Leading with Purpose
Open My Eyes
As leaders we find that being human in today’s dynamic work environment can bring its share of difficulties. In striving to get things done in the short term, we sometimes fail to see opportunities that will actually keep our organizations alive in the long term.
Let’s be honest. We say that we’re innovative and committed to process improvement, but in 
reality we find ourselves so pressed for time that we accept a few suggestions during a weekly meeting in an attempt to rationalize our internal dialogue and struggle. The suggestions remind us of the effort involved in getting those ideas forward, yet they also press against the challenges of our already overflowing plate. Rather than infuse the ambiguity that arrives with ideas, our senses often get pushed to the side waiting for that allusive time that we will have to delve into it. As a result we may inadvertently be closing the meaningful possibilities that would help our businesses flourish.
Dr. Robert J. Sternberg, a noted psychologist, educator, and author of countless books once stated, “Complacency can come about because of our own expertise. We can become so comfortable with it that we assume we know all there is to know and stop growing. We come up with no new ideas and are reluctant to consider new ideas from others. Meanwhile, the world has passed us by”.
Lighting Up Our Senses
It is time to watch our work diet. It is time to realistically look at what we have to accomplish or attain and consider a shift in paradigm. Shift the way that we process information and our thought processes that expands our ability to sense a wider range of possibilities. We need to begin with authenticity. Tell others around you that you want a healthier workplace environment and consider the following tips:
Increase some level of physical exercise into your routine. It’s one of the single best ways to both increase resistance to stress and unlock your personal creativity.
Be surprised by something new each day. Walk through a different crowd or corridor in the workplace. Ask yourself what’s different, and what’s changing for our internal departments. Be aware of your visual senses and maximize them.
Take a different path on your way into work. Our brains actually create more “pathways” when we travel away from autopilot.
Increase your tolerance for ambiguity. Creative ideas tend to come in bits and pieces and take time to develop. Ambiguity leaves many feeling uncomfortable. It’s this very discomfort that aids our thinking from resisting status quo. Don’t fight it.
By striving to enhance your senses toward possibilities, five wonderful things will happen:
- Your senses will come alive and you’ll begin to feel energized as a leader.
- You’ll stop your inner critic from claiming ownership over your over crowded workload and schedule.
- You’ll bust the innovation-on-demand myth and begin producing lasting results.
- You’ll begin to find meaning as you honor the highest callings and responsibilities as a leader. By helping others believe in their own abilities and encouraging them to realize every day creative opportunities which add value and contribute to the success of your workplace, customers and communities.
- People will come to your side to collaborate and offer assistance to implement new improvements. They will also come to learn when to challenge assumptions, reshape them, and or adapt to them in the future.
Decide to thrive today!
Photo Credit: iStockPhoto
© 2011 All rights reserved. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina based The Infusion Group ™ LLC, a next generation people management consulting and executive coaching firm dedicated to the design of thriving workplaces. For more information, go to www.theinfusiongroupllc.com Connect: @InfusionGrpLLC
Empowering Employee Performance
In high-trust workplaces, it’s not always about what we know and the result we achieved that fosters good performance. It’s how we as 21st Century people leaders empower those around us and enable them in making trustworthy decisions that will impact the future. The committed actions taken to execute on those decisions and engaging others in the process can turn good decisions into great ones!
During the Great Depression, rather than succumb to the overwhelming financial pressures demanding the world’s attention, a furniture design company decided to focus on building up the organization’s strength; people and focused on creating a quality workplace culture through relationships that would enable the flow of creative design in producing the most distinguished furniture in history. That was a good decision even in spite of the mounting criticism this CEO endured. Many years later, that decision turned out to become a dynamic decision because of what the organization and its leaders had to do after making those early decisions.
Today, Herman Miller Inc. is one of the most distinguished and highly-respected furniture design makers around the world. Both good decision making and managing of those decisions, especially during the hard times is necessary in order to achieve great results. Some of the greatest leadership lessons and workplace building moments occur during the valleys.
How might your organizational leaders act upon good decisions to move your workplace culture forward?
Inspired by Dr. John Maxwell and so many other effective leaders, below, you’ll find a few tips to help people leaders manage good decisions in order to achieve great results:
1. Assure understanding of the key event of the day. In today’s dynamic environment, priorities shift rapidly and ensuring that effort is focused on the main event which impacts the most relevant goal is critical.
2. Prioritize the right actions around this key event and allocate the time and resources that enable others around you to accomplish this. Ensure that the alignment of actions demonstrates respect and dignity toward others.
3. Go to work. Rather than worry about the good decisions that were already made, stay focused on doing the hard work. Manage the good decisions by leading and encouraging others toward achieving quality outcomes.
4. Avoid the traps that can pull people leaders away from executing effectively. Often focused on delivering results and moving at record speeds, leaders may not realize that aligning interactions is a prerequisite for workplace success. Plan for and prioritize quality interactions which may include addressing employee performance issues in a timely manner with both employees and relevant stakeholders. This reinforces that good decisions made by people leaders are trustworthy. Additionally, practice the discipline of prioritizing the need to have quality interactions and resist hiding behind the work and away from the team. Being accessible to your team and relevant stakeholders strengthens organizational capability to make good decisions even better.
5. Multiply quality interactions on the team. Hold the team able by teaching them how to engage others in conducting quality interactions through respectful candor, honesty and accountability. The benefits of teaching this important skill will help to provide clarity in the midst of chaos and constant change while building the relationships necessary to execute and deliver better outcomes over time.
©All rights reserved.
Workplace Tone: Are We Building Trust Together?
Whether your organization focuses on face-to-face communication or through robust social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, employees and 21st Century leadership can set the tone that restores trust and begins to drive different levels of innovation throughout the workplace experience.
While many workplaces are plagued with uncertainty and high-levels of fear, 21st Century leaders understand the critical elements necessary in preparing for growth and succeeding in the future. By building on people’s strengths and cultivating a language that asks great questions, can help set the tone toward building new levels of trust and open the work environment to greater bursts of energy and creativity.
To improve workplace tone, below is a shorthand look at how communication by leaders, employees and co-workers can drive organizational innovation or cause levels of mistrust:
- Facts only. With having more to do and less resources to do it with, the messenger delivers in a no-nonsense format whereby the receiver often hears the data. However; the message that is delivered is lacking the context and relative importance. As a result, the receiver is left having to create their own interpretation of the message meaning.
Take it back to the workplace tip: Consider sharing facts by asking questions for others input on the data first. Share the context of the information and ask how these insights might move ideas forward together or how the data can better assist in resolving a customer issue.
- Limited options. When attempts to engage employees and/or customers present either/or options like, “Do you like this color or do you prefer the standard black?” it begins to limit focus and may also kill incentives toward generating more ideas.
Take it back to the workplace tip: Schedule the right time to engage a co-worker, boss, or customer in order to really generate the best ideas and strengthens trust to grow further. For example ask, “What suggestions might you have to help grow the idea to offer x in a variety of colors? Or “How might we build goodwill with people in the organization who are opposed to anything other than the standard black offering?”
- Pointing fingers. The quickest way to lose credibility and respect as a leader is to point the finger. Even if you’re right, assigning blame and/or calling out the weaknesses in others leaves a negative tone toward workplace relationships and significantly limits the pathway to innovation.
Take it back to the workplace tip: The next time an employee, boss or co-worker begins calling out the weaknesses of others raise the question, “What would it take for us to support this person or department more?” “What skills can we integrate to problem solve in this area?”
Cultivating a workplace tone that communicates respects for people’s differences and builds upon each others strengths will help set the stage for greater creativity and innovation. Recognize those that model respectful tone and action and align rewards with improving business innovation and results.
United or Divided? Depends On Where You Stand.
Okay so as high-potential leader you’ve just been recognized and rewarded with more staff. The long-time desire to assume several key departments that have supported your division has now come into your fold. You’ve always imagined what it would be like to have these resources and what you could accomplish as a senior leader with even broader influence. But interestingly, you begin to discover that the departments you’re now responsible for are significantly underperforming. Worse yet, the departments are beleaguered with reports of workplace bullying, low employee morale, disengaged employees and you eventually stumble upon the truth that other members of management have been reinforcing the negative behavior. The organization overall has experienced its ups and downs and more recently is losing market share, competition is stiffening and you’re facing the pressure of your boss to perform while facing the constant criticism from other colleagues that the leaders before you couldn’t turn around a sinking ship.
Sound like a fun job? What next?
Like a CEO, you start building. But what you begin building upon is contingent on where you stand. Leading organizations have drawn their stake in the stand, what about you? What will your leadership stand for and how will it be different this time for these departments as your craft an entirely new division? Or will it be different? How might your organization enable or disable you as you move ahead?
Will your stand take you on a journey that encourages others to engage in disruptive innovation and works diligently and collaboratively through constructive conflict so that in the end you achieve the united power of one division? Or will you settle for making the numbers and achieving average outcomes that has become your organization’s current norm?
Stand For Something
Would it be any different if you accepted a challenge to lead a head coaching position with a record of losing streaks? Begin by asking:
- What will your leadership represent? And, what will it not?
- What is your underlying motive for taking on this responsibility?
- How will your leadership demonstrate in thought, word, and/or action the uniting of others or maintaining organizational division?
- What will your workforce be able to believe in?
Once you’re clear on where you plan on standing, begin attracting the talent you need to win. Grow your workforce and help them stand for something special by working with each other and achieving uncommon results.
While the journey takes time and the road map often differs for each leader and organization, knowing what you stand for prevents you from falling for anything and is foundational to being a highly effective 21st Century Leader.
©2010. All rights reserved.
Like It or Not You’re Building Tomorrow’s Top Talent
Coach Lou Holtz recently shared among a lively audience of 15,000 motivated business leaders one of his key secrets to making all the difference in work and family life; WIN.
For any individual or team that word may immediately conjure up a thought of winning, success and gaining the edge over the competition. However, buried under Coach’s golden nugget of wisdom and experience lays one simple truth for effective leaders and highly productive individuals, the “win” stands for “what’s important now?”
What is important now may seem a little misleading at first, given that leaders have a unique obligation to their organizations and shareholders. In a very special way, people leaders are responsible for what happens in the future of their companies and not just providing the oversight of day-to-day activities. While these day-do-day activities are essential toward goal accomplishment, it’s important to remember that today’s performance by a leader isn’t truly evaluated for months and years to come. Therefore, much of a leader’s performance cannot be reviewed until after the “moment”.
Whether we like it or not, the discipline leaders demonstrate now will not be evaluated for some time to come and becoming even more critical for executives to ask what is important now? As Max De Pree, Chairman Emeritus, Herman Miller, Inc. states in Leadership Is An Art, “Today’s trust enables the future.” Therefore, if your organization joins the ranks of others where tensions might be running high and team dysfunction is the “norm” adding to the trust tax, your organization’s future might be heavily impacted if key priorities remain unaddressed.
Therefore, leaders can practice the art of WIN by planning for what’s important now and building the necessary talent for the future:
1. Accept the responsibility and full obligation that comes in being a 21st Century Leader. Acknowledge your obligation to all key stakeholders and define what your company’s leadership team is expected to accomplish.
WIN-What’s important right now? Prepare to lead future leaders; not followers. If you’re not ready to assume this responsibility fully, do yourself and the organization a favor, step down from the role. If however you are ready, design a continuing education and learning plan and keep building your adaptability and confidence.
2. Establish world-class commitment to talent acquisition. Ensure you and your leaders have exceptional talent spotting and selection skills that attract competence, character, emotional intelligence and the behaviors necessary for the team to realize its full potential.
WIN- What’s important right now? It’s critical to assess your current capabilities with future needs and align any gaps with corrective action.
3. No excuses.Never make excuses for mediocrity and poor performance. Ever. If you let underperformance go unaddressed today and again tomorrow, then you’ll have a much larger challenge to address later. Once it becomes a bigger challenge, you may be at risk of losing your high-potentials to the competition and significantly disrupt employee morale in the process.
WIN- What’s important right now? Following your assessment of capabilities and performance, begin working respectfully to address underperformers and develop the necessary action plans to close the gaps and energize better performance.
The above are a few steps to help you begin connecting the “WIN” each day that contributes to building a talented team in leading the competition into the future.
©2010 The Infusion Group LLC. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group, LLC, a people management consulting and executive coaching firm.
Wise Words From the Coach
Read this powerful article from UCLA Coach Wooden (via Success Magazine) and be inspired!
