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Category: Leadership (Page 3 of 19)

Collaborative leadership

In this TED Talk, Lorna Davis, explains the difference between traditional “heroic leaders” and “interdependent leaders”.

There are three big differences between the two ways of leading:

  1. A hero sets a goal that can be individually delivered and neatly measured. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, start with a goal that’s really important, but is actually impossible to achieve by one company or one person alone.
  2. The second big difference is the leader’s willingness to declare the goals before having a plan. The heroes only reveals their carefully crafted goal when the path to achieve it is clear. In fact, the role of the hero announcement is to set the stage for the big win. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, want other people to help them, so their announcements are often an invitation for co-creation, and sometimes, they’re a call for help.
  3. Heroes see everyone as a competitor or a follower. Heroes don’t want input, because they want to control everything because they want the credit. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, understand that they need other people.

According to Davis, we don’t need heroes. We need radical interdependence, which is just another way of saying we need each other. Even though other people can be really difficult, sometimes. There’s no recipe here, but time together has to be carefully curated and created so that people know that their time is valuable and important, and they can bring their best selves to the table.

Why does hero culture persist, and why don’t we work together more? Interdependence is a lot harder than being a hero. It requires us to be open and transparent and vulnerable, and that’s not what traditional leaders have been trained to do. However, the joy and success that comes from interdependence and vulnerability is worth the effort and the risk.

Image: PixabayGeralt

7 Tips for better leadership

What makes you a leader is not a title but your attitude and your actions. Leadership is about how you interact with people and how you motivate them to work with you toward a goal together.

In this article you’ll find practical tips to improve your leadership:

  1. Value every relationship: there’s a person behind every job title. You have the chance to influence him/her by the way you interact with every team member.
  2. Think about your team’s needs before your own: Thinking about your team’s needs could be as simple as saying thank you or as serious as making a trip to the hospital after hours.
  3. Help your team grow: Provide training and opportunities for them to work at their full potential. Encourage and sponsor continuing education.
  4. Share the credit: Make your team look good. Give them the spotlight and let them shine.
  5. Shoulder the blame: If you and your team fail to meet a goal or a project doesn’t go as well as planned, the blame stops with you. If you need to give feedback to people about their performance, do so privately.
  6. Never say that’s not my job: Help with what needs to be done, even if it’s not your responsibility. Even when nobody’s watching.
  7. Be a person of character: Leadership is less about skills and more about living by your values. Your team certainly doesn’t want to follow a leader they can’t trust. Respect takes a long time to earn and a second to lose.

Image: Pixabayrawpixel (CC Creative Commons)

5 common mistakes made by leaders

In an article published on Web Design, Steve Cartwright points out the five common mistakes made by leaders:

  1. Focusing on tasks rather than reaching the ultimate goal. You can’t lead others if you don’t know what you’re striving for, so be sure you’re clear and focused on the vision rather than the small tasks of the job.
  2. Checking up on employees rather than engaging them. Make it a point to get to know your team members: it’s important to get your vision across, and you can’t do that if you merely check in once in a while.
  3. Don’t stick to your own leadership style. You can learn from other leaders in history and in your business, but don’t mimic them when it comes to your leadership style: find your own way and stick to it!
  4. Resist change. Many leaders tend to do what they’ve always done in terms of leading. If you want your business or team to prosper and grow, take some time to expose yourself to new ideas.
  5. Hire people too fast to fill a slot. True leaders take their time when hiring and make sure they can complete the work and grow along with the company or team.

Five Common mistakes made by leaders

15 Best Books to improve your leadership

In an article  published on Lifehack, Joe Vennare identifies some 15 best books especially would-be leaders need to read to define leadership and how to apply it, to communicate and motivate teamwork, and to keep going on.

According to John Coleman, ‘broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders’. Reading has shown to lead many benefits in leadership development.  It improves communication, emotional intelligence and organizational effectiveness and reduces stress.

Nowadays business people seems to be reading less. Sometimes because they are not sufficiently convinced of the importance of reading. In other cases because they don’t know what they should read or  they think they don’t have the time.

 

Image source: Pixabay (CC0)

10 ways to deal with negative people and help them

In our everyday life, we have to get in touch with negative people. Those people have one thing in common: boundless negative energy that ends up affecting everyone around them. How can we interact with those negative or difficult people? People who seem chronically critical, belligerent, indignant, angry, or just plain rude. How to maintain a sense of compassion without getting sucked into their doom? And how to act in a way that doesn’t reinforce their negativity–and maybe even helps them?

This article provides 10 simple tips to deal with those difficult people:

1. Resist the urge to judge or assume.

It’s hard to offer someone compassion when you assume you have them pegged. Even if it seems unlikely someone will wake up one day and act differently, we have to remember it is possible. Try coming at them with the positive mindset you wish they had. Expect the best in them.

2. Dig deeper, but stay out of the hole.

If you show negative people you support their choice to behave badly, you give them no real incentive to make a change. It may help to repeat this in your head when you deal with them: “I understand your pain. But I’m most helpful if I don’t feed into it.”

3. Maintain a positive boundary.

Dealing with them, try to do two things, in this order of importance:

  • Protect the positive space around you. When their negativity is too strong to protect it, walk away.
  • Help them feel more positive, not act more positive.
4. Disarm their negativity, even if just for now.

Listen compassionately for a short while and then help them focus on something positive right now, in this moment. Don’t try to solve or fix them. Just aim to help them now.

5. Temper your emotional response.

Negative people often gravitate toward others who react strongly–people who easily offer compassion or get outraged or offended. People remember and learn from what you do more than what you say. If you feed into the situation with emotions, you’ll teach them they can depend on you for a reaction. It’s tough not to react because we’re human, but it’s worth practicing. Once you’ve offered a compassionate ear for as long as you can, respond as calmly as possible with a simple line of fact.

6. Question what you’re getting out of it.

We often get something out of relationships with negative people. You can’t make someone think, feel, or act differently. You can be as kind as possible or as combative as possible, and still not change reality for someone else. All you can control is what you think and do–and then do your best to help them without hurting yourself.

7. Remember the numbers.

Research shows that people with negative attitudes have significantly higher rates of stress and disease. Someone’s mental state plays a huge role in their physical health. If someone’s making life difficult for people around them, you can be sure they’re doing worse for themselves. When you remember how much a difficult person is suffering, it’s easier to stay focused on minimizing negativity.

8. Don’t take it personally, but know that sometimes it is personal.

Conventional wisdom suggests that you should never take things personally when you deal with a negative person. Accept that you don’t deserve the excessive emotions in someone’s tone, but weigh their ideas with a willingness to learn.

9. Act instead of just reacting.

If you know someone who seems to deal with difficult thoughts or feelings often (as demonstrated in their behavior), don’t wait for a situation to help them create positive feelings. You’re more apt to want to boost them up when they haven’t brought you down. This may help mitigate that later and also give them a little relief from their pain.

10. Maintain the right relationship based on reality as it is.

The best you can do is accept them as they are, let them know you believe in their ability to be happy, and then give them space to make their choices.

Image: FlickrPablo (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Leading with Humility

Leaders are often described as powerful and headstrong individuals, certain of their position and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals or ambitions.

Recent researches have advanced  a new model for understanding and improving effective leadership: leading with humility. Scientific inquiry has shown that humility offers a significant “competitive advantage” to leaders.

Humble leaders consider their own strengths, weakness and motives in making decisions; demonstrating concern for the common good, and exercising their influence for the benefit of all.

Managers who exhibit traits of humility resulted in better employee engagement and job performance.

In this article, Gwen Moran explains how to use humility to be more effective in the following 6 ways:

1) Be open to others’ opinions;
2) Tend to others’ needs;
3) Admit mistakes;
4) Accept ambiguity;
5) Self – reflect;
6) Let people do their jobs.
Image source:  InspiredImages from Pixabay

Be orderly in life, be original in your work

The contemplative life requires discipline and hard work, for sure. But it also seems to require some time indulging pleasures.

There is much fascinating variety in the daily habits of celebrity and creative humanists to be discovered browsing their biographies.

Monkish and lonely Nietsche used to eat incredible amounts of fruits at lunch, and a much loved beefsteak, before setting himself for long mountain walks in the Swiss Alps.

Prodigious Karl Marx was accustomed to working long hours at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking.

Rather predictable and orderly Immanuel Kant tried to stick to the rule that he would smoke only one pipe, but the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on…

Remember Gustave Flaubert’s quote?

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Maybe, the addition of a little “bad habit” or two might help too!

Discover more in this article of Openculture

Source: Pixabay – Rawpixel (CC0)

How many times have we faced rejection in our lives? Probably more than we can count. Probably more than we can even remember. Yet every time we are rejected we feel wounded inside and sometimes those wounds can have a hard time healing. Yet in the workplace, we must learn to learn from rejection and bounce back from it rapidly, using it as a means to build our experience and resilience.

Cam Adair was able to bounce back from rejection and build his very own path as a successful entrepreneur. Listening to his story might just encourage you to do the same!

 

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