When talking to groups of people, getting the information out there in a consistent way such that everyone gets the same message is a real talent.

In these usually one-way interchanges, using jargon and complex messages can kill off any hope of the getting the point easily.

Ensuring that you deliver what you need to with focus, simplicity and brevity will go a long way to ensuring that your people stay with you and get that message.

Because overindulging in what you say serves no-one, except perhaps to massage your own ego, so getting past that is critical when you want full engagement.

Then what you say will be heard fully and over time, when you come to speak, your team will be much more prepared to listen, full in the knowledge that you understand what their needs are as an audience and deliver.

They will respect and follow you all the more for it.

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Unless the relationship is very sound and the self-awareness of the leader is quite acute, balancing talking and listening may be hard to achieve.

Leaders are by definition, some way up the hierarchy, so there is a natural tendency for employees to bow in deference when the leader is talking. Although this might not go quite so far as intimidation, it will always be quite close.

Similarly, leaders having something to say is quite compelling, because they might have useful information to impart as well as give clues about what they think of the person listening to them.

So in leadership, there is an inherent role to ensure that the balance of any conversation ensures that individuals feel they have a close relationship with the leader – and in most circumstances, only the leader has the status to make this happen.

Whilst in many conversations the ‘two ears, one mouth’ rule works effectively (see this blog post for more), a simpler one might be of value when leaders engage with their people as individuals.

By simply ensuring that each side speaks for an equal amount of time, leaders can ensure that their people really feel heard, especially when they show they truly are interested by listening actively.

Being self-aware enough to appreciate when you have said your piece in a conversation and then giving the other side space for their say, is a challenge many leaders fail to achieve.

The most successful leaders balance the conversation as they recognise the value in giving space to others too.

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These are often relatively easy to identify, because as SMART objectives inherently define (as long as they are good enough, of course), there are usually numbers attached. Achievement of a fixed numerical goal is pretty straightforward – or not.

For the more subtle performance outcomes, it can be a challenge to fix numbers on them, so defining the results can be more of a problem.

Take behaviors.

How easy is it to measure something like ‘being supportive’? An excellent leadership behavior, but very difficult to demonstrate. In the ‘emotionally intelligent’ world, ‘being supportive’ is one of the key behaviors that any decent leader needs to have in their toolkit.

If you ask a leader, many of them will say that they are supportive and yet when asked to define this, they will find it challenging. Even more difficult, they will find it very tough to be able to say how their existing behavior set demonstrates that they are supportive on a regular basis.

That’s because we really find it quite hard to be objective in how we assess how we do, often because we get too close to it.

Try this little experiment.

Without looking at it – or you spoil the fun – draw your own watch. If you don’t wear a watch, draw the clock you most often use. It is something that is very hard to do, despite our close familiarity to something we look at several times a day.

This analogy exactly replicates how we are with the behaviors we have built into us. It’s really hard to be objective, simply because we are too close to it.

For teams and organizations, appreciating the behaviors demonstrated as part of the culture is equally difficult – on a much bigger and potentially more damaging scale.

Whilst being aware of this ‘blind spot’ on a personal basis is challenging enough, for organizations, even open, honest and effective awareness can be very difficult. Add in a mix of politics, strategic thinking and individual self-preservation and you get a minefield.

The way to progress for both individuals and organizations is to seek feedback about what does – or doesn’t – work well. This feedback needs to be open, honest and received without excuses or reasons to apologize it away. People who give feedback – from individuals right up to whole organizations – need to be honored for their generous participation.

And what they say needs to be honored too, by ensuring it is responded to professionally and thoroughly, showing that the efforts they make to provide feedback is fully valued.

Whether it is at the individual level or big corporation level, knowing exactly what your watch looks like as a first step, demonstrates that internal change can and will happen, once you fully understand current reality.

And that can only be for the better.

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Self Belief and Leadership Success

If you are a leader you will already have many achievements in your career to date.  Despite this, when people step into a leadership role for the first time they can have a dip in confidence and experience lots of doubt.

Making the move from manager to leader is probably one of the biggest steps you will take.  For this reason you should not be surprised if you feel just a little bit uncomfortable.  If you don’t you are probably either:

•    Playing it safe
•    Staying in your comfort zone
•    In a role that lacks challenge

So as you make the transition or aspire to make the transition into leadership, how can you retain your self belief?

Recognise You Are in Post for a Reason

When you were promoted to your first post as a leader, someone or more likely a group of people had faith in you.  They knew that there were areas that you may have needed to work on, but they saw the potential.  Remind yourself of this when the going gets tough.

Develop a Learning Mindset

When things don’t work out as you expected, it is easy to fall into the trap of viewing it as a failure.  The truth is we all learn much more from the things we got wrong than those we got right.  Make a conscious choice to reflect and learn from mistakes rather than dwelling on the disappointment.

Keep Track of Your Successes

You will have many things that have gone really well.  Keep track of them so that you can refer to from time to time.  Notice what you did or how you behaved and how it contributed to your success so that you can use again in the future.

Set Challenging But Achievable Targets

You are probably someone who is highly driven.  While this is a great quality to have, be alert to setting yourself up to fail.  The targets you set for yourself and your team should be a stretch but ultimately achievable.

Bottom Line – It’s not just what you do that determines your success as a leader.  So what do you need to start doing to boost your self belief and achieve more success?

Duncan Brodie is a leadership and management expert who can help you and your people achieve extraordinary success. Check his website out at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

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5 Proactive Steps to Becoming a More Effective Leader

Your effectiveness as a leader significantly impacts on the results that you deliver.  The results that you deliver not only impacts on the success you deliver for your organisation or team but also the personal success you achieve.  So what proactive things can you do to become a more effective leader?

Step 1: Do a self assessment

A great quality of effective leaders is self awareness.  They know where their strengths are and are also aware of their weaker areas.  Start the journey to becoming a more effective leader by carrying out and honest and objective self assessment.

Step 2: Get some feedback

Even if you are the most self aware person around, chances are you still have a few blind spots.  We often fail to recognise or even see strengths that others see in us or weaknesses that are getting in the way of success.  Collect some feedback from at least 10 people to get a rounded picture of where you stand as leader.

Step 3: Make a plan

Many people talk about the importance of continued development.  Very few on the other hand make a clear plan when it comes to development.  Think about it.  Would you try to build a house without a plan?  Of course not yet, many people fail to create a plan when it comes to building their leadership capability.  Simply thinking about what you need to develop and putting in place some basic activities that you will undertake will set you apart from most.

Step 4: Create accountability

A plan is great and more than most will do.  By creating some accountability you will greatly increase the chances of executing and getting the results you want.  Why?  Simply because when you have to account to someone else for what you did or did not do, you are more likely to follow through.

Step 5: Keep refreshing the plan

Professional and personal development is not done once and forgotten about.  New areas emerge that you need to work on or the internal or external environment in which you work changes.  Make sure that you refresh your plan periodically so that it remains relevant.

Bottom Line? Developing yourself as a leader is no longer an optional extra.  So what proactive steps will you take to becoming a more effective leader and achieve success?

Duncan Brodie is a leadership and management expert who can help you and your people achieve extraordinary success. Check his website out at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

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For most of us, whilst we might not be fully aware of it, we are riven with self-interest.

Whilst this is quite understandable – from deep in the mists of time, where we needed to look out for ourselves to survive – in our modern world, there are new, more subtle priorities to get to where we want to.

When we show others that we value them; trust them; and want to form a relationship with them, we are leaps and bounds ahead of those who demonstrate merely self-interest.

Our appreciation of others – who they are and what they stand for – is a powerful way of getting them on our side, which makes them valuable to us too.

Listening carefully to what others have to say is one of the most powerful tools for building strong interdependent relationships and yet is underutilised because we get in our own way. We are only half listening, half of the time, because we are are too interested in hearing our own inner voice with its own selfish agenda.

This shows in our manner; in our faces and in other behaviours that give away that we aren’t actually that interested in the other person. Our own ego is shouting out loud about us, which is just not what interets most other people.

As Stephen Covey says in ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People‘

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply”

If we can spend just a little time practicing truly authentic, active and attentive listening, that investment alone will create powerful interactions with others.

Setting our own agenda aside is a challenge – and by doing so we can add significant value to the relationships we have ahead of us.

The golden rule is to follow your ears. We have been given two of them.

And only one mouth.

By using them in that 2:1 proportion, we will have all the benefits of being appreciated and liked by those around us on our team.

Then they will work much more affectively as our partner in whatever ways we want from them.

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Such freedom is, in enlightened organizational eyes, vital to ensure that every one of their people feel that the environment is ideally suited to getting in the flow and being able to have the perfect mindset for these new demands of novel approaches to work.

The challenge for many organizations is to ensure that there are standards in place which employees adhere to, whilst also engendering a culture of openness, freedom and new ways of working.

These standards may be of behavior, security, communication, equality and more. All of which are vital components that people need to understand better what is expected of them in general, when employed together in their workplace community.

Such rules are vital to ensure that everyone gets along in a civilised way together and, more importantly, each appreciates the needs and expectations of their fellow colleagues too.

Rules and freedom. Using the two words together in the same sentence seems an oxymoron that simply won’t work. Yet they are particularly comfortable bedfellows if the best value is to be achieved from every employee.

For rules create understanding that everyone adheres to. And once clear, with all the players signed up, individuals are much more able to relax and do their own thing. From rigidity can come freedom after all.

To ensure that rules do not encumber employees, engaging them by including them in the design of workplace standards enables contribution and commitment.

When they are involved in creating the structure within which all will work, joint ownership in the creative process with management, will provide more productive than when such strictures are simply imposed from an impersonal ‘above’.

Completely structureless organizations and teams might offer hope of greater flexibility and outputs, yet this is so often not the case.

Wrangling and discontent start to suck energy from creative opportunities as individuals feel, share and focus on their personal sensitivities that are being – to them – abused, so less work gets done and that which is will tend to be stilted and compliant.

Much better to be clear on the standards and rules together – and then get on with the freedom that such discipline enables.

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And when we are asked for our solutions, it’s all too easy to give them. For speed; for knowing the way is ‘right’; for a subtle massage for our own ego and for playing the role of the ‘boss’ and showing off our prowess.

Appreciating that we may well be able to fix most things that employees come across is one thing. Letting them find the answers for themselves is a much stronger skill, even though there might be hiccups along the way.

By ‘not knowing’ the solutions, we open up our people to developing their own sense of creativity, leading to new solutions, confidence building and much more capable team members.

When asked the question, try asking one back and be still. By letting our people fill the spaces with their thoughts, solutions and ideas, they become the empowered ones who can take on some of the ‘stuff’ that we choose to fill our days with.

Using silence as the answers we give may be too much on every occasion we are asked for help. And it’s a skill for leaders that can take some time to develop.

The outcomes are much more valuable to us than simply the letting go of purring as we are perceived as the ‘star’. Much better to arrange a team of stars around us by not having all the answers and letting the silence do the work.

‘Remember that Silence is Sometimes the Best Answer’ from ’20 Ways to Get Good Karma’ – The Dalai Lama at SpiritualNow

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To help us on our way, ensuring that we understand why the plan didn’t work as we would have wanted and learning from it, enables added value to be gained from losing positions.

Rarely do we get a perfect result from the experiences we have in our lives.

So by ensuring that we add value back in from what we can appreciate to do differently next time, we can make the outcome 100%, even if the goal we achieved was less so.

For the very enlightened, the lessons we learn from the experiences we have, however painful, can be even more enriching than the achievement of the goal we seek.

And the additional benefit is where we take a constructive and productive position when we might be feeling disappointed or let down, we gain focus, energy and emotional strength too.

Which puts a much greater ‘win’ slant on the ‘lose’ it might have been.

From  ’20 Ways to Get Good Karma’ – The Dalai Lama at SpiritualNow

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The traditional view of micro-management is where a manager is so neurotic about the delivery of results that he or she cannot leave individuals to their own devices.

Micro-managers sabotage success simply because they are so close to what their people do that they stifle performance, thereby making the achievements of the desired results even more unlikely.

By failing to give responsibility to each individual to deliver what’s required, micro-managers very nearly do their job for them. This can be very demanding for the manager, who has to keep many more plates spinning than their role allows for, leading to not only exhaustion, but also to actual underperformance as they spread themselves too thinly to ensure quality outputs.

Employees find this sort of micro-management behavior incredibly frustrating. They feel watched, which diminishes their confidence. They feel that they are not trusted, so they tend to play safe and take few risks. They also find that they get nervous too, when they expect their boss to pop up at any moment to interfere and give them the guidance they clearly don’t need.

So micro-management is regarded by employees as a bad thing.

Smart managers micro-manage differently.

By seeking to interact with their people much less directly, they can understand the different motivators that every individual needs specially personalised to them. Getting to know their people, these particularly effective managers not only get to know what’s going on, they build strong, supportive and focused relationships that deliver.

Micro-managing relationships in this way, means that instead of getting close to the activities their people as tasked to deliver, they simply get close to the people themselves.

And it’s a set of skills that are easy to learn. Instead of being clever and knowing what’s best in the approach to tasks, savvy managers ask their people easy question, let them talk – and then listen, a lot. They let their people feel they are the success, because when employees talk, these exceptional managers recognise that what works is simply listening to them with focused attention and then asking them some more.

Micro-managing relationships is so much more valuable than micro-managing tasks. The accountability for team success clearly lies with a manager. Responsibility for delivering the component tasks that make up the big-picture result lies with individuals. Then each is doing what their individual roles requires.

Creating the sort of relationships that enable this dynamic and productive interaction is what defines the very best of management behaviors and attitudes.

Employees feel valued, heard, capable and confident and go on to contribute more; be pro-active; show their creativity; take on more. Managers make time for their people and, with clear expectations of each and every one of their people defined, step back from getting in the way.

Micromanaging relationships works very effectively indeed. A long way from micro-managing tasks, for which it’s much better to leave to the valuable resource of the employees they lead.

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