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Leadership

Leadership – The Medium Is the Message

The titanic achievements of Ghengis Khan, Julius Caesar, F John Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Socrates, have left an indelible impression on our civilisation. They are remembered not only for their achievements, but for their ability to communicate their leadership to others. Leadership that inspired, and motivated, their followers to great achievements.

Some leaders rely on the power of their position, or fear. Others rely on their power of persuasion. Versatile leaders rely on both the power of their position, and persuasion, as the situation demands.

Leaders exist only by their ability to communicate. The medium is the message! Leadership is the message. A message determined by the medium in which a leader chooses to communicate that message e.g. aggressive, cooperative, facilitating, can’t miss, etc.

One-dimensional leadership that uses the power-of-position only, is destructive. One-dimensional leadership discourages the personal growth of other’s, denies them fulfilment, and responsibility, does nothing for their self-esteem. Power-of-position leadership negatively motivates by anxiety, implied threat, and fear for a person’s performance review, employment, and career should they not comply with their leader’s commands.

Persuasive, versatile, leadership encourages personal growth, fulfilment, responsibility and self-esteem. Versatile leadership motivates by example of the ‘right’ attitude. The ‘right’ leadership attitude, of feelings, emotions, beliefs, and values, that permits the leaders information to enter the mind of the other person, and influence, motivate and predict his, or her, behaviour.

You have probably met a person with the same attitude as yourself. You instinctively like that person. Your information, your reasoning, your leadership, is readily allowed to enter that person’s mind. You talk easily, freely, together. Words have the same meanings and implications, for both of you. Trust is almost spontaneous. Your message, your sales, your negotiation, your leadership, your friendship, is most effective in motivating that other person’s self-esteem, and confidence, to achieve your objective.

On the other hand when you meet a person with different attitudes to yourself, your information, your leadership, your persuasion, meets barriers, and is refused entry into that person’s mind, it is ignored and cannot motivate him, or her, in the way you want. You have nothing in common to discuss!

As a versatile leader your awareness recognises, and adopts, the other person’s attitude, to ensure your leadership is permitted to enter that person’s mind, inspire and self-motivate him, or her, to achieve your objective for his, or her, reasons, not yours.

What are the attitudes of a versatile leader? Watch a good leader. Look for his, or her, situational awareness as they deftly adopt different attitudes to motivate different people in changing situations. These situations include:

1. Organising Others: to achieve the objective uses attitudes of: accommodating – compromising – complimenting – conciliatory – moderate – prescribing – prescriptive – resistant

2. Engaging with Others: to achieve the objective uses attitudes of: collaborative – conferring – experimental – conciliatory – facilitative – prescribing – prescriptive – what ‘if’

3. Motivating Others: to achieve the objective uses attitudes of: authoritative – “can-do” – “can’t miss” – confronting – emphatic – persuasive – single – minded – visionary

How many Leadership attitudes do you use?

The greater the number of leadership attitudes you adopt (without self-stress), the more effective your leadership. Your leadership readily self-motivates a greater number of people, with its vision, drive, planning, and commitment to achieve your objective.

The fewer the number of leadership attitudes you adopt without stress, the less effective your leadership. Your leadership is less effective in motivating others to achieve your vision, drive, commitment, planning and objective.

Your culture of Leadership Attitudes significantly influences the situational quality of your leadership.

Versatile leaders Culture of Leadership attitudes (without self-stress), that spreads across all three culture groups, of organising, engaging, and motivating, have significant advantages when leading, and motivating people to change, and to succeed in our increasingly complex and fast changing world

On the other hand, leaders whose culture of attitudes is confined to one culture group are hobbled by self-stress, have difficulty in leading and dealing with change. Their self-stress can increase, spark, or spontaneously combust into ineffective, inappropriate, or even counter-productive leadership decisions and attitudes.

Everyone has attitude? Effective leaders lead with the ‘right’ attitude. The more attitudes in your quiver, the better your leadership.

Harry Wolfe. Grad. Dip. Org. Behav. FAICD.

[http://www.managementdynamics.info]

Management Dynamics International, Geier Profiles translate intangible motivatation into validated fact. They examine beliefs, values to describe, psychologically measure, benchmark & validate: attitudes, behaviour, leadership, ability to manage change, organisatuion culture, to predict a person’s job performance, future potential, and culture ‘fit’.

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Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Harry_Wolfe/136300

 

Leadership

What You Need to Know About Leadership

Executive Summary

Since the inception of business, organizations have searched for clues to help identify and select successful leaders. They have searched for men and women of vision with that rare combination of traits that help them serve as motivator, business driver, and authority figure. The concept of leadership has been widely observed and frequently studied, but a thorough understanding of what defines successful leadership has always remained just out of reach.

I wanted to find the answer(s) to the age-old question, “What makes a great leader?” After studying the behavioral attributes of thousands of business leaders, the resulting data could reveal commonalities that define strong leadership. What similar patterns or behaviors might possibly be found over and over again? By forming a concise “leadership recipe,” the never-ending search for quality leaders could finally be simplified to a standardized set of characteristics that might help predict successful leadership in any organization. But could science and behavioral psychology be successfully applied to extract these leadership “revelations” from the data?

I centered my investigation on 30 behavioral leadership models that were used across 24 unique companies encompassing 4,512 business leaders from all performance levels. These companies included several from the Fortune 500 list. Each of the 30 leadership models was analyzed to identify the most common behaviors that differentiate higher-performing leaders from low-performing leaders. The findings compiled from this data set revealed new evidence that must serve as a foundational piece of every leadership hiring or training endeavor.

Expectations of the Study

Leadership is a concept that is difficult to capture. You know it when you see it, but it is difficult to quantify. The components of leadership are often examined and observed, but the ability to predict successful leadership has thus far avoided the confines of a repeatable recipe. Many approaches have been used in an attempt to document commonalities among successful leaders, but only with mixed results at best. Taking a new approach to the issue, I set out to study the behavioral characteristics of successful leaders in comparison to leaders of lower performance levels. The two main objectives of this study were:

  • To identify the three most important behaviors that are predictive of leadership performance.
  • To identify the level or degree of the three most common behaviors that are predictive of leadership performance.

Behavioral Leadership Models

Before discussing the study findings, it is important to lay the groundwork of this study using the behavioral leadership model. The behavioral leadership model is the cornerstone to this research study since it is designed to capture the behavioral preferences of successful leaders currently working in the position. Essentially, the behavioral leadership model captures the unique combination of behaviors that predicts success. Each unique model was created using the same methodology, but the customization was made possible by using performance data related to a specific position. To create a behavioral leadership model, each organization used the following three-step process.

Define Success– Traditionally, leadership success is determined by education, experience, potential, or other non-performance related measures. For this study, success was determined by actual performance on the job. We want to better understand the behaviors of the real leaders who produce results on a daily basis.

To keep the study focused on leadership productivity, each company defined success based on their business practices, and their leaders were evaluated on their ability to produce the desired business results. Those who did not produce the desired outcomes were considered ineffective leaders while others who produced the desired results were considered successful leaders. Each organization utilized specific performance data captured from those leaders actively engaged in the leadership role. The types of performance data collected ranged from subjective data (i.e., performance evaluations, soft achievement ratings, etc.) to objective data (i.e., store sales, percent to plan, profit metrics, etc.).

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Leadership

Effective Time Management For Profitable Business Leadership Results in Strategic Innovative Actions

A strategic way to boost your business leadership results, along with its profits, productivity and growth is through effective time management practices. Because time, as it is in any profession, is a critical resource in making business leadership actions profitable, innovative and transformative.

Before we continue, you need to appreciate this important fact about business leadership – whether we’re talking about market, innovative, strategic, situational, transformational, project or organizational leadership – leadership in any form is always a social activity.

So with that understanding, we can look at business leadership in three generic ways: as market leadership, organizational leadership and human capital leadership.

In business organizations, entrepreneurs may choose to invest their time in human capital related leadership activities, that is in leading, coaching or soliciting and recruiting the support of their associates and trading partners.

Entrepreneurial leaders also have opportunities to use their time to contribute to the quality, quantity or significance of life for their customers and clients. I call these actions a form of market leadership.

Business leadership tasks demand that leaders analyze, plan and re-order their budgets, cash flows, operational systems or their schedules, where their sole objective is to manage their time as profitably, effectively and creatively as possible. We can call these activities organizational leadership.

A fact-of-life for those professionals charged with business leadership responsibilities – which includes the executives, entrepreneurs and managers – they will usually encounter the most disruptions, interruptions or other forms of distractions to their scheduled activities. Unfortunately in the face of that reality, this business leadership personnel tend to immediately discount, ignore or underestimate the potential value in those unanticipated events.

If you ever hope to become an effective leader you should never focus your attention on the management of accomplishing tasks against a daily allotment of your time, you should however concentrate your energies on the management or maximizing the allocations of your significance.

We know that being effective means doing the right things. We also know that being efficient is doing things the right way. Are you doing the “right things” or are you doing things “the right way”?

The problem with the focus of most time management strategies is this, we are told to be efficient in our use of time, that is, we’re taught that the right way of doing time management is to plot whichever tasks we feel or believe we need to accomplish in a certain amount of time segments.

And in the case of business leadership, the right things for your usage of time must be based upon your contributions of quality, quantity or the value of your significance.

In a word, your contributions have to be acts that you take for the purpose of being of benefit to all the actors, artifacts or artifices, attributes and audiences engaged in your social activity. On the other hand, your significance must add a form of excellence, emphasis, essence, elevation, eminence, effectiveness, efficacy, efficiency, execution, elucidation, explanation, exposition, expression or esteem to your actions.

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.” – Edward de Bono, creativity expert

I advise my business leadership clients to keep strategic questions in mind whenever they engage in any activity. I call these mini-evaluations strategic because being strategic means being decisive, deliberate and dexterous – meaning leaders who wish to be strategic thinkers or questioners have to think through, think about and think with their actions, don’t they?

The purpose of those questions isn’t to generate answers consisting of one-word or a single idea. And leaders shouldn’t use these questions to judge a moment-in-time as being either significant or worthless. Rather than making those types of value judgments, these questions should ensure you have competent, strategic responses prepared, organized and ready to go in advance, so that you can optimize, leverage or otherwise make the best use of those planned-for or unplanned-for periods of time.

Here is one set of example questions you could ask to help you make more effective use of your time, regardless of any interruption, or unexpected or distracting event.

“Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.” – Pablo Picasso, artist

(Can I Make This) Quality Time?

 

  • Is it pure? [resulting in no distractions, disruptions, delays from your goals or mission]
  • Is it sweet? [warm, refreshing and enjoyable experience or environment or forum or venue]
  • Is it absolute? [secure, or obligated to my relationship, or persuasive or memorable]

 

“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”
– USA President Barack Obama

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Leadership

Leadership Styles – Participative Leadership

Also known as democratic leadership, participative leadership is the most common form of leadership practiced in the corporate world and political scene. The participative leadership model favours decision making by a group. In this model, the leader consults his team and seeks their opinion, making the decision subsequently. Compared to the autocratic leadership model, this model allows the views of the team members to be heard and encourages team members to participate, hence its name. It is worthy to note that in this style of leadership, the decision is still made by the leader, only that it is based on opinions and perspectives from the team as a whole.

Participative leadership is successful as a leadership style that allows an all rounded decision to be made. It allows a team to make a decision on the matter together. Often, a leader would seek the opinion of the team and possibly encourage discussion and debate to stimulate the thinking process of the team. This way, the every member of the team would feel that his views are being heard, and even if their views are not accepted, they know that it was for a reason and not merely overlooked or brushed away. This, according to Patrick Lecioni in his book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, is critical in achieving buy-in, failure of which would result in a team to be dysfunctional.

The mode of decision making of a participative leader is known as the consult-and-decide method. In his book, The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins explained that the consult-and-decide method essentially has the brainstorming done by the group, and the decision to be made by the leader. This is as opposed to both the seeking out of ideas and the decision to be done by the leader. The team also has a part in directing the decision by participating in the discussions.

However, participative leadership may fail should the team be relatively inexperienced. For instance, should a team deciding on the appearance of a physical product sold be a company consists mostly of fresh members, the quality of discussions and debate with relation to the final decision would be superficial and possibly even irrelevant, hence making the decision of how the product should be will not be well thought out. Evidently, a precondition for effective participative leadership is to have a team that is sufficiently experienced and competent at their job.

Participative leadership is particularly popular in the corporate world as the decisions made often has consequences in multiple levels and would require the inputs and expertise of various professionals. In addition, the pace of events often does not allow a free rein style of leadership where the leader allows the team to reach a consensus with a luxury of time.

Lucas Lin is a renowned expert in the field of leadership and management. Having held leadership positions ranging from management executive to operations manager, Lucas is in the prime position to offer advice on leadership and consulting services to leaders across the hierarchy. His years of experience in leadership render his advice highly sought after. Having served in leadership positions in various organisations, including a country club, a school and the military among others, Lucas developed an intimate knowledge of value-based leadership, which can be applied to all vocations.

Visit Lucas Lin for Timeless Leadership Lessons at [http://leadership-lessons.com]

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Lucas_Lin/517142

 

Leadership

How to Maximize the Return on a Leadership Training Course

In today’s economic environment every business is looking to maximize the return on investment. One of the hardest things to figure out can be the return on investment for leadership development training. It’s easy to recognize the need for a leadership training course, but how to calculate the return on investment is another matter. Some would say it is easier get a consensus definition of leadership than it is to calculate the return on investment in leadership training.

The best way to calculate the return on investment of a leadership training course is to have a shift in how leadership training is viewed. In most cases, leadership training is viewed as a way to improve the competencies of someone in a leadership position. For example, if you have a leader that does a poor job in their leadership communication, you get leadership development training to improve that competency.

In order to calculate a return on investment for a leadership training course you have to go one step further than just looking at the competency. You have to look at the results of having the competency in place. In other words, if this leader had the competency of effective leadership communication, what would having that competency allow the organization to achieve. Once you begin to focus on the results, then you can more easily calculate the return on investment for the training.

Using our previous example, let’s say that after the leader completes a leadership course on communication the turnover in the leader’s department declines by 5%. That 5% reduction represents a part of the return on investment. There may be other areas that are positively impacted also.

When making a decision on leadership training, you want to calculate the potential return on investment before the training begins. It is much better to know going in what you want to get out of the training and the impact the training will have.

To maximize the return on investment, there has to be a way to reinforce the training after the training event. Most leadership courses are one, two, or three day workshop events. What happens in the training is participants learn leadership concepts and ways to apply the concepts. What usually is missing is practicing the leadership concepts and getting feedback or coaching from the instructor.

What that means is when the participant gets back to the workplace they need to practice the leadership concepts learned in the training. Not only do they need to practice, they also need to get feedback on how well they are developing the skills they learned. Without having a process set up in advance, there is a very strong chance that your investment in leadership development training will be wasted. The old saying is so true: “if you don’t use it, you will lose it.”

Having a coaching and mentoring program is an excellent way to reinforce the leadership concepts learned in the training. The mentor or coach can observe and give feedback as well as recommend additional things that would enhance the development of the person.

Calculating and maximizing return on investment in leadership development training does not have to be a vague concept. Implement the suggestions here and you will want to invest in the leaders of your organization.

And now I would like to invite you to preview a way you can develop your leadership skills by visiting www.leadershipdevelopmentessentials.com.

You will see a unique and effective way to have leadership development training that is convenient and cost effective.

From: Andre Boykin – Managing Partner, CAPITAL iDEA and Co-Creator of Leadership Development Essentials.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Andre_Boykin/247551