After a number of years of being a manager, supervisor or team leader it can feel as though you have ‘been there and done that.’ With fewer opportunities for promotion, how can you re-energize your enthusiasm for your leadership role?
 
Perhaps it is time to wake up to your higher purpose of being a developer of people.
 
You will be long remembered for your role in developing others once the memory of your great management skills fades away. 
 
As you think back to the managers and supervisors you have worked for, you likely have one or two who made the most significant impact on you. Isn’t it a shame that there are so few inspiring bosses?
 
As a leader yourself, what kind of legacy are you leaving? Will you be known as the type of manager or supervisor who made a difference to a large number of employees or will you be just another boss, forgotten soon after you retire or leave your current position?
 
If doing your management job has become a little stale, why not shift your focus to building the capabilities of the people who work for you? Not only will they appreciate your interest in their success, they will want to help you succeed in your leadership role.
 
Tips for Building a Leadership Legacy

• Think about the talents and potential of the people who work for you.
• Have conversations with them about their ambitions.
• Provide challenging job assignments.
• Delegate greater responsibility to them.
• Recommend worthy candidates for promotion.
• Give tough love to those who need to adjust their thinking.
• Encourage and push employees to stretch themselves beyond their current beliefs about what is possible. 

During our vacation this summer we spent a few days in Chicago and spent one of our days at The Field Museum. As we walked through a great exhibit on evolution a couple of quotations caught my eye along with a couple of observations of how successful species who are better at adapting to their environment tend to exist longer while less adaptable species become extinct. 
 
One of the quotations was that “Evolution favors bodies that fare well in their environment.”
 
Less environmentally-adaptable creatures become extinct as the earth changes. And the same thing can happen in the corporate world.
 
If you are struggling with adapting to change, you might be putting your career on the endangered species list. An organization with this mentality may find itself extinct.
 
It amazes me to see how the majority of people are stubborn and fearful towards change while a small minority of change provocateurs are determined to confront and over turn the status quo.
 
Most of us are pretty resilient and adaptable to change over the MEDIUM to LONG TERM – often because we have no choice!
 
The problem appears to be in the SHORT term. If change always seems to be happening TO you, consider becoming a proactive change initiator.
 
One General Manager was sharing his concern that there were so many opportunities to improve his back office admin functions and yet his salaried staff were reluctant to adopt the change, let alone lead it.
 
If you find yourself dragging your feet with change, consider getting out in front of it. You’ll be positioning yourself as a leader and you will discover that the change can be exhilarating and motivating instead or threatening and demotivating.
 
Reflection Questions

• Take a moment to observe how your department functions. What are all the annoyances and frustrations that you put up with instead of fixing?
• What do you think is holding you back from being more proactive at fixing the systems that cause you the most grief?
• If you tend to respond defensively to changes, reflect on why that is and set a personal goal to be a creator of change.

By being a leader of change you can take your career off the endangered species list and not only survive but thrive.

As you might imagine, as a paid expert on communication and leadership, I get some well earned ribbing at home from my wife Robin because of my poor listening skills as a husband and father. Once I made the comment that she just didn’t pay me as well as my client’s did for me to be a good listener. After a few days in the dog house I understood that payment can be in many different forms.

How can I be a very good listener in selling and coaching situations and so poor at it at home?

In the same way, my teenage children can be remarkably poor listeners at times and yet hear the faintest whispers of a private conversation I’m having with my wife.

Perhaps you suffer from the same affliction – selective listening. Chances are when your boss or a customer is communicating you pay more attention and you may even lean in to hear a juicy bit of gossip. And yet when a coworker or employee approaches you, your listening skills plummet.

It turns out our selective listening isn’t just dependent on our interest in the information. It also has to do with who is delivering the information.

Supervisors and managers have to be particularly conscious of this because they tend to have certain employees they listen to well and others who they don’t listen to as effectively.

Much of this has to do with the judgments you make about people in determining whether they are worth listening to or not. In a manager – subordinate situation I may have already discounted the information the person is going to give me before they start speaking. It could be based on prejudice or past experience with the individual.

The effect is that I will miss out on some potentially useful information and send the message that I really don’t value the person as an individual. As my employee the person will then be less interested in helping me achieve the departmental objectives.

Tips to Improve Your Listening Skills

1. See the other person as having something useful to say even if it means deprogramming some of your past interactions or your own insecurity.
2. Avoid distractions and focus on the person – yes that means not looking at your computer screen or checking your Blackberry or iPhone for a few minutes.
3. Challenge yourself to summarize what the person said to you before adding in your own commentary.

Along with you, I will be applying these tips at home to see the impact it has on a personal level.

Do you want to be less frustrated at work? An engineering manager shared an insight in a leadership course I was teaching a couple of weeks ago. He said that being frustrated is simply a sign that you are avoiding dealing with an issue or concern.  
 
Dictionary.com shows a number of definitions for frustration including: act of being disappointed or thwarted and a feeling of dissatisfaction resulting from unfulfilled needs or unresolved problems.
 
It would seem at first that your frustration is the fault of someone or something else. That belief can make you feel helpless. Playing the role of victim might garner you some sympathy and yet it rarely results in solving of the underlying problem.
 
Recognize that a majority (approximately 60%) of the people around you are passive. They defend themselves through avoidance and pretending that everything is okay. If you share this passivity you are contributing to the continuation of what frustrates you.
 
Instead of trapping yourself in a cycle of disappointment, why not put the issue on the table constructively and attempt to resolve it? In many cases you will find that the other individual is unaware of your feelings.
 
Action Tips for Being Less Frustrated

• Decide what you want to see happen. Many people know what they DON’T want but do not clearly know what they DO want.
• Meet (not email) with the individual you perceive as the cause of your frustration.
• Explain the situation from your perspective – express yourself clearly and fully.
• Ask the other individual to describe their position.
• Propose a potential solution – be as specific as possible.
• Ask for agreement and deal with any obstacles.
• If you are unsuccessful the first time, be persistent.

If there is no resolution and you decide to live with it, let it go. If you feel strongly enough about it then make a change.

When a great employee becomes a team leader, supervisor or manager, the transition isn’t always smooth. This week we examine some of the challenges and advice for moving from doer to leader. 
 
Great workers can become mediocre leaders if they don’t acknowledge that some of the characteristics of being a great worker can work against them in the leadership role.
 
To get promoted, an employee demonstrates that he or she has a good work ethic, is reliable, cares about the company and solves problems. These are all good things and yet as a leader the doer must now get things done through others.
 
New leaders have two reactions to their new found power and authority: 1. They become too bossy and alienate the team, or 2. They go too easy on the team and lose respect and don’t achieve the desired results.
 
Especially where the leader had close friendships with co-workers, he or she might find it a challenge to balance leadership and friendship. Employees may also ask for special favors.
 
A leader must set the direction and tempo of the workgroup, challenge employees to solve problems on their own and achieve the results without doing all the work themselves.
 
Many new leaders practice the golden rule – treat people as YOU want to be treated. The problem is that employees may not be motivated by the same factors as the new leader. The leader therefore must practice the platinum rule – treat people as THEY want and need to be treated.
 
As a doer, the individual may have chosen to be more friendly with some co-workers than others. As a leader, building a strong team means not playing favorites and treating each person with dignity and respect.
 
Tips for Moving from Doer to Leader

1. Learn to feel a sense of achievement from getting results as a team versus only from your own efforts.
2. Let your friends know that as a leader you need to be consistent and fair to everyone in the workgroup and that playing favorites could put your job in jeopardy.
3. Get your team to come up with answers and solutions on their own to keep them from being overly reliant on you which could turn you into a glorified gopher.
4. Get some leadership training, practice constructive leadership techniques and learn to get comfortable in your new leadership role. 

With some conscious effort and a willingness to succeed the doer can become an excellent leader.

My daughter and I had our portraits drawn as caricatures. It is a cartoon-like mocking, exaggerated portrait.
 
Sometimes when you meet someone, you get the gut feeling that they are trying to be someone they aren’t. An overcompensation for a deep seated fear or anxiety.
 
As leaders, our employees and team members will pick up on this fakery and it will prevent them from truly wanting to help us succeed. 
 
Your character is the sum of your qualities, reputation and behavior. Our built in B.S. detectors can usually pick out whether someone is comfortable in their own skin.
 
I’ve had a couple of recent examples with individuals who were overcompensating for their perceived shortcomings.
 
The first is a woman who is very smart and caring and wants the best for the company she works for. She appeared to be trying too hard to impress me and perhaps her boss. After the official meeting ended I pointed this out to her and suggested that she didn’t need to try so hard. She is already good enough. To over exaggerate will actually cause people to resist her leadership and maybe even resent her.
 
In another example a well-meaning manager was going out of his way to keep his team of employees happy. His way of keeping them happy was to do most of the work himself. This would get him flustered and he would become short tempered. The employees were becoming disgruntled because they thought he didn’t trust them.
 
Tips for Being a More Authentic Leader

• Accept yourself for who you are – strengths and weaknesses.
• When you are uncertain or don’t know – say so and have a plan to find out.
• Avoid taking yourself too seriously, let your true colors shine through.
• Stop trying to impress people with fancy language and say it like it is.
• Be more humble – allow your actions and results speak for themselves.
• If you do have some deeper issues start working them out with a professional therapist or counselor.

Watch how people respond to you when you are  a more genuine and authentic leader.

With the July 4th Independence Day in the USA and July 1st Canada Day holidays happening in the next week, let’s see what role independence has on employee motivation.
 
This week we celebrate independence in North America. How much independence is there to celebrate in your workplace?
 
A friend sent me the link to an interesting video on what really motivates people at work. You can watch it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
 
Researchers measured the impact that money had on performance. For basic, non-thinking tasks more money equaled more output. Interestingly, if even a moderate amount of thinking was involved, more money resulted in a DECLINE of performance.
 
The three top motivators were Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Autonomy focuses on the freedom to act independently. Employees given this freedom to work on projects or opportunities of interest added greater value to their organization through innovation and customer focus. Mastery is about the opportunity to get really good at something and purpose is a connection to the big picture.
 
One of the leader’s responsibilities is to continually remind people about purpose – how their work impacts the customer and the greater mission of the organization. It is easy to forget this and work can become a boring chore.
 
Reflection Questions

1. Does your organization purposely create an opportunity for employees to have the freedom to think outside the box? Or is everything and everyone overly controlled?
2. How could you reward employees by giving them some free time to work on a project or opportunity of interest? Notice that autonomy or independence isn’t goofing off.
3. Are you giving employees the opportunity to develop mastery though training, coaching and challenges?
4. Do you keep reinforcing the purpose of why your organization or department exists? And no it isn’t just to make money – it is to serve customers.

Action Items

1. See how you can create time and space for employees to have the autonomy to be creative.
2. Keep reminding your team about its greater purpose in serving customers and helping the organization succeed.

Is  it really worth it to bend over backwards to accommodate an employee who has a ton of knowledge and experience but brings little else to the organization? Over the years I have seen companies label individuals as “untouchable” because of their organizational history. This is despite clear evidence that the person can be destructive to the people around them.

It seems that almost every organization has at least one individual who everyone puts up with for longer than they should because the person has some special knowledge and experience.
 
In effect they hold the organization hostage. And it can be a significant risk to the organization if the person were to leave suddenly… or would it?
 
An HR Manager was sharing her organization’s experience in having a former plant manager demoted several times and put on special projects because of his considerable knowledge of the plant facilities and equipment. He was deemed untouchable despite the fact that there were many long serving employees in production and maintenance who likely could handle most situations that arose.
 
What to do if your organization is a knowledge hostage

• Assess the real risk. Does the individual have real or only perceived special knowledge? What would the consequences be if the person wasn’t there?
• If there is a real risk, develop a strategy now to mitigate that risk. Use documentation and cross training to get others up to speed.
• Explain that it isn’t acceptable for the individual to hoard knowledge and expertise and that there are consequences to him or her for continuing to do so.
• Confront, correct and encourage the individual to be less defensive about their knowledge and focus on helping the team succeed.

What to do if you are the person holding the organization hostage

• Realize that you may not be creating the security you had hoped for.
• Reposition yourself as a teacher of others and think of your legacy of leaving the organization stronger instead of putting it at risk.
• Seek training, coaching or mentoring to change behaviors that are hurting your job performance and ability to interact constructively with others.