determining whether good women and men with talent will make a difference. Psychologist Martin Seligman illustrated a yawning chasm between social animals who react to roadblocks with a sense of futility and those who react with a steely determination to master their destiny (again, hardiness). "Learned optimism" is Seligman's term for a person's capacity to join the latter group.
• Adaptability is the hallmark of leaders of substance.

How adaptable are you right now? What is your capacity for "hardiness"? What would it take to develop more capacity?

It's Not How You Start, It's How You Finish

"As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." – Nelson Mandela

My good friend Lou Gatto shared this link recently. The next time you think you’re having a rough day, watch this YouTube video to help gain some perspective. Nick Vujicic, born with no limbs, faces obstacles every day of his life. But it's not how you start, it's how you finish. Nick has made a choice to be happy in spite of his circumstances.  You and I can too!

Watch the video and be inspired like Lou and I were.

What choice do you need to make?

Paint-by-the-Numbers or a Blank Canvas: It’s Your Choice

"We all make choices about how we live our lives. You can take a paint-by-the-numbers approach, or you can start with a blank canvas. When you paint by the numbers, the end result is guaranteed. You know what it's going to be, and it might be good, but it will never be a masterpiece. Starting with a blank canvas is the only way to get a masterpiece, but you could also blow up." - Jim Collins

I read this in a recent interview with Jim Collins on Inc.com. I was challenged to think about my life in these terms and as much as I'd like to believe I've been working with a blank canvas, I've done a lot of paint-by-the numbers in my 50+ years on the planet. I suspect many of you would have to admit the same thing.

I think, though, that we all have the potential to be a masterpiece and the thing that's holding us back is fear.  Fear of failure, fear of being vulnerable, fear of being misunderstood, fear of rejection, etc, etc, etc. So I get to ask myself, "What's it going to take for me to overcome my fear and choose courage instead?"

So how about you, are you going to pick the paint-by-numbers kit or the blank canvas?

To Be Successful, Pay Attention to Your Calling

"To succeed you need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you." – Tony Dorsett

According to author and coach, Richard Leider, "Success in the new era will be characterized by those who heed their own call and who lead others to heed their call."  He describes calling as the inner urge to get up and give your gifts away and defines it as what lies at the nexus of four things ...

1. Gifts - your natural strengths
2. Passions - those things that naturally inspire you
3. Values - that voice within that assures you of what is right
4. Will - the energy to get up and act

What is your calling?

What Matters vs. What Merely Annoys

"The capacity to see the big picture is perhaps most important as an antidote to the variety of psychic woes brought forth by the remarkable prosperity and plentitude of our times. Many of us are crunched for time, deluged by information, and paralyzed by the weight of too many choices. The best prescription for these modern maladies may be to approach ones's own life in a contextual, big-picture fashion - to distinguish between what really matters and what merely annoys." - Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind

To distinguish between what really matters and what merely annoys ... now there's a wake-up call for all of us! How much of an average day do we devote to people and things that really matter to us vs. other things that, if we are honest with ourselves, fall into the "have to" or "ought to" categories?

Daniel Goleman’s research with leaders demonstrates that one cognitive ability, "pattern recognition," distinguishes star performers from average ones. This critical ability allows them to pick out the meaningful trends from an overabundance of information around them and to think strategically.  These individuals, he found, "relied less on deductive, if-then reasoning" and more on intuitive, contextual reasoning.

How are you at "pattern recognition"?  How do you distinguish between what really matters and what merely annoys?

To develop your skill in this area, read the chapter on "Symphony" in Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.