Great artcile by Paul. Definately worth a read. I might even buy his new book. Enjoy!!
Paul B. Thornton is President, Be the Leader Associates (http://www.betheleader.com) and author of seven books on management and leadership. His latest book is Leadership - Best Advice I Ever Got, is available from WingSpan Press.
Fortune magazine once published an article entitled “The Best Advice I Ever Got.” It was a great article that offered wit and wisdom about achieving business success. I liked it so much, that it motivated me to produce my newest book, Leadership—Best Advice I Ever Got, which describes the best leadership advice 136 successful CEOs, coaches, consultants, professors, managers, executives, presidents, politicians, and religious leaders received that most helped them become effective and successful leaders.
Here are 7 secrets to leadership success:
1. Leadership is about making things happen
If you want to make something happen with your life – in school, in your profession or in your community, do it. Perceived obstacles crumble against persistent desire. John Baldoni, Author, Leadership Communication Consultant and Founder of Baldoni Consulting LLC, shared this advice that had come from his father, a physician. He taught him the value of persistence. At the same time, his mother taught him compassion for others. Therefore, persistence for your cause should not be gained at the expense of others. Another bit of leadership wisdom!
2. Listen and understand the issue, then lead
Time and time again we have all been told, "God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason"...or as Stephen Covey said..."Seek to understand, rather than be understood." As a leader, listening first to the issue, then trying to coach, has been the most valuable advice that Cordia Harrington, President and CEO of Tennessee Bun Company has been given.
3. Answer the three questions everyone within your organization wants answers to
What the people of an organization want from their leader are answers to the following: Where are we going? How are we going to get there? What is my role? Kevin Nolan, President & Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Health Systems, Inc. believes the more clarity that can be added to each of the three questions, the better the result.
4. Master the goals that will allow you to work anywhere in today’s dynamic business world
Debbe Kennedy, President, CEO and Founder of Global Dialogue Center and Leadership Solutions Companies, and author of Action Dialogues and Breakthrough once shared this piece of advice that was instrumental in shaping her direction, future and achievements.
She was a young manager at IBM just promoted to her first staff assignment in a regional marketing office. For reasons she can’t explain, one of her colleagues named Bookie called her into his office while she was visiting his location. He then began to offer unsolicited advice, but advice that now stays fresh in her mind. He mentioned that jobs, missions, titles and organizations would come and go as business is dynamic-- meaning it is always changing. He advised her not to focus your goals toward any of these, but instead learn to master the skills that will allow you to work anywhere.
He was talking about four skills:
• The ability to develop an idea
• Effectively plan for its implementation
• Execute second-to-none
• Achieve superior results time after time.
With this in mind, Kennedy advises readers to seek jobs and opportunities with this in mind. Forget what others do. Work to be known for delivering excellence. It speaks for itself and it opens doors.
5. Be curious
Curiosity is a prerequisite to continuous improvement and even excellence. The person who gave Mary Jean Thornton, Former Executive Vice President & CIO, The Travelers this advice urged her to study people, processes, and structures. He inspired her to be intellectually curious. He often reminded Thornton that making progress, in part, was based upon thinking. She has learned to apply this notion of intellectual curiosity by thinking about her organization’s future, understanding the present, and knowing and challenging herself to creatively move the people and the organization closer to its vision.
6. Listen to both sides of the argument
The most valuable advice Brian P. Lees, Massachusetts State Senator and Senate Minority Leader ever received came from his mentor, United States Senator Edward W. Brooke III. He told him to listen to all different kinds of people and ideas. Listening only to those who share your background and opinions can be imprudent. It is important to respect your neighbors’ rights to their own views. Listening to and talking with a variety of people, from professors to police officers, from senior citizens to schoolchildren, is essential not only to be a good leader in business, but to also be a valuable member within your community.
7. Prepare, prepare, prepare
If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail. If one has truly prepared and something goes wrong the strength of the rest of what you've prepared for usually makes this something easier to handle without crisis and panic. One of the best pieces of advice Dave Hixson, Men’s Varsity Basketball Coach at Amherst College has ever received and continues to use and pass on is this anonymous quote—“Preparation is the science of winning."
Along with this are two expressions from Rick Pitino's book Success is a Choice, which speaks to preparation. Hixson asks his teams every year: "Do you deserve to win?" and "Have you done the work?" This speaks to the importance of preparation toward achieving your final goal. If you haven't done the work (preparation) the answer to the second question is an easy "no!"
Great advice comes from many sources – parents, other relatives, consultants, bosses, co-workers, mentors, teachers, coaches, and friends. The important point to remember is to stay open, listen to everyone, but also develop your own leadership style.
Showing posts with label listening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label listening. Show all posts
Thursday, December 2, 2010
A Failure to Lead - A Failure to Communicate
A great article for Private Club Managers. Reasearch show that Communication is one of the top leadeship traits need for club managers. Enjoy!
John Baldoni is a leadership communications consultant who works with companies and non profits organizations. He is the author of several books on leadership including Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders (McGraw-Hill, 2003).
Two recent high profile catastrophes cast light on an age old problem. The first was the breakup of the Columbia shuttle as it speed across the Texas sky on February 1st, 2003. The second was the sudden power outage on August 14th that affected some 80 million consumers in the Eastern part of the United States and Ontario. The first accident cost the lives of seven astronauts; the second accident cost a loss of faith in the power grid as well as billions of dollars. While both accidents were different in root causes, both shared a single similar fault – a failure to communicate.
The most glaring communication failures make headlines, but failure to keep people in the know or to report an emergent problem are hardly unique to disasters. Communication lapses in fact are so recurrent that the very phrase, "failure to communicate" - popularized a generation ago in the Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Luke - seems to be a near universal. Communication beakdowns occur routinely, but it takes a spectacular event like the Columbia disaster or the Eastern power outage to remind us how consequential they can be. What can we do to ensure that communications flourishes to the betterment of the enterprise?
Scan the horizon. Nothing remains the same for very long. Leaders are responsible for looking outside the organization to discover what customers are thinking and purchasing - and how competitors are responding to the changing market conditions. By scanning the organization's horizon, leaders help their organization anticipate the future to avoid blindsiding by it.
Keep an ear to the ground. Leaders listen to what people are saying - but also what they are not saying. Problems occur in all organizations, but it is the well lead organization that learns about incipient problems before they emerge. Front-line military officers, for instance, frequently look over the shoulder of their troops not only to assure performance but also to learn of early warning signs of threats to performance.
Ask questions. One of the surest ways to find out what is going on within an organization is to pose questions. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is an inveterate questioner. He helps keep himself up to speed by incessantly posing queries during his many forays around Amazon facilities.
Create feedback loops. It is useful to install devices by which employees can voice an opinion and receive a response. Feedback systems are easy to implement with e-mail, but providing a thoughtful response requires a commitment to active communication. But then again, that's what communications is all about – two-way feedback and follow-up.
MBWA. David Packard pioneered "management by walking around" as he built Hewlett-Packard. Doing so took him out from behind his desk and into meeting, hallways, cafeterias, shop floors, and sales centers where the real work occurred, and his MBWA has become an industry standard.
Integrate communications into your disaster plans. Have a disaster plan in place with two way communications, and test it so that employees feel comfortable with it. Most fire, rescue, and trauma teams maintain such plans and rehearse them regularly. In the absence of a rehearsed disaster plan, effective communication is one of the first casualties of a catastrophe.
Communication is the glue that holds organizations together. It helps prevent calamity and fosters performance. Through self-conscious development and frequent practice of the art of organizational communication, communication failures should become communication successes.
John Baldoni is a leadership communications consultant who works with companies and non profits organizations. He is the author of several books on leadership including Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders (McGraw-Hill, 2003).
Two recent high profile catastrophes cast light on an age old problem. The first was the breakup of the Columbia shuttle as it speed across the Texas sky on February 1st, 2003. The second was the sudden power outage on August 14th that affected some 80 million consumers in the Eastern part of the United States and Ontario. The first accident cost the lives of seven astronauts; the second accident cost a loss of faith in the power grid as well as billions of dollars. While both accidents were different in root causes, both shared a single similar fault – a failure to communicate.
The most glaring communication failures make headlines, but failure to keep people in the know or to report an emergent problem are hardly unique to disasters. Communication lapses in fact are so recurrent that the very phrase, "failure to communicate" - popularized a generation ago in the Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Luke - seems to be a near universal. Communication beakdowns occur routinely, but it takes a spectacular event like the Columbia disaster or the Eastern power outage to remind us how consequential they can be. What can we do to ensure that communications flourishes to the betterment of the enterprise?
Scan the horizon. Nothing remains the same for very long. Leaders are responsible for looking outside the organization to discover what customers are thinking and purchasing - and how competitors are responding to the changing market conditions. By scanning the organization's horizon, leaders help their organization anticipate the future to avoid blindsiding by it.
Keep an ear to the ground. Leaders listen to what people are saying - but also what they are not saying. Problems occur in all organizations, but it is the well lead organization that learns about incipient problems before they emerge. Front-line military officers, for instance, frequently look over the shoulder of their troops not only to assure performance but also to learn of early warning signs of threats to performance.
Ask questions. One of the surest ways to find out what is going on within an organization is to pose questions. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is an inveterate questioner. He helps keep himself up to speed by incessantly posing queries during his many forays around Amazon facilities.
Create feedback loops. It is useful to install devices by which employees can voice an opinion and receive a response. Feedback systems are easy to implement with e-mail, but providing a thoughtful response requires a commitment to active communication. But then again, that's what communications is all about – two-way feedback and follow-up.
MBWA. David Packard pioneered "management by walking around" as he built Hewlett-Packard. Doing so took him out from behind his desk and into meeting, hallways, cafeterias, shop floors, and sales centers where the real work occurred, and his MBWA has become an industry standard.
Integrate communications into your disaster plans. Have a disaster plan in place with two way communications, and test it so that employees feel comfortable with it. Most fire, rescue, and trauma teams maintain such plans and rehearse them regularly. In the absence of a rehearsed disaster plan, effective communication is one of the first casualties of a catastrophe.
Communication is the glue that holds organizations together. It helps prevent calamity and fosters performance. Through self-conscious development and frequent practice of the art of organizational communication, communication failures should become communication successes.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Real Leaders Use Social Media to Shut Up and Listen
Great article by Wayne Turmel and goes to my point that listening/communication are the #1 leadership trait! Enjoy!
By Wayne Turmel
With all the Twittering, Yammering, Foursquaring and all the other social media going on (the word I’ve coined is tweetfacelinkblogging, patent pending) it would seem that leaders have no shortage of ways to get their message out. That’s great, says one leadership expert, but it misses the point. The real advantage of social media to a leader is the ability to listen.
Jim Kouzes has been writing about leadership for well over 30 years,starting with the landmark “The Leadership Challenge” and now his latest book, “The Truth About Leadership- the No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know,” are essential reading for anyone interested in being a great leader. He doesn’t buy into the fact that leadership means anything different to Millennials (or whatever you want to call those darned kids) than it did to your parents, but technology has made a difference, and the difference isn’t what you think.
“The fact is that social media, Twitter and all that, actually makes it easier for leaders to listen to their people than ever before”, he said when I spoke to him on The Cranky Middle Manager Show. That’s right, people complain about distance and being physically far from your people, but ask yourself: how many leaders actually get unfiltered input from their folks, even when they’re in the same location?
The idea of using social media to listen seems counter-intuitive. After all, we get told constantly how easy it is to broadcast your message. You can send out daily tweets, update your Facebook or Ning page, and conduct “Town Hall” webinars but those are one-way, broadcast media, at least the way most people use them. When was the last time your CEO held a webinar that actually allowed chat or took questions with any serious intent?
It’s amazing how insulated leaders can become- just watch a treacly episode of Undercover Boss sometime. (”I never knew the people who worked for me worked so hard for so little”. Really????). Giving the appearance of listening is easy, you just have to take a look at that dusty suggestion box in the lunch room. It gets a lot of action at first and then becomes a dust bunny repository as people realize that their ideas are going into the ether.
Kouzes makes the point that a real leader listens. “Social media is a great opportunity to get input from your people and let them feel listened to and heard- if it’s used effectively”.
That effectiveness is demonstrated by not only gathering feedback, but responding to it and displaying it for all the world to see, even when it’s not flattering. Then (and here’s the hard part) taking actual action based on that feedback.
Whether you’re the CEO or first-time project manager, leaders listen to their people and let those folks know they’ve been heard. It doesn’t mean you do everything they suggest — after all, you’re the leader for a reason– but they have to know that you listen and care.
By Wayne Turmel
With all the Twittering, Yammering, Foursquaring and all the other social media going on (the word I’ve coined is tweetfacelinkblogging, patent pending) it would seem that leaders have no shortage of ways to get their message out. That’s great, says one leadership expert, but it misses the point. The real advantage of social media to a leader is the ability to listen.
Jim Kouzes has been writing about leadership for well over 30 years,starting with the landmark “The Leadership Challenge” and now his latest book, “The Truth About Leadership- the No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know,” are essential reading for anyone interested in being a great leader. He doesn’t buy into the fact that leadership means anything different to Millennials (or whatever you want to call those darned kids) than it did to your parents, but technology has made a difference, and the difference isn’t what you think.
“The fact is that social media, Twitter and all that, actually makes it easier for leaders to listen to their people than ever before”, he said when I spoke to him on The Cranky Middle Manager Show. That’s right, people complain about distance and being physically far from your people, but ask yourself: how many leaders actually get unfiltered input from their folks, even when they’re in the same location?
The idea of using social media to listen seems counter-intuitive. After all, we get told constantly how easy it is to broadcast your message. You can send out daily tweets, update your Facebook or Ning page, and conduct “Town Hall” webinars but those are one-way, broadcast media, at least the way most people use them. When was the last time your CEO held a webinar that actually allowed chat or took questions with any serious intent?
It’s amazing how insulated leaders can become- just watch a treacly episode of Undercover Boss sometime. (”I never knew the people who worked for me worked so hard for so little”. Really????). Giving the appearance of listening is easy, you just have to take a look at that dusty suggestion box in the lunch room. It gets a lot of action at first and then becomes a dust bunny repository as people realize that their ideas are going into the ether.
Kouzes makes the point that a real leader listens. “Social media is a great opportunity to get input from your people and let them feel listened to and heard- if it’s used effectively”.
That effectiveness is demonstrated by not only gathering feedback, but responding to it and displaying it for all the world to see, even when it’s not flattering. Then (and here’s the hard part) taking actual action based on that feedback.
Whether you’re the CEO or first-time project manager, leaders listen to their people and let those folks know they’ve been heard. It doesn’t mean you do everything they suggest — after all, you’re the leader for a reason– but they have to know that you listen and care.
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