Your are a leader of:
- yourself
- your time
- your attitude
- your career
Positive goals
- Create a motivated team happy to work for you
- Guide staff to a positive outcome
- Encourage a passion for learning
- Mutual respect with your team even if mistakes are made
- Embracing failures
- Mistakes will happen and they are a great opportunity to learn
What to avoid?
- Bad morale (slow poison that can destroy a team)
- Team burnout. Promote a good work/life balance. Make sure crunchies do not become the norm (get more people, delay deadline)
- High staff turnover (reputation, competition)
- Being a know it all. You do not need to know everything. Hard to do, trust your skilled team
- Not supporting and coaching
- Not showing gratitude even with simple things
- Do not be a victim of a decision, explain why
Tools
- Communication: be clear
- Listening: focus on what they are saying, body language
- Appraisal: be honest
- Conflict resolution: seek win win result in a conflict
- Mentoring (based on relationship) and coaching (based on tasks)
- Empathy
- Delegating
Leaders have/are:
- integrity
- are accountable
- are learners: make learning a priority, commit to your own growth development
- inspire
- communicate
- lead by example
- delegate
- prioritize
Leadership characteristics to develop
- Begin with the end in mind (“7 habits of effective people”)
- Reality smothers commitment: what are your commitment killers ?
“Consistency trumps commitment” –
Marc Le Blanc
- Write down the skills relevant to you and the select the most important ones
- Understand and define the skill
- who excels in this skill
- what are the boundaries of that skill
- write down what you need to do
- Assess your proficiency
- write an honest self-evaluation
- list what you need to work on
- ask others for feedback
- Practice the skill every way you can
- Let your boss know you are looking for opportunity
- Get mentored for someone who has gone through the same path
- Teach it (makes you think critically)
- Do not compare yourself to the greatest leaders
- Concentrate on your strengths