Tag Archives: leadership

March 3, 2014 · 12:18 pm

That Won’t Work

Since Mondays are days of new beginnings (“does the work week actually ever end?” you ask), let’s begin with some thinking on starts.

Not just start-ups, since there are starts everywhere in business. A project, a deal, a meeting – they all represent new beginnings.  As we start whatever those journeys may be, we need a few things. Most important, we know to have some sense of where we’re heading and how: objectives and strategies in business-speak.  We need to understand that there may be detours along the way that will require us to adjust some things – maybe a delivery date, maybe tactic, maybe even the entire place to which we’re heading.

Where many businesspeople get into trouble is when they maintain a firm determination to get to wherever it was they set out disregarding the detours.  That’s silly.  So is the opposite – seeing all of the possibilities and refusing to firm up one’s focus.  If the purpose of the enterprise or project can’t be expressed clearly and definitively, there’s a problem.

As a leader, your job is to define the mission, assemble the team to accomplish it, instill confidence, and provide whatever resources your team requires to get to the destination.  If you project an attitude of determination and success, your team will as well.  If you’re unclear or scared, your odds of success drop dramatically.  You don’t need to have all the answers; you do need to believe that the answers are within the team’s grasp.

One of the hardest things you need to be able to do is to say “Stop the car – we’re lost.”   Telling the team “that won’t work” feels like a loss since it’s an admission that something has gone wrong.  Not true.  “That won’t work” can mean the situation has changed or that you’ve learned enough from what you’ve done so far to recognize adjustments are required.

The leaders and businesses that fail are the ones afraid to admit something won’t work out loud and then to adjust.  Great leaders see the need and explain it to their team clearly.  Which will you do?

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December 16, 2013 · 9:04 am

You Never Walk Alone

Here we are, winding down another work year, and I thought this might be a good time to look at some food for thought on leadership.  Why now?  Well, at this time of year there are frequently year-end reviews going on and employees hear from their leadership as to how the employee has performed in the manager’s estimation.  Much more rare is the manager hearing from the subordinate with respect to the manager’s performance.  I suspect if the worker bees could speak up, they’d talk a fair amount about how the boss lacks interpersonal skills and a sense of mistaking pushing their employees in the right direction for leading them.   It’s a critical distinction.

It really boils down to character.  Many people get promoted into leadership roles and forget that they didn’t get there by themselves.  In fact, they lose sight of the fact that the single greatest skill a boss can possess is, in my opinion, the ability to motivate others in a positive way.  Turns out it’s not jut my opinion:

The flaws most commonly tripping up our at-risk leaders were related to failures in establishing interpersonal relationships. Far less frequent were fatal flaws involved in leading change initiatives, driving for results, and — we’re happy to report — character. That might explain how they’d managed to get as far as they had. But past a certain point, individual ambition and results aren’t enough. As they climb higher in an organization and the ability to motivate others becomes far more important, poor interpersonal skills, indifference to other people’s development, and a belief that they no longer need to improve themselves come to haunt these less effective leaders the most.

That’s from the folks at Zenger Folkman who do leadership assessments and training.  The good news is that bad leaders can become good ones if they’re willing to accept that they have issues.  The biggest of these may be the premise that they are somehow isolated from the team – above them in more than rank.  Bad leaders confuse who they are with what they do and substitute a title for earning respect.  None of us walk alone in the world and especially not in the work world.  Only when we acknowledge that and learn to work with and through others do we reach our full potential.

Make sense?

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January 18, 2013 · 9:33 am

Leading By Keeping Quiet

If you’ve been reading the screed for any period of time you know that I’m a huge fan of Top Chef.

Top Chef Middle East

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week’s episode provides us with the raw ingredients for our Foodie Friday Fun.  It was “restaurant wars” week, in which two chefs each conceive of and open a restaurant in 48 hours.  The chef selects other contestants as team members to serve as their staff and it’s not unusual for the losing head chef to go home.  What happened this week made great television, but it also demonstrated a fantastic business point for anyone who wants to lead a team.

One of the team captains selected a contestant who probably should have gone home several weeks ago.  It’s obvious that her talent and work ethic are not up to the standards of the other remaining contestants, much less up to those of the woman who chose her for her team (and no, she wasn’t a top pick).  Over the course of the prep day and the service day, the slacker chef delayed preparing a critical part of a dish which resulted in the dish not matching the head chef’s vision for it.  At judges’ table, the head chef did not complain about the other chef’s refusal to work as instructed. The judges had no way to know what had caused the offending dish to come up short.  All they knew is that the head chef said she was responsible, both for the dish and for the overall meal.  She went home.

The business lesson is critical   The leader’s taking responsibility and refusing to complain about her subordinate when she could have done so in order to save herself shows the type of character that makes a great leader. More importantly, it show that she understands that real leadership means assuming accountability to go along with your organizational authority.

That’s not to say she demonstrated perfect leadership skills.  As things weren’t going her way she got very frustrated.  Like many perfectionists she was  hard on herself and she shut down to a certain extent when she should have been more assertive. Things often don’t go the way we envision in business (in life to, come to think of it) and we  need to face the situation, adapt, and be flexible.  If we’re not confident we can’t possibly instill confidence in our teams.

The web is filled with the comments of outraged fans of the show screaming how the “wrong” chef was sent home.  Maybe the verdict was misplaced but the leadership lesson certainly wasn’t.

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