Posts from — January 2008

If you want to progress in your career, and get promoted to a leadership role, it is important to be developing your leadership skills on an ongoing basis.

One of the most essential indicators of good leadership skills is the most obvious – the ability and willingness to take the lead and to motivate the team to follow.

This article will explore how you can develop experience in leadership and how your leadership skills can be developed through becoming a volunteer in your local community.

1. What’s the overall purpose of the meeting? To develop a 3 year strategy? Improve teamwork? Solve a big hairy problem? Sometimes it’s a combination of a few things, but try to keep it to just a few. A great off-site agenda should not look like an extended staff meeting. This is an opportunity to take the time needed to strategize, brainstorm, debate, reflect, and learn.

2. What’s the “desired outcomes”? Desired outcomes are a tangible set of deliverables that describe what a successful meeting would look like at the conclusion. Examples: “A list of 3-5 three year goals”, “A shared vision”, “a shared understanding of each other’s concerns”.

About 85 percent of all managers in North America became managers without prior education to become one – I’m sure you can imagine how well that often goes. Time spent away from the office at trade shows offers a good chance to review what makes a good manager. The majority of traits I see in need of improvement usually include the following.

Look in the mirror

The Foremost of the Values …
Winston Churchill once said, “Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it all others depend.” The systematic development of the deep down quality of unflinching courage is one of the fundamental requirements for leadership in any field.

Fear, or the lack of courage is more responsible for failure in management, and in life, than any other factor. It is always fear that causes people to hold back, to sell themselves short, to settle for far less than they are capable of!

Micromanagement and lack of trust are cries often heard in today’s business arenas. In this age of accountability, downsizing, larger spans of control, complex global competition, and job uncertainty, all managers are faced with getting results through people. Managers preach empowerment and yet, if the results are not right, who gets the blame?

And so, I think, the issue of trust resembles a crystal with four facets. The first facet has to do with that term “empowerment”. Too often management throws out the term without clarifying what are the limits or parameters in which employees may make critical decisions.