Archive for the ‘leadership tips’ Category

Voltaire said it first, and while many people have said it in various ways, it all means the same thing. When we try to be good at too many things, we end up being great at none of them.

Consider this scenario.

Mary is the manager of a medium-sized division in her company. She is responsible for the work that her division does for the company, as well as managing the 25 associates that work in the division. She reports to a company Vice President, and is occasionally asked to make reports to the entire group of Vice Presidents. Mary has job responsibilities that extend beyond managing the people in her division. Yet she spends much of her time putting out fires with and for them. They like and trust her, and it makes her feel important to help them with their work issues.

 Mary finds herself constantly feeling like she is trying to catch up at work. She often works very long hours, staying way past everyone else, and lives with her Blackberry glued to her hand. She feels guilty for not spending more time with her family. She often misses evening or weekend family commitments to take care of something at work. Mary is totally stressed out and over extended. She feels like she can’t get a handle on the never-ending ‘fires’, and wants to quit.

Mary’s scenario may not be your own. However, I would assert that too often, many of us are guilty of getting caught up in other people’s expectations or demands on our time without taking the time to consider our effectiveness.

Are you trying to be good at too many things and sacrificing being great at just a few? Are you losing sight of the bigger picture, scrambling around, and feeling trapped on a hamster wheel?

To engage in ongoing development as a leader means evaluating these questions every so often. And to really evaluate them, you need to get specific.

Everyone, regardless of your position at work, can benefit from engaging in intentional reflection. Here are some steps to get you started:

1. Get it on the calendar: Decide how often you want to reap the benefits of the process and then write it into your calendar. Treat it with the same importance that you treat any other meeting. We recommend allocating two hours to this process, and scheduling it once a week, once every two weeks, or at the very least, once a month.
2. Problem Solving Time Goes First: Spend the first hour of your reflection time on problem solving. The focus of this type of reflection is short-term and tactical. We are inundated with problems at work every day. To address them effectively, we need to reflect on them. Make a list of problems. Pick the priorities and work them out. Do as many as you realistically can.
3. Think Strategically and Seek Wisdom: The second hour of your time should be spent on this longer-term type of reflection. It is more proactive and requires discipline and accountability. There will always be dozens of immediate demands! But without this type of reflection, you will find it very difficult to control your time and your situation.
4. Take Action!: Using what you’ve done in the two hours of reflection, make a plan of concrete steps that you can follow to get you there. Take it to the next level and find someone with whom you can share your plan of action who will hold you accountable for actually doing it.

Many of us are so busy putting out fires and responding to the immediate and never-ending daily demands of our lives that we do not carve out time to gain control. Often people refer to it as ‘taking time for themselves’. It falls again and again to the bottom of the priority list.

We challenge you to try carving out this block of time even once, and see what kind of benefits you can reap. And if you want a partner in this process, and more detailed guidance on how to engage in this discipline, we’re just a phone call away.

Team Building Quotes: Below is a list of Japanese proverbs related to Team Building and People Skills. Some are funny. Some are wise. All will make you think a little…

• One kind word can warm three winter months.
• The reverse side also has a reverse side.
• When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
• A good sword is the one left in its scabbard.
• A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle.
• Adversity is the foundation of virtue.
• If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.
• Laughter cannot bring back what anger has driven away.
• One who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger.
• The inarticulate speak longest.
• The tongue is but three inches long, yet it can kill a man six feet high.
• The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.
• Vision with action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.
• We learn little from victory, much from defeat.
• We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
• We’ve arrived, and to prove it we’re here.

Walk the Talk: How we present ourselves in the workplace

Women in leadership are still something of a rarity today. There have been a couple of articles recently in the Wall Street Journal looking at women in the workforce and analyzing our collective progress. While there are no concrete conclusions about why it’s happening, the data is unambiguous. Women are being overlooked at promotion time.

Hmmmm.

This got us thinking about our own successes and failures in various industries within the working world. We have come to the conclusion that there are five key ways to “Walk the Talk” when it comes to how we present ourselves out there. Here they are, for your pondering –

1. Speak how you want others to speak – both TO you and ABOUT you. Think for a moment about how others would describe you. What would they say? Is that who you want to be? The way to change it is to give them something better. The old adage is true – you get what you give.
2. Be authentic. No one likes to deal with someone who is two-faced, to be blunt. Be true to your values, and don’t be afraid to disagree with someone else, even if you work for them. If you find ways to do so respectfully and sincerely, you might be surprised at how well received your opinions will be.
3. Go out of your way for others. It seems that in many workplace environments, we’ve come to expect the worst of each other. There is a clear “every (wo)man for her/himself” attitude out there. When you extend simple courtesies to someone else, you show that person that you are considerate. Nothing helps with rapport like a small act of unexpected kindness.
4. Focus on your work ethic. If you don’t deliver, you don’t have credibility. It’s as simple as that.
5. Take responsibility for your actions and words. Lose the victim mentality. If you mess up, opt for a simple “excuse me” or apologize rather than offering excuses or reasons as to why something happened. This covers everything from being late to a meeting to not making a deadline. You write your own story, and life is not happening to you – you are not a puppet.

The bottom line is this – women have historically had a tough time out there. Many of the barriers that have stood in our way in the past have come down, and many others are still there. Nothing will change overnight. However, recognizing that you are the main character in your own story and that you can control your actions and behavior just might give you the courage you need. Stand up and lead like a woman and excel in team building and leadership.

Leadership Tips/Team Building Tips: Set Your Priorities

Author James Patterson once said that in the game of life, there are five balls that must constantly be kept in the air – work, family, friends, health, and integrity. He said that work is a rubber ball – it can be dropped and it will bounce back. The rest of the balls are made of glass. If you drop one of them, it can be scuffed, scratched, or shattered.

I myself must admit that I have sacrificed (on more than one occasion, if I am being honest) each of the other four things at one point or another, to varying degrees. When my first son was a baby, I can remember mindlessly setting the baby swing for another round of music just so that I could get one more phone call made for work. I have rearranged dates with friends on more occasions than I can count because ‘something’ came up for work. Before I had children, I routinely put in 70-80 hours as a young community organizer, once working even after being diagnosed with pneumonia. And I’ve been guilty of going along with a decision that I knew was a compromise of my integrity at work, out of fear that I would look stupid or lose my job. All of this was done in the name of ‘getting ahead’, or ‘taking care of my family’, or ‘keeping my priorities straight’.

I felt that work was the ball made of glass.

How many of us have that confused? In our experience working with clients, leaders and business people over the years, many of us do.

So how do you remedy this way of thinking before you ‘shatter’ your family, friends, health or integrity?

The first step lies in an honest assessment of your priorities. Your calendar can be a great mirror for you (if not a little painful) of where you spend your time. After all, time is the most precious resource we have, so taking a hard look at where you spend yours can be revealing.

After you have come to terms with the reality of where your time is spent, you must reconcile whether or not this is an accurate reflection of your priorities and values. In other words, if you consider those five balls – work, family, friends, health and integrity – in what order of importance do you place them?

Finally, taking some time to reflect can be a useful tool for helping you figure out how to spend your time in a way that more accurately reflects your priorities. It is a discipline – it takes time, and it is not always easy to do, but worth it in the long run.

And if you choose to make no change at all, that, too, is a valid choice. But if you make no changes, you can expect no changes. Zig Ziglar said it well:

“One definition of insanity is to believe that you can keep on doing what you’ve been doing and get different results.”

What results do you want to have?

“Classroom Training” does not equal “Boring Training”!

It is an unfortunate truth that there are a lot of  “Leadership Training” or “Team Building” workshops or seminars out there that are… well… boring. It has become common to hear groans of distress and expressions of angst from people who have had, shall we say, “less-than-stellar” experience in these sessions.  However, that doesn’t have to be the case. Leadership training and team building events can be a very powerful way to add energy and enthusiasm to your team while passing along time-tested skill sets that in high demand in the business world.

However, it is important to understand the semantics of the industry so that you end up with an exceptional activity or workshop versus a boring one. The more focused you are on the results that you are looking for, the more likely you will be to pick the perfect solution for your team.

Consider the following criteria when evaluating your next training workshop.

1. Look and listen for key words such as ‘interactive’ or ‘experiential’ in the description of the training session you are considering. And ask for an example of what is meant by using those terms. Usually, these terms mean that the class participants will actually participate in the session somehow. This is absolutely essential because we don’t learn stuff just by listening to it. We learn by interacting with the material. In short, we learn by doing. The more active the workshop, the more enjoyable it will be for the participants.  The more passive the workshop, the more droopy eyes you will see from the participants.
2. If the person trying to interest you in the training is not asking a lot of questions about you, your company and your expectations, shop somewhere else. This is a sure sign that they have no intention of trying to meet or exceed those expectations, and could risk wasting your time and your money by delivering a training session that is not appropriate for your team’s needs.  The facilitator doesn’t necessarily have to customize, or even tailor, the material to the group, but with a few simple questions up front, the facilitator should be able to match content with the needs of the group.
3. Understand that not all training is created equally. The more you know about what you want to get out of the training experience, the better able a training consultant will be in a position to help you find the right match for your needs. Sometimes a team in conflict really shouldn’t spend their time and money on a training session that is designed to really just let a team play together. Sometimes that team in conflict needs something a little more in depth. However, that doesn’t mean the session won’t be fun for the participants – it just means that the laughs will come from different experiences.
4. Do your legwork ahead of time with your team. Once you’ve chosen a training workshop, talk to your colleagues about it before they get there. Ask your training consultant or instructor to give you suggestions about how to do this. If there are negative feelings and/or experiences from the past, consider letting people air their concerns so that you and/or the trainer can dispel them prior to the workshop day. There’s nothing worse for a training consultant than to walk into a classroom prepared to facilitate a great session only to be met by enormous resistance before they’ve even had a chance to speak!

Regardless of your experiences with classroom training thus far, studies show in increasing numbers how incredibly valuable it is to the entire workforce to invest in some type of leadership development training. Whether you are looking to improve your communication skills, polish your presentation skills, or develop overall better leadership capacity, there is a training out there for you.

Just keep the concepts above in mind when you choose a workshop or facilitator, and your team will be enthused by your activity and love the experience.

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes, in the nature of the case, different points of view. -Robert Hutchins

Oprah Winfrey was the most successful daytime TV star of all time and is still one of the most influential people in America.  When she promoted a book on her television show, it would typically be on the bestseller list within a week.  However, I’d wager that Ms. Winfrey’s success would have been far less dramatic if she had spent all those years lecturing her audience for an hour a day.   One of the characteristics of her show that has made her so influential is the fact that she created a one-on-one dialogue with her guests as well as with her audience.  Her audience, and her influence, grew year after year.

We can learn from her success.  We too can have more influence over others if we create two-way communication.  One of the most common complaints I hear from front-line employees is that top management does not take their ideas seriously and does not address their concerns.  Many companies today have a top-down communication in place that can stifle creativity and build resentment in front-line employees.

Many of these employees have ideas that could revolutionize the company, but far too often, the ideas are overlooked because the people at the top are too focused on the status quo.

Herb Peterson was a McDonald’s franchise holder in 1972 when he had an idea to add breakfast to the menu.  At that time, McDonald’s was just a hamburger place without a lot of additional items, and no one would want to go to a hamburger place for breakfast.  Herb went ahead and crafted a Teflon circle in his garage in order to be able to easily cook eggs Benedict on a hamburger grill, and he took the idea to the McDonald’s headquarters in Chicago.  Today, it’s estimated that McDonald’s sells about $4 billion worth of breakfast per year.

Those dialogues that we create with the people who work for us can provide us with valuable information – both good and bad.  This information is critical in helping us make solid decisions in the marketplace.

If you want to influence others in a positive way, take a lesson from Oprah and McDonald’s and create dialogues rather than monologues. Practice good listening skills and communication skills, and create two-way communication to build a good team.

Gain Enthusiastic Cooperation:  Encourage and Facilitate Two-Way Communication

Have you ever noticed that the most successful people in just about any industry are the early risers?  Ben Franklin called this group of people the “Six O’clock Club.”  Franklin spent the first hour of his day planning the events of his day (to do this he invented the Franklin Planner) and reading.  He often claimed that the first hour of his day was the most important.  How does this relate to raising your own energy level?  We have a choice every morning when we wake up.  Do I want to hit the snooze bar a few times, or do I want to put some energy and enthusiasm into my day?

Frank Bettger, in his book How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, said that if he had to narrow down to one thing why he has been so successful, it would be enthusiasm.  His enthusiasm was what moved him from a “second rate bush league making $25 a week” to the starting shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals.  His enthusiasm was also what transformed him from a washout in sales to the most successful insurance agent of his time.  Where did his enthusiasm come from?  He says that he didn’t have any enthusiasm in the beginning, but he faked it.  He acted like he was enthusiastic, and behold he was.  After a few successes, the enthusiasm came easy.

You have the same choice in your own life.  When a dirty job has to be done, jump in with lots of enthusiasm and gusto.  When you have a challenging project that no one else wants to do, you can use that project as an opportunity to get yourself noticed.

Everyone wants to be around people who are going somewhere.  The person who sets out to enthusiastically get to the next level will attract tons of followers.  Enthusiasm is contagious.

Take the advice of Franklin and Bettger and raise your energy level and the people around you will stop and take notice.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. –William James

Most people have one defining need that very rarely gets satisfied.  Many of us will move Heaven and Earth to satisfy this need.  This one attribute is the single most motivating factor that leads to success.  It is the need, the want, to feel important.  The person who can satisfy this need in others, the person who can sincerely make other people feel important, can be very influential and is typically regarded by others as a good leader. In fact, you can tell a lot about an individual by what makes him feel important.  My dad builds houses, and one of the most satisfying things to him is to complete a building and have others admire his work.  Al Capone got his feeling of being important from power and control.  Mother Teresa got her feeling of importance by helping the helpless.  There are usually two reasons why people do things.  The reason we tell others… and the real reason.  When we give money to charity, do we really do it to help others or do we do it because of the satisfaction we get from helping others.  We feel important because we feel like we made a difference in someone else’s life.

We you look around your office, you will see people from all walks of life who crave this feeling of importance.  If any one of those people all of the sudden stopped doing their job, it would cause a lot of challenges for your company.  Every single job that they do is important to the success of the company – to your success, because without them you couldn’t do your job effectively.

When was the last time that you told them how important they were to you?

One of my class members about ten years ago decided to use this principle with his sales assistant.  She was the assistant for five different salespeople, and her job was to put together marketing materials and, ultimately, their contracts when they sold a big deal.  During the class, this salesman decided that the work that this woman did for him was critical to him closing deals, so on his way into the office, he bought her a big container of popcorn and just put a sticky note on it saying how important she was to him and to his success.

When he gave it to her, she was shocked and surprised, but awfully grateful as well since he was the first person in years to treat her like an equal in the office.  When he came back to class the next week, he told us that she had taken the sticky note off the can and stuck it under the plastic protector that covered her desk so that she could see it every day.

I saw this man a couple of years later and asked him about the sales assistant.  He told me that she is still there and still doing a fabulous job.  He said, though, that she now has over a dozen of the sticky notes on her desk.  She keeps every one.

Great leaders use this aspect of human nature to make people feel important.  One way to be a great leader is to find some way every day to make the people around you feel important.

Team Building Principle #15: Acknowledge the Importance of Other People

When the economy is slow, company managers and leaders have to be very cautious with every expense. As a result, we will often put off hiring new employees until more certainty in the marketplace develops. Although natural efficiencies will develop in a downward economy, can team building activities help increase productivity so that we can avoid the expense of adding on new personnel? The answer to that question is… “Well… It depends…”

Don’t Confuse “Morale” with “Productivity”

Team Building is almost a generic term that is used for both “morale building” activities and “productivity building” activities interchangeable, but if you confuse the two activities, you can make some costly mistakes. Morale building activities can include anything from going out to a movie together to an office holiday party to entertainment style activities at annual meetings ans conventions. These activities provide a shared-experience that builds temporary camaraderie and provides a fun relief to the normal day-to-day rat-race. Productivity building activities are training events or innovations that help teams do more with less. Although people will often call both of these types of activities “Team Building”, the activities themselves get totally different results. Both are needed to create a team culture, but quite often, managers and leaders will schedule one type of activity hoping to get the needed result from the other type of activity and be sorely disappointed.

Although productivity will often improve (sometimes dramatically) when morale improves, an increase in morale doesn’t always cause a team to be more productive. For instance, if a manager came into the office and announced that the entire team would get the whole week off and still get paid, morale would skyrocket, but productivity would drop to zero for the week. Morale building activities like team outings and company parties are extremely important, but they can’t entirely replace productivity building events and activities.

Since the team atmosphere created by morale building activities can be temporary, you’ll want to schedule activities like this regularly so that the individual team members get to interact with each other in a more fun way to build camaraderie. Charity team building events at annual meetings or conventions can be a great way to insert a morale building activity. These team building functions are very economical, because the company can generate great public relations without increasing the cost of conducting a convention or annual meeting. For instance, most conventions are going to have some type of entertainment or at least a company outing of some kind. Many companies are replacing these activities with a charity bike build or a team scavenger hunt where team members build gift baskets for soldiers. The investment in each activity is fairly similar, but the results of the charity activities often provide impactful, lasting memories that build great camaraderie between team members.

Build Teams by Training Team Members Together

In addition to morale building activities, a team also needs to develop new skills in order to keep them productive. Many years ago, a mentor of mine told me that “You can’t build a team by training individuals, but you can build a team by training individuals together.” I didn’t really understand the power of this advice until I started my own business, but I understand it more and more as my company grows and grows. For instance, many big companies offer tuition assistance for higher level degrees for their employees, but what often happens is that a company will invest a ton of money into the development of an employee only to have the person leave the company and start working for a competitor. This happens because the individual employees is growing, but the team as a whole is stagnant.

Oddly enough, any skill development activities will work to build the team culture in an organization if the skills developed gives the team a competitive advantage in the marketplace. For instance, Apple decided to eliminate cash registers inside their Apple Stores and replace them with the ability for any employee in the store to be able to use their smartphones to ring-up items for purchases on their smartphones. Because Apple is doing something that no one else is doing, the employees who have been trained in this new technology feel like they are a part of an elite group that is different from other retail stores. Whether they are or not doesn’t really matter, because the team believe that they are ahead of the curve. Customers can find an Apple employee and within seconds create a purchase and have the receipt sent to the customer via email and be on their way. A dramatic increase in productivity and decrease in cost while creating more of a team atmosphere among employees.

“Soft-Skills” Team Building Training is Most Productive

The most effective team training to increase productivity comes from “soft-skills” training, though. While Hard-Skills are ones essential to doing individual jobs within a company — for example hard-skills for an engineer might be calculus and physics — soft-Skills are skills that improve productivity no matter what specific role that a person has within an organization. Soft-skills would include communication skills, presentation skills, the ability to persuade people, the ability to coach and mentor others, etc. If the engineer improves in any or all of these soft-skills, then he or she will likely improve their individual success as well as the overall success of the team.

When teams train together in these soft-skill areas, they automatically develop that same type of team culture that Apple developed with the technology change. Team members know that they are a part of a unique, elite group that is different from most organizations (because most organizations don’t train this way).

For example, a few years ago, I was hired by a commercial construction company to help them deliver high-level sales presentations better. Companies that build skyscrapers or have groups of construction projects often bid out these huge projects in one big contract, so they will often ask for huge proposals and have each qualified contractor come in and do a presentation to narrow down the field. The company that hired me was closing about one out of six of these presentations, but wanted to increase their numbers. So we conducted a series of presentation skills classes with the teams of presenters. Because they trained together, they developed a team culture that showed up when they conducted their presentations. Quite often, at the end of their presentations, the board members who were in the audience would say, “We chose this group because they just seemed to work very well together.” The team culture showed, because the individuals within the group had been trained in soft-skills together, so they saw themselves as having an advantage over other presenters (and they had one.)

Presentation skills, people skills, coaching, mentoring, and other soft-skills training can really help teams become more productive as long as the teams are going through the training as a team. I remember my college football coach telling us, “You don’t fight for records or awards, you fight for the guy who is next to you in the trenches.” When teams train together, they build a rapport that lasts.

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