Leadership And Unlocking Potential
Anyone who is responsible for the performance of others is a leader. Performance is inextricably linked to attitude.
Attitudes define your organisation’s ability to think, to react, to charge forward, to win, to create, to innovate, to apply the wow factor.
Here are 6 ideas to help you as a ‘leader of attitudes’.
1. Grow people.
Make others feel capable, confident and strong. The leader’s power, like the orchestral conductor, depends on the ability to make other people effective. You need to pay attention to how you are enabling your people to be the best they can be.
Ben Zander, principal conductor of the Boston Philharmonic,
puts a blank sheet of paper on the stand of every
musician at every rehearsal. This paper is an invitation
to the players to give feedback on how effective
the rehearsal is at helping them perform at their
best.
Have the attitude –everyone grows here. Self-fulfilment of all persons working in the company must be made possible on the job. Management is held explicitly responsible for this.
2. Be an enthusiast.
Put a crackle in the air! Have fun! There is only one attribute more contagious than enthusiasm in the workplace, and that’s lack of enthusiasm. Some people are like the living dead!
Have a lead by example attitude. Be spooled up. Be polished. Be excited about what your organisation is doing. When you walk the floor, be a source of positive energy- it will be reciprocated. Enthusiasm is the life force of leadership.
Even if all you do is walk more quickly, you will find you energise those around you. Most people are just waiting for someone to come along and fire them up.
Keep in mind - it's not what you say you believe that counts, but what you demonstrate, encourage, reward and let happen.
3. Make recognition an everyday act.
People work harder for recognition than money or just about anything else. Make people feel important, make them feel their work matters.
Create an environment where people support and encourage their colleagues. Jack Welch famously said –‘Building confidence in others is a huge part of leadership’.
Banish anyone at any level who humiliates others. People will only be motivated to go for a stretch goal if they are encouraged and supported by those around them.
4. Encourage the attitude – What we hand out we get back. Multiplied.
We’ve all heard the phrase ‘the best way to make a friend, is to be a friend first’. The same applies to building a business.
If we hand out trust, we get trust back. If we hand out respect, we get respect back.
Live the maxim – ‘Give the world the best we have and the best will come back to us’.
Treating people with respect builds loyalty and commitment.
In a recent interview Greg Dyke, former Director
General of the BBC said: ‘Behave properly
to people. Care. The people who work for you matter
more than anybody else. Care about them first,
and then you'll succeed in the other stuff’.
5. Create a culture where everyone has a tremendous opportunity to be heard.
Good leadership does not necessarily mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow. That can be hard.
Instead lead with questions, ask people for their thoughts, ideas and opinions.
Jim Collins in his book ‘Good to great’ has this advice, ‘Dialogue is not used as a sham process to let people ‘have their say’ so they can buy into a predetermined decision; rather it is used to engage people in the search for best answers’.
The strongest incentive for employee feedback is always the willingness of management to listen.
6. Focus on high performance and still be a good place to work.
Too many managers focus on making sure that everyone feels good and not enough on high performance.
Have the attitude that execution – getting the job done is crucial. Expect it.
Keep in mind most of us don’t get what we want from people, we get what we expect. Expectations tend to act like self-fulfilling prophecies.
Former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy puts it well, ‘Execution must be a core element of a business culture. Execution must be embedded in the reward systems and in the norms of behaviour that everyone practices….. we must not rely on vision to get the job done’.
Execution and the wow factor are inextricably linked.
© Leadership Development Ltd. www.ldl.co.uk.
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