Get your brain in motion
According to Roxi Bahar Hewertson, every choice you make in your daily worklife has a ripple effect throughout your team and organization. Here are four exercises that will make you a better leader, by ensuring that these effects have intended consequences. Such exercises concern the following issues:
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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons – Serge Bacioiu (CC – BY – 2.0)
Ed Gelbstein, former director of the United Nations Computing Centre with long experience in International management, has summarized in a table what is expected from those who want to be a senior manager or leader in international activities.
Here is the summary which is the combined skills of Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Peter the Great and Houdini!
54 lessons organized in 8 chapters, each of them covering an aspect where soft skills play an important role: career management, getting the job done, communication, handling critics, office politics, self-promotion, dealing with differences and leadership.
In her book “The hard truth about soft skills – workplace lessons smart people wish they’d learned sooner“, Peggy Klaus, tells us about the importance of soft skills on workplace, trying to understand why they are still so often ignored, although they are fundemental in our everyday work. The problem is semantic? What is soft cannot be considered serious? The matter is that most of us think that they are about touchy-feely people skills?
Among the 54 lessons pinted out by Klaus on the basis of her work experience:
1. Knowing yourself is as important as knowing how to do your job
2. Learn when to stick and when to shift or the details will hang you
3. Know where to draw the line between self-improvement and self-destruction
4. When it comes to gossip, learn the art of deflection
5. Don’t take it personally
6. Your procrastination is trying to tell you something
7. Keep your visibility when you are not face-to-face
Being able to change is a crucial skill for any leader.
However, to communicate change to our colleagues or coworkers is not always easy. Scott E. Rupp provides us with 5 useful tactics that can be summarized as “inform, share, involve and be crystal clear”:
1. Provide regular, weekly e-mail blasts from leadership describing the changing events;
2. Let employees know when major decisions are expected to be made;
3. Encourage dialogue between managers and their teams;
4. Create a channel for two-way, open communication.
5. If there is no information available or something hasn’t been decided yet, let employees know that, but don’t keep them guessing.
Read the full article here
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According to John Coleman, ‘broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders’. Actually reading has shown to lead many benefits in leadership development: it improves communication, emotional intelligence and organizational effectiveness and reduces stress.
Unfortunately, nowadays business people seems to be reading less, maybe because they are not sufficiently convinced of the importance of reading, they don’t know what they should read or because they think they don’t have the time.
In this article on Lifehack, Joe Vennare identifies some 15 best leadership books especially would-be leaders need to read to define leadership and how applied it, communicate and motivate teamwork, and keep going on.
The right people in the right seats on the bus: this is the metaphor from the first Jim Collins best-seller ‘Good to Great’. In that book – published in 2001 – the author identifies what leaders need to do, in order to see their teams and organizations excel. And he uses the power of an image to communicate the following concept.
According to Collins, leaders who are able to transform their organizations begin not by setting a direction, but by getting the right people on the bus – and the wrong people off the bus.
Actually great leaders understand the following three simple truths:
1. If you begin with “who,” rather than “what”, you can more easily adapt to a changing world.
2. If you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away, because they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.
3. If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company.
Assembling the team is the first crucial point. Then a leader has to develop a vision (the direction of the bus), to remove obstacles to high performance (that is, maybe people are not exactly in the right seats and need to be assigned to the right role) and to help people with diverse talents and interests building trust in each other.
It is an hard work, but leaders need it to accomplish objectives with the right people.
Image source: http://bit.ly/16TU0QU
Becoming an effective leader is not a one-time thing. It takes time to learn and practice leadership skills until they become a part of us.
Taking time to analyze the habits of effective leaders is an important exercise allowing us to recognize both the good and the bad characteristics, in order to shape our leadership style.
Below are just five habits we can emulate:
1. Taking calculated risks;
2. Fostering a positive work culture;
3. Encouraging innovation;
4. Leading by example;
5. Remaining graceful under pressure.
Read more on: http://bit.ly/1KIhTtB
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Team building activities are essential in creating a productive team, since they serve to increase communication among team members in a positive working environment. Actually staff are most productive when they are happy within they role, and feel that they are making a valued contribution to the team’s goals.
Team building does not have to be painful, annoying or even embarrassing. There are many valuable team building exercises that can be effective in uniting groups, developing individual skills and collective strengths.
There are four main types of team building activities, which includes:
1. communication activities and icebreakers;
2. problem solving and/or decision making activities;
3. adaptability and/or planning activities;
4. building trust.
If you want to learn more on team building activities, read here: http://www.huddle.com/blog/team-building-activities/
Image source: http://bit.ly/1uEy4E9
Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results – Andrew Carnegie
Image source: http: //bit.ly/1E0045d
Mary Wroblewski, in her article How to become a diplomatic employee published by The Global Post, suggests 9 steps to reach such an ambitious goal.
Step 1 – Listen carefully and respectfully to your co-workers, especially those whose ideas differ from your own.
Step 2 – Refrain from criticizing your coworkers. If you disagree with a coworker about an idea or decision, don’t tell him you think he’s wrong or question his competence.
Step 3 – Avoid participating in workplace gossip or other behaviors that might pit one side of the workplace against another.
Step 4 – Demonstrate compassion, support and encouragement to coworkers who disagree with a particular strategy or agenda.
Step 5 – Build a consensus by soliciting feedback and ideas.
Step 6 – Recognize when conditions deteriorate and take proactive measures.
Step 7 – Maintain your composure when tempers flare.
Step 8 – Acknowledge your mistakes when they occur.
Step 9 – Share credit with others for accomplishments.
Read here the full article: http://bit.ly/1uDPX6b
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