Whether you are a multinational organisation or a smaller business, the way we are working is changing. As strategy shifts in many industries to being more experiment centric, projects are going to become more and more critical for achieving excellence in execution. Many things in life are projects, therefore, I think project management skills touch every part of our lives and as a result, project managers will need a new approach and mindset. Contact me via e-mail for workshops and roadmaps on how to navigate a successful project and the common pitfalls to avoid.
Leadership thoughts
c/o Getty Images
Do you remember the first time you were seen as a leader?
I think that maybe I had some natural leadership skills as I was chosen as the Form Captain in my first week at secondary school. I’ve always been looking at problems and finding solutions.
How has your perspective on leadership changed over time?
I see my role as providing continuous support and vision to the team, but I don’t think that I need to be involved in everything.
What have you enjoyed most about leadership?
For me, it’s not about power! It’s about the working process and making sure the wheels are smoothly turning around. I have been described as a decisive leader, very good at making strategic decisions and at the same time I’m very good at getting things executed and building the right team.
“To whom much is given, much will be required.”
Self reflection
According to Indeed business leadership refers to how individuals make decisions, set goals, and provide direction in a professional environment. Business leadership can take many different forms, but usually involves a CEO or higher-level employees guiding and inspiring the rest of the team. I have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the core elements of business leadership and I think the essential business management skills should include:
Critical and strategic thinking
Communication
Problem-solving
Organisation
Presenting
Reporting
Leadership
Project management
Qualities of a good leader
When you manage people, you are responsible for inspiring, motivating, and encouraging them. I think this is the language of a good manager:
1. What do you think?
2. How can I help?
3. I trust you
4. I am proud of you
5. Your work matters
6. I appreciate you
The pursuit of perfection
In today’s world, technology makes geography and size almost irrelevant, therefore, this gives us this unique opportunity to assert strong strategic leadership. Content marketing is not about choosing a keyword and writing an article to rank for it, it’s about having a deep understanding of your target audience and the information they’re looking for and being a credible and trustworthy source for that information. How do you know that is true?
“Strategy is a commodity, execution is art.”
Tell the truth
c/o Apple TV
Many of you have heard about the Apple TV series, “Ted Lasso”, perhaps you have seen it. It’s about an American football coach Ted Lasso who is hired by a wealthy divorcée to coach the English football (soccer)team AFC Richmond. Here’s 10 leadership lessons from Ted Lasso:
1. Believe in believe
2. Live in the moment
3. Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing
4. All people are different people
5. Optimism is a superpower
6. Be kind
7. Tell the truth
8. Happiness is a choice
9. Forgive first
10. See the good in others
Many of you may also have heard the English phrase, “Many a true word is spoken in jest.” Watching “Ted Lasso” may not make you a better sales leader. What’s wrong with sales leadership today and how I can fix it? Contact me via e-mail if you are interested in hearing more.
More feedback required
How do you start a feedback loop?
- Plan (choose an action)
- Execute (perform the action)
- Monitor (observe the reaction)
- Analyse (measure the reaction)
Touch points are interactions between businesses and customers that occur during the customer’s journey. These moments significantly influence customer experience as well as brand perception. A good customer journey is when we include everyone who’s involved in a touch point - customers, the people who influence them and those they influence. In order to start a feedback loop, you will need to add another layer to the journey - who, on our brand’s side, holds responsibility for each step and what constitutes a handoff to the next group. These teams need to provide feedback at each step so everyone along the customer journey understands the bigger impact of their work.
Remote working
In the current remote working world, managers and leaders must promote ownership and accountability to help their employees to connect to the organisations mission. Do you have a clear picture about your team members?
- Who are they as a person?
- What skills can be improved?
- How can you help them to thrive?
Leaders who want to maximise self-motivation for each member of their team would have given them a clear definition of their purpose and role in the organisation as they began working from home. And this should be connected to the organisations overall purpose (or why). Purpose may include a desire to make an impact by contributing to something larger than themselves or challenging themselves to grow and learn new skills. Overcoming challenges and acquiring mastery is one of the most satisfying parts of the human experience, regardless of whether it is work related or not. How well do you understand your employees’ current skills, aptitude, and potential?
Working from home
Working from home is not a new phenomenon but due to the Covid-19 pandemic it has become the new normal for most employees. It’s more than likely that many of you have been or will be working remotely for the foreseeable future, so it’s imperative to distinguish between private and professional life at home. As employees are the key drivers for all businesses, companies, and organisations, hopefully your boss sent you home with more than just your laptop.
In a remote working model, autonomy, mastery and purpose will help leaders to replace control with empowered self-control. Leaders and managers should focus on empowering and motivating their teams by establishing clear goals and boundaries for each member of their team and allow them freedom to operate within these boundaries. I think leaders and managers should concede control and enhance motivation by trusting employees to work in ways that suits them best.
The outsider’s perspective
I think that before you begin to communicate with anyone you have to know who you are communicating with and what’s important to them - always start with the other person in mind. As it’s the season of goodwill, here’s a few questions to consider in terms of communication:
- Who is this for?
- What’s in it for them?
- How much do you know about them?
- Can you meet them where they are?
Being an effective communicator is an invaluable leadership skill that goes far beyond having an even temper or providing concise directives. It relies on a thoughtful combination of empathy, accessibility, approachability and a genuine level of care and compassion for your team. Take your team on a short journey and land them in a better place than where they started. In essence, a strong communicator is a conscious communicator, and a conscious communicator is well on their way to becoming an incredible leader.
Wisdom on Wednesday
Nowadays we have very few guidelines and an awful lot of options, and all these options are giving us quite a bit of uncertainty and self-doubt. We need leaders that can create big promises to customers, and help their organisations deliver on those promises. Leaders who master both strategy and execution start by building a bold but executable strategy. Next, they ensure that the company is investing behind the change. And last, they make sure the entire organisation is motivated to go the journey.
There are 4 parts of emotional intelligence (EQ):
1. Self-awareness
2. Self-management
3. Empathising
4. Social skills
Within each and every one of these domains are there specific learned and learnable abilities that will make sales executives outstanding performers. Within the self-management cluster there’s not only better managing of negative emotions, there’s also adaptability. Maintaining a positive outlook, no matter what happens in your life, keeping an eye on that long-term goal despite setbacks, obstacles, and distractions. Mindfulness doesn’t help you directly with any of these but if you want to look at all the EQ attributes and competencies then I’ll be willing to guide you through the process of additional learning. Contact me via e-mail for 1-on-1 executive coaching.
Risk versus yield
When leaders choose a strategy they are guiding your attention towards specific actions. An organisation’s strategy represents the desired pattern of organisational attention, in other words, what every business department should focus on, each in its particular way. A given strategy makes choices about what to ignore and what matters, for example, which metric should you focus on, market share or profit?
Leaders need three kinds of focus to be effective, self (inner), people (other), and system (outer) awareness. Inner focus attunes you to your emotions and intuitions, guiding values and better decisions. Other focus smoothes your connections to the people in your lives, and lets you navigate the larger world. I think the key is finding the balance and knowing when to use the right kind of focus at the right time. Contact me via e-mail for training and workshops.
Inner, outer and other
Every leader today needs a strong ethical rudder and I think inner focus is essential. This inner sense is an ethical rudder and answers the questions - Is what I am about to do in keeping with my sense of meaning, values, right and ethics? This is not a question we answer in words, we answer it first with what feels right and what doesn’t feel right, then we put it into words.
Then there’s other focus, which is being able to read people, being able to tune into a person. There are three kinds of empathy:
1) Cognitive Empathy means I understand how you think about things, your mental model of how you see the world. This means I’m able to communicate with you in terms you really understand and resonate with. Leaders and managers who can talk to other people with good cognitive empathy are able to get better than expected performance from their people because they will know what really matters.
2) Emotional Empathy is an immediate felt sense of what’s going on in the other person and this is also absolutely essential. If you only have cognitive empathy and you don’t have emotional empathy, then you’ll miss the mark.
3) Empathic Concern is the third kind of focus in other words empathic empathy is outer focus. Not only do I know how you think and feel but if there’s something you need and I can help, my DNA means I am predisposed to help.
The leaders and managers who have the most loyal employees in their team, have all three kinds of empathy. Contact me via e-mail for workshops on empathy.
Always be learning
Are you leading an organisations where there are islands of activity? Where finger pointing at who’s doing it wrong in sales, marketing, production or R&D is a common occurrence. It takes strong mental strength to step back and say what is the best thing that I can do as a team to build trust. Are you really spending enough time trying to understand what your team needs are or are you just feeding them information and data?
I think confidence is believing you are able, and competence is knowing you are able. Steve Jobs surrounded himself with A+ players, people who were smarter than himself because he wanted to learn, evolve, and grow. He put his faith in his people, not in technology, which for him was just tools that either worked or didn’t. He believed that people were basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. What are you doing to move the needle forward?
Heroes have a growth mindset
Leadership is not about being the best, leadership is about making everyone else better, and you can’t learn leadership from a textbook or by gaining a certain title or number of years of experience. Leadership and the ability to influence others are a result of understanding people and if we take the time to develop this, it is much easier to influence other people, because you will be able to speak to their purposes and motivations.
As a leader, you cannot do everything yourself in a fast-changing business world. You need a team that takes ownership, that coaches and helps each other to cross the finish line together, that maintains each other’s energy. If you have this kind of culture, where people are also rewarded for these behaviours, then everyone can have the ability to influence change for good, and they will want to do so. I think the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley made an excellent speech at the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, see “When will leaders lead?”.
Small things matter
You don't have to be in a position of authority to be a good leader and we can show that through our communication. To paraphrase Simon Sinek, “Leadership is irrespective of what level we are at.“ When you start a business there is a method and there are things you need to do in order to build it up. In business you have to set certain goals that you want to achieve and then act towards achieving those goals. Once you have defined your goals and begin to pursue them with your team you will find that obstacles continuously arise as you go towards it.
Whenever you create something new, it’s rarely a smooth progression, you will have to overcome obstacles along the way in the form of people or situations that go wrong. I think that when an obstacle arises, immediately face the obstacle which can come in the form of a situation, for example, something is not working or something is going wrong or perhaps somebody is trying to sabotage you. What is your relationship to difficulties and obstacles that arise as you travel towards your goal? Contact me via e-mail as it's very helpful to share our stories with others as doing so will help you process your emotions.
Movers and shakers
If you don’t know where you are going then any road will take you there! Human beings are goal seeking organisms and we only function at our very best when we are working towards accomplishing something that is important to us. Clarity is the starting point of all success, and this means clarity in thinking. Clarity means the ability to determine exactly what it is that you want to be, have, or do in life. The more I study successful men and women, the more I find that every single one of them are very clear about where they are going and what it is they want to accomplish.
All the great movers and shakers throughout history have been dreamers. If you’re leading the ship and don’t know how to operate a compass, the journey will not be a fun one - for you or your shipmates. It’s vital to have a clear sense of where you are going. Clarity is especially important when you’re introducing change or working towards new goals with your team. The common mix of excitement and anticipation alongside anxiety and fear can be challenging and even unsettling. The differences between successes and failures are not that successful people make right decisions, it’s that successful people make their decisions right.
Confidence is a key leadership quality
c/o Getty Images
Regulating and balancing feelings of confidence requires considerable self-awareness and knowledge. I have seen really good salespeople lose confidence in their ability to sell simply because of a bad relationship with their boss. It’s normal to feel quite confident in some circumstances and less confident in others, this is influenced by past events and how we remember them. Over-confidence can make you take on projects that are beyond your capability, and you might not be able to complete them, so in the same way that you don’t want to lack confidence, you also don’t want to be over-confident.
Self-confidence is an attitude about your skills and abilities. Self-confidence comes from really feeling good about yourself, and one of the best ways to feel good about yourself is knowing that you did your best in every situation. This state is changeable according to the situation we are currently in and our responses to events going on around us. This knowledge will allow you to accept and trust yourself as you are and generate a sense of control in your life. On the other hand, low self-confidence might make you feel full of self-doubt, be passive or submissive, or have difficulty trusting others.
Are you familiar with the “ACT” acronym?
A = Action, C = Changes and T = Things.
Individual mentoring can also help increase your self-confidence if you need more help contact me via e-mail to arrange a meeting.
The currency of trust
I think the currency of trust is when you sense the other person cares as much about you as they do about themselves. Here are some simple generic questions to evaluate where you stand:
How's it going?
How is what I am doing for you helping or not helping you?
What could I do better?
Where else do you need help?
Did what I do provide value for yourselves and if so, how?
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”
Details makes the difference
“The team must trust the leader, the leader must trust the team and team members must trust each other.”