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Are Your Mindsets Ready For Leadership?

8/18/2014

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You've finally been promoted to that managerial position you've worked so hard for the last couple of years.  Congratulations!  But are your mindsets ready for leadership?  

Through the years, I've seen many new (and experienced) leaders consistently get tripped up by wrong mindsets in 3 areas: respect, power & knowledge.  The sooner leaders adapt their mindsets in these 3 areas, the sooner they and their teams will be on the path to delivering outstanding results to their organization! 

The proper mindset for Respect: "Leaders earn it; followers get it"

As a new leader, you step into your position with a clean slate and "an empty bucket".  The empty bucket I refer to represents respect: the respect you've earned and accrued as the leader of your new work group.  It is very important for new leaders to adopt the mindset that they are "owed nothing" and have to "earn everything", especially when it comes to respect.  Other than the small amount that comes with your new title, your task is to earn the rest.  With each step you take, each interaction you engage in and each decision you make, you have an opportunity to fill your bucket of respect. 

Here's the catch . . . when it comes to your employees, you give respect to them immediately and unconditionally.  And when they trip up, reflect on what YOU, as their leader, can do differently next time to help them avoid a similar stumble, discuss the situation with them, as appropriate, and refill their bucket of respect back up to the top.  As a leader, it's your job to earn respect and your job to give respect, not the other way around.

The proper mindset for Power: "It's yours to share, not hoard"
Power is the capacity to exercise control.  As a leader, it's important to share power with your work group.  Not only does it send a strong supporting message, but it also strengthens the group's overall ability to perform.  For leaders, power is primarily derived from 3 sources:

                             -  One's Position (hierarchical power)
                             -  One's Knowledge (expertise power)
                             -  One's Access to Information (informational power)

Of the 3 power sources, hierarchal power is the only one that cannot be shared, as it is tied to the leader's job and necessary to uphold the responsibilities of the position.  Both expertise and informational power can be shared.  While not all new leaders possess expertise power, all possess informational power.  Some leaders get tripped up by mistakenly believing their unique access to information or possession of expertise increases their power status.  In reality, information access and expertise only become power increasers when they are shared with others. 


The more your team knows, the better able they will be to individually and collectively unleash their capabilities to help the business.  With expertise and informational power, the more you share, the more you will receive, both in terms of power and overall work group performance.

The proper mindset for Knowledge: "You don't know it all, so don't pretend"
None of us truly know everything, not even in the area of our specialty.  So why then does it seem so hard for some, especially once they've moved into leadership, to admit they don't know everything?  Ego I guess.  I have found this to be one of the single biggest challenges facing young leaders.  Through the years on numerous occasions, I learned of instances where a seasoned subordinate seemingly sat by while their new supervisor did something the subordinate knew was incorrect.  In every case, the explanation was either the supervisor had not asked the subordinate for input, or the subordinate had spoken up but the supervisor had not listened.

The lesson, for all leaders, is to engage your people for input when dealing with their jobs.  Give your people the benefit of the doubt regarding knowledge, whether they have earned it or not (see #1 above - you earn it, they get it).  Nobody expects you to have all of the answers, so don't pretend to. In general, be humble.  It is more important to find out what your employees know.  More often than not task owners know more about their jobs than others realize.

If you are a leader that already understands the above mindsets, congratulations, as you are off and running on the right foot!  If you found the above to be new and insightful, worry not.  The simple fact that you're reading articles, seeking knowledge and considering differing perspectives reflects a learner's spirit.  Keep learning, keep growing and keep tapping into the knowledge around you (see #3 above), as that's a formula used by successful leaders everywhere!  Lead on!


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Employees Crave It, But "What is Leadership?"

8/4/2014

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A common theme from workers across businesses today is the ongoing cry for "improved leadership".  Survey after survey reflects a deficit in leadership according to employees.  If we are to address this unfortunate reality, we must first understand what we are trying to fix - we must first answer the question, "What is leadership?"  A seemingly simple question, yet when posed to successful leaders, consultants and academia, it yields an astonishingly wide array of answers.  Here's just a sampling:

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. —Peter Drucker

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. —Warren Bennis

Leadership is influence. —John C. Maxwell

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. —General Dwight Eisenhower

Leadership is a way of thinking, a way of acting and, most importantly, a way of communicating.
—Simon Sinek

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.  —Deepak Chopra

Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It's about impact, influence and inspiration. Impact involves getting results, influence is about spreading the passion you have for your work, and you have to inspire team-mates and customers.  —Robin S. Sharma


Hmmm, while all of the above are true, at least to some degree, and some possess sage wisdom, none do a very good job of functionally answering our question.  In fact, it is the mere variety of responses that creates a distracting "noise" surrounding the topic of leadership today.  It is very difficult for practitioners; young, old, new or experienced, to discern what leadership really is and what matters when it comes to leadership.  The inability to clearly and commonly define this important topic has positioned leadership as one of the least understood disciplines in business today.

Before I address our question, let me touch on 3 issues that inevitably draw a lot of sidebar debate, when it comes to discussions on leadership:  
         First, I am focusing on the definition of leadership from a business perspective.  While I believe my definition has relevance on a broader perspective, my goal is to clearly define leadership for use by the business community in seeking improved leadership.
         Secondly, if you are a manager or supervisor with people reporting to you, then you are also a leader.  You are not one or the other.  If you have people reporting to you, you are both a manager and a leader.  The distinction is that managers manage processes, systems and tasks (all the non-people tasks) and leaders lead people (all the people tasks - the topic of a future post).
         Thirdly, if you are a manager or supervisor, your primary job is to deliver results.  Yes, this is simply stated and the "how" & "why" do matter, but once folks go down the how & why road of conversation, managers and supervisors alike seem to loose focus on the primary reason for which they exist - which is to deliver results.  Critical to any definition of leadership must be the understanding that managers and supervisors (leaders), in business, are responsible for delivering results.

To answer our question, let's begin simply with the word itself:  LEAD-ER-SHIP


The root word is "lead", which gets expanded to leader and finally to leadership.  A leader leads people, and what the leader provides to those people is leadership.  The dictionary defines LEAD in the following ways: to guide, to direct, to show way to, to inspire.  Using this approach, I like the following definition leadership:

        "Leadership is the act of guiding, directing, showing the way to and inspiring people to deliver results".

The above definition doesn't talk about styles.  It doesn't get into why.  It doesn't address the how.  It doesn't reflect any uniqueness from my years of experience.  Some of you may find it a bit boring. But it does accurately answer the question, "What is leadership?"  And it does provide a clear and simple baseline from which developing better leaders may begin.

What techniques or approaches do you use to guide (share information with) your employees?  To show them the way (train, coach and correct) or to inspire (encourage and motivate) them?  When do you chose to direct versus guide?  Or inspire versus show the way?  Which approach do you lean on the most?  When is the use of each approach most appropriate?

The answers to these questions and others will begin to give you insight as to how your employees might answer the question, "How is your manager's or supervisor's leadership?"  Learning to understand and properly utilize the above dimensions of leadership will help you become a more effective and productive leader.  Lead on!

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    Author

    Bill Novak is president of WIN Leadership, LLC, with over 25 years of leadership experience, specializing in operational and cultural turnarounds of operations.  Bill writes about the pragmatic aspects of leadership and change.

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