In today’s fast changing environment agility and the ability to make change effectively is a key organisational requirement. According to research many change management initiatives fail, risking employee’s resistance and change fatigue.
View this webinar recording to explore:
• The key change management mistakes to avoid
• Successful approaches to effectively leading change
• How to minimise resistance, engage and motivate your people
• Positive change management methodologies
10 leadership actions to help your team flourish
1. Develop a team that is made up of people with different experiences and strengths. Successful teams are diverse, with a wide range of complementary strengths; each person performing in the role that plays to their strengths and in which they can thrive. This approach makes the most of the combined talents available to you, allows most individual weaknesses to become irrelevant, as they are compensated by the strengths of others. Diversity of perspectives is crucial for innovation.
2. Involve your team in co-creating an aspirational vision, so members have a clear stake in the organisation’s success. Seeking your people’s views generates immediate engagement and a stronger connection between activity and outcome.
3. Talk about “why” as well as “what”. Foster the team’s shared aim by describing the impact of their work so that members understand the link to a greater purpose. There is a stakeholder, a customer, or even society at large that benefits as an end result of the work they’re doing.
4. As part of planning and managing challenges, identify and communicate a clear outcome. Review past similar successes and identify the factors of that success. You can then use these to shape your response to issues.
5. Specify and agree clear metrics and targets and agree shared performance outcomes. This establishes each person as responsible for their own performance, seeing growth opportunities, owning mistakes, and setting and reporting against their own SMART objectives. This investment of time benefits the leader by allowing you to spend less of your time spent on ongoing monitoring.
6. Discuss performance at all levels, all the time. This means the organisation’s performance, the team’s performance, customer responses, and individual contributions and actions. All of these elements contribute to the outcome, satisfaction, and experience.
7. Take the role of facilitator, rather than team manager. Ensure that you give thinking time and space to staff members when discussing projects or challenges. They may need time to think issues through, explore options, or identify likely obstacles.
8. Create successful team conversations by encouraging positive communication. The ratio of positivity to negativity is a fundamental driver of good relationships as well as productivity. A successful team looks to have between three and six positive statements for every negative statement, expressing more agreement, and engaging with others’ viewpoints. Successful teams also listen more than argue – they spend more time seeking to understand rather than asserting their own point.
9. Use “Yes AND…” rather than “Yes BUT…” in discussions and meetings. This indicates that you’ve heard the other person’s point, and allows you to build on the previous statement. It is a small language tweak, which generates collaboration, rather than argument.
10. Expect accountability and at the same time practice visible forgiveness to defuse blame when things do go wrong. This will allow you to move on to resolve issues and safeguards the team’s willingness to try new things, take risks, make mistakes and learn. Apologising and showing forgiveness are some of the most important ways of building trust, and encouraging open communication.
If we can support the development of your team, look at our organisation development offer or contact us.
Exceptional leaders hardly ever stop learning, they know they can always improve themselves. Twitter is a great resource for thoughts, ideas and good examples. Here are just some of the top influencers that we follow and retweet on leadership skills or company culture. Check out our selection:
Through Alison Green’s Ask a Manager profile you can ask her a question like ‘this is what my boss says, what does it mean?’ Send her your questions or learn from others’ cases.
Based in London, David Shepherd tweets tweets about Human Resources, employment law, pay, benefits, the labour market, data services, b2b media, and a whole lot more.
Aadil
Bandukwala is a social recruiting consultant with a history in Talent Acquisition and Social Media. Worth your while following him if you want to know everything about recruiting.
Lolly Daskal’s Twitter feed is about coaching, management, leadership, consulting. You can find truly informative posts, inspirational quotes and pictures shared by her.
Dan McCarthy
, self-described leadership and management development geek. His profile has everything that has to do with leadership and management.
Who is missing from our list? Let us know in the comments below!
A summary of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In
Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, presented a TED Talk on why are there so few women in leadership positions. Her book, Lean In started from that 15 minute talk. Sandberg’s argument is that excuses and justifications will not get women anywhere. In her book she provides useful suggestions to urge women to take their place in the working world while taking ownership of a leadership concept. Women have to take a seat at the table, even if they feel uneasy at first, says Sandberg.
They have to lean in and have the will to lead. She says women have to break with internalised attitudes that hold them back. Throughout the book, Sandberg carefully weighs the double binds, internal and external, that hold back women from achieving their goals, their potential at the workplace.
Sandberg’s work is a combination of hard data, academic research, her own experiences, observations and life lessons with a hint of humour. Lean In is more than a book, it’s kind of a feminist manifesto as she calls it; part of a movement to create a more equal world.
The book is available at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.
Agi Galgoczi
British training company Happy Ltd has been rated best for customer service and work/life balance among many other awards. Henry Stewart, Chief Executive, has written a book about the story of Happy and its achievements. The book has a clear tone, comes with real-life examples, provides evidence where required and poses thought-provoking questions – overall an enjoyable read. From the title you can guess you will find a public declaration of the methods, views and motives of the author.
Stewart’s Happy Manifesto is based on ten points:
Most of the points are about giving freedom to your people and trusting them. With his book Stewart aims to help the reader put in place the structure that makes freedom and trust possible in his/her organisation.
The Happy Manifesto shows an aspirational alternative, it can help some managers and organisations but it is still not a panacea which will “Make Your Organisation a Great Place to Work – Now!” Don’t get me wrong, it is a great book, the idea has potential but I can’t see how it could be applied in every case. I find it hard to believe that all employees can work without rules, and in my experience not every manager has the freedom to influence the structure, choose their people and put together a dream-team. If managers don’t have the freedom to choose people for their team, or if they inherit an existing team with set preferences and habits, further work will be needed before they can provide the level of freedom suggested.
It is apparent throughout the book that Stewart believes in guidelines rather than rules. He says managers don’t give enough freedom to their staff and it could be much more effective if your people made most decisions themselves. Stewart describes the hierarchy of management needs, based on Maslow’s well-known pyramid, which highlights workplace safety, comfort, reward and communication as necessary but insufficient for motivation.
Stewart proceeds to expand on organisational approaches to develop challenge, support, trust and freedom as the management behaviours leading to high performance.
Book details:
Henry Stewart: The Happy Manifesto: Make Your Organization a Great Workplace;
Kogan Page; 1 edition (3 Jan. 2013)
We believe that great leaders are made not born. We have brought together a list of 5 thought-provoking blogs which can give you ideas to develop your skills and guidance on your leadership journey.
1. Lead
ership Freak: Dan Rockwell empowers you in 300 words daily. Enjoyable and makes you think, reading this blog could become an important part of your daily routine.
2. Dr Wayne W Dyer: If you wo
uld like to focus on your personal leadership or self- development, this blog could give you some great tips and ways to motivate yourself.
3. Tanveer Naseer: Th
is blog’s main focus is on helping managers to improve their leadership and team management skills, helping them identify the fulfilling purpose of their work.
4. Management Excellence: Art Petty’s blog focuses on developing leadership skills by concentrating on professional presence. Critical thinking is also a central theme on this site.
5. Three Star Leadership: This blog is aimed at leaders at all levels. Tips, lists, strategies to help managers to perform at a higher level.
We could not complete this round-up without including Gordon Tredgold‘s leadership blog. Hear more from Gordon in our interview.
Whatever you think of Valentine’s Day, it is mid-February and love does seem to be in the air. In this article we look at the five languages of appreciation you can use to show your ‘love’ to engage and motivate your colleagues.
Making your employees feel valued is an essential skill for any manager – but what is the best method to express appreciation for a job well done or gratitude for a commitment to quality? Length-of-service awards, employee-of-the-month recognition and merchandise rewards do not always appeal to everyone in the whole organisation.
In their book The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace Dr. Paul White and Dr. Gary Chapman highlight that different people have different ways they find appreciation most meaningful. They suggest you will get the best results if you choose the approach to recognition most valued by the recipient.
According to White and Chapman, the five languages are:
Words of affirmation
Praise, thanks and specific positive feedback shared one-to-one or in front of a group.
Quality time
Time spent in conversation, mentoring or working together – some of your colleagues feel valued if you take the time to spend with them.
Acts of service
Supportive actions, helping out when needed – some of your people will strongly feel that actions speak louder than words.
Tangible gifts
Giving the right gift that the recipient wants, which may be time off or a development opportunity, can send a powerful message.
Appropriate physical touch
A handshake of congratulations or a sincere pat on the shoulder.
By showing sincere appreciation and personal recognition to your staff you can enhance engagement and motivation.
Our challenge to you is this:
How can you express appreciation more often – and in the ways that are most valued by your colleagues?
Over the last few decades a dispiriting body of research has been amassed, which suggests that the vast majority of change programmes fail, or fail to reach their intended outcomes. In their book Switch – How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, academics Chip and Dan Heath address this challenge head on.
The authors argue that we all have both an emotional and a rational side, which they portray as the elephant and the rider – for their relative roles and power.
They suggest that the emotional (elephant) and rational (rider) sides have different needs and limitations that we have to address for change to be successful. Furthermore, we can also smooth the path to make change as easy as possible.
The Switch model outlines three sets of actions to support each of the elephant, rider and path. The aspects of the model are therefore to:
Direct the rider by
Motivate the elephant by
Shape the path by
The Heaths have created a leadership book with great – but all too rare – balance. The Switch model and their recommendations are based on robust research from business, management, psychology and even international development.
These are then presented in a very accessible and readable book with lots of case studies and illustrative examples that both ‘point to the destination’ and allow us to ‘find the feeling’, resulting in an inspirational and immediately actionable read for leaders looking to make organisational or personal changes.
Switch – How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath is available at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. Additional resources are available from heathbrothers.com. The book is reviewed by Eszter Molnar Mills.
Eszter Molnar Mills is a strength-based leadership and organisation development specialist and founder of Formium Development. She helps organisations and individuals reach enhanced performance by reflecting on what works, and developing skills and strategies for improvement.
This month we are prompted by the US Thanksgiving tradition to take time and practice gratitude.
The practice of gratitude as a tool for happiness has been in the mainstream for years. Long-term studies support gratitude’s effectiveness, suggesting that a positive, appreciative attitude contributes to greater success in work, greater health, peak performance in sports and business, a higher sense of well-being, and a faster rate of recovery from surgery.
But while we may acknowledge gratitude’s many benefits, it still can be difficult to sustain. So many of us are trained to notice what is broken, undone or lacking in our lives. And for gratitude to meet its full potential in our lives, it needs to become more than just a Thanksgiving word. We have to learn a new way of looking at things, a new habit. And that can take some time.
That’s why practicing gratitude makes so much sense. When we practice giving thanks for all we have, instead of complaining about what we lack, we give ourselves the chance to see all of life as an opportunity and a blessing.
Remember that gratitude isn’t a blindly optimistic approach in which the bad things in life are whitewashed or ignored. It’s more a matter of where we put our focus and attention. Challanges and problems exist, but when we focus on what works and what we can appreciate, including our strengths and the strengths of others, we can make great gains in performance and well-being. Gratitude balances us and gives us hope.
There are many things to be grateful for: a great team, loyal and appreciative customers, challenging and exciting projects at work, new learning, our health, a long list of friends and family to plan festive gifts for. What’s on your list?
Author’s content used with permission, © Claire Communications
Meeting the organisational and individual challenges of excellent leadership is crucial for any business.
Formium Development Director Eszter Molnar Mills was interviewed for Business Innovators Radio on leadership challenges and how harnessing strengths and investing in development can mitigate these.
You can listen to the interview on iTunes, or visit http://businessinnovatorsmagazine.com/eszter-molnar-mills-managers-to-leaders/ where you an also read the accompanying article for Business Innovators Magazine.