Browse Category: Leading Well

Past issues of Leading Well ezine

Weakness and Leadership

“What does weakness have to do with leadership?” I can hear you ask. 

Well, the answer is quite a lot!  

You see we all have weaknesses, even exceptional leaders.  So as a good leader you need to know your own weaknesses so you can deliberately overcome them.  

We will always have gaps in our knowledge or experience, our understanding of another culture or even our customer’s reality.  We will always have better skills in some areas than others.  Sometimes the very habits or attitudes that have allowed us to succeed in one situation can become a weakness in a different situation.  

Have you given thought to what your personal weaknesses might be?

When we interview an applicant for a new position we often ask them what they consider to be their greatest weakness.  Someone who has considered the question and has a reflective answer that explains how they have overcome it, is likely to be a good employee.   

Similarly, as a leader you need to consider what your weaknesses might be in different situations and how you might overcome them.  

If you have been appointed to a new leadership role, it may be that the skills that won you your promotion are no longer enough for you to succeed in your new role.  You may need to develop a whole new set of leadership and management skills.  

If you are good at some things but have other things that you only do under sufferance, you may neglect the tasks you don’t like when you get busy – unless you ensure someone else on your team has responsibility for them.  

If you are male you will want to ensure that you appoint some women on your leadership team to understand their perspective. If you are selling to people from a different culture you will want to go out of your way to listen to your customers, respect their perspective and include people who share their culture in your team.  

Diversity of background, culture, skills, attitudes and experience in your team will overcome many leadership weaknesses if you value and respect everyone’s input and their strengths.  

As soon as we accept that everyone – even an outstanding leader or manager – has weaknesses, we can begin to look for the strengths that compensate.  

Exceptional leaders recognize and work on their own weaknesses, and they ensure that someone on their team has the strengths that compensate.  

———–

More on how to address weaknesses in the Quick Tips below:

———–

QUOTE OF NOTE

“Leaders are learners.  They learn from their failures as well as their successes.” James M Kouzes and Barry Z Posner, 1995

———–

The Leading Well Bottom Line:  

You don’t have to do it all on your own.  Join us in the Leadership Coaching Club and leverage off all the wisdom, insight and experience of dozens of guest experts, other participants and your mentor Kerrie Mullins-Gunst. See http://leadershipcoachingclub.com for details. 

———–

QUICK TIPS FOR ADDRESSING WEAKNESSES

*   The important thing is not to torture yourself (or anyone else) over weaknesses, but to work out how to address them.  A weakness only becomes a problem if it isn’t addressed.  

*  Weaknesses are often the flip side of our strengths.  So a highly productive creative worker who works best with a ‘Do not disturb’ sign, may never be good at training someone else or talking to your customers. If you force them to do it, you may lose your productive worker and still not gain a good trainer or customer service person.  

*  Even though we can do something, it doesn’t mean we will enjoy it.  When we get busy or face pressure from change or deadlines, we naturally put off the things we like doing least.  Unless we have recognized this weakness already, and worked out how to compensate, a small weakness can quickly become a major problem.   

* Acknowledging our own weaknesses and encouraging others to do the same can help avoid weaknesses becoming problems.  

While the kittens sleep…

Hi there and welcome back for another year.  

If you’ve been lucky enough to have had holidays we hope you feel refreshed and ready for all of the exciting things we have planned for you this year.  We’re determined to make sure 2008 is just great!

Since the last issue of Leading Well our family has had two new additions … kittens called Smokey and Izzy who are (for the moment anyway) curled up asleep and looking adorable just beside the chaos they created moments ago when they were playing with anything in reach.  The brief moment of peace and quiet gives me a chance to let you know about two important things that really can’t wait:

First: 

The Leadership Coaching Club is just about ready to launch and if you are at all interested in joining, you really must make sure your name is on the advance notification list so you get to hear first when it is launched.  This is the only way you will be able to take advantage of the early-bird special offers.  There’s no obligation, and I’m sure you will regret it if you miss out.  Register here:  http://leadershipcoachingclub.com/

Setting up the Leadership Coaching Club has been a lot of work, but I have to say it is looking great and I think you will be really pleased with the way it helps you each month to become even more effective as a leader and manager.  

Second: 

As well as finalizing the Leadership Coaching Club, we have been hard at work on several other projects that I can’t wait to share with you over the next few weeks.  

And one of them is ready for you right now …

We appreciate that not everyone learns in the same way.  Some people like to read to understand information – and that’s how much leadership information is presented.  However, other people prefer to learn by listening or watching.  So we wanted to help those of you who prefer to learn about leadership and management in this way by offering you some useful videos.  

But not just one or two leadership videos!  

We have drawn together the largest collection of leadership and management videos from all over the internet and added it to the Leadership Skill Center so you can access them easily all in one place at any time.  

It’s an amazing collection, with contributions from a myriad of different sources and freely available for anyone at http://leadershipskillcenter.com/tv right now!  If you can’t find some useful videos here, I’ll be amazed.  

Have a look and let us know what you think.  

Kind regards, Kerrie

PS. Here are those links again: For the Leadership Coaching Club pre-launch registration:   http://leadershipcoachingclub.com 

For the largest collection of leadership and management videos: http://leadershipskillcenter.com/tv 

Xmas news

It’s a busy time of year, and it’s hard not to wonder where the year went!  Here in Australia the days are getting longer and hotter, summer holidays are looming and Santa is struggling to stay cool in his fur trimmed outfit.  It’s hard to believe there have been record cold snaps in other parts of the world.  

But all that means there are a couple of things I want to say to you.  

First, thank you for allowing me to work with you again this year.  Whether I’ve coached or trained you personally or your whole business team, whether I’ve spoken at your leadership conference or facilitated your strategic planning process, or just visited each month via Leading Well, it’s been a privilege and a pleasure to work with you.  We have some really exciting things planned for 2008, so keep an eye out early in the new year for details.  

Last year we offered you some special gifts to download for Christmas to thank you for being a part of our life and they were very popular.  So once again we have gathered together a selection of special Christmas gifts for you and your family. We have added some to help you celebrate the festive season as well as something to help you get off to a great start in 2008. Please accept these Christmas gifts with our compliments.  You will find them here:  http://www.leadershipskillcenter.com/thankyou/xmas.php 

Soon it will be time to take a break to focus on family, fun and festivity for a little while.  We hope, like us, you can look back at lots of good things achieved in 2007, as well as being excited by everything to come in 2008.  

To start the year in mid-January the Leadership Coaching Club will finally open for membership.  Watch for it.  There will be special offers and bonuses for the first people to join as Foundation members, so watch your email from mid-January.  If you want to be the FIRST to know, make sure you sign up for priority notification at

http://www.leadershipcoachingclub.com That way you won’t miss out on getting in early as soon as it is open.  It’s going to be a great program that anyone who is serious about leading and managing people will want to be a part of, so you won’t want to miss it.  

We also have a whole range of other products and programs planned to help you on your path to easy, effective and effortless leadership, that I can’t wait to share with you next year.  

But for now Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at KMG Consulting and the Leadership Skill Center.  

…HO…HO…HO…  And I haven’t forgotten … Here’s that link for your special Christmas gifts again:  http://www.leadershipskillcenter.com/thankyou/xmas.php (because we know you’ve been good this year!)

Kind regards, Kerrie

PS.  It’s Christmas!  Of course you can share that link with anyone who would like to download a gift for Christmas.  Here it is again: 

http://www.leadershipskillcenter.com/thankyou/xmas.php 

Doing the Important Stuff

As the year seems to be slipping away I thought it was time to look at the fourth area of leadership focus: Getting Things Done. I hope you enjoy this article on ‘Doing the Important Stuff’.

And remember, the Leadership Coaching Club is coming soon. If you are at all interested in joining after it is open to the public, make sure you register at http://leadershipcoachingclub.com now, so you will be eligible for the very special offers when it is first launched. It will be worth your while!

Kind regards, Kerrie

PS. It’s my birthday later this month so if you read right to the end of this issue of Leading Well, YOU will get a present! 🙂

———–

Doing the Important Stuff

In “First Things First”, the follow-up to Steven Covey’s best-selling self-improvement and motivation book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, he illustrates a highly effective system of time management that can benefit any leader or manager. Covey’s Quadrant method of time management has been adopted throughout the business world: in team building, project management, business meetings, leadership training and seminars to ensure you focus on doing the important stuff.

What Covey has named his Quadrants system is based on the theory that most of us are driven by a consuming sense of urgency. He instructs us to divide all our priorities into the following four quadrants:

Quadrant 1: Important and Urgent – Items in this category are integral to your success and require your immediate attention. They include: situations such as crises, emergencies, appointments, projects that have deadlines, and other pressing problems.

Quadrant 2: Important but Not Urgent – Items in this category are integral to your success but don’t require your immediate attention right now. They include: leadership activities like planning and preparing, preventing future problems, coaching and mentoring staff, building and developing relationships with others, considering new possibilities and opportunities, and balancing activities such as spending time with loved ones, or having fun and creative pursuits.

Quadrant 3: Not Important but Urgent – Items in this category are not integral to your life, but they do demand your immediate attention. They include things that appear pressing on the surface (such as answering an insistent ringing phone or email), but probably don’t have any drastic consequences or repercussions for your success, or that may be able to be done by others or in a different way (someone could take a phone message for example).

Quadrant 4: Not Important and Not Urgent – Items in this category are not integral to your success and don’t need to happen at any particular time (or sometimes at all, for that matter), yet doing them can consume your time and energy. They include: routines, distractions and diversions, time-wasters, and other things you can generally do well without, although sometimes they include things we just like doing that aren’t necessary or important.

What Covey says next about these Quadrants may surprise you.

He warns that the common tendency is for people to get wrapped up in Quadrant 1 & 3 tasks because of their sense of urgency. This typically happens at the expense of the much more important Quadrant 2, which contains many life-enriching and important tasks.

The focus on tasks in Quadrants 1 and 3 is bolstered by the influence of other people’s demands and forces outside yourself, including the impetus of time. Accomplishing urgent tasks in Quadrants 1 & 3 gives us a comforting sense of progress. At least we have achieved something (even if it wasn’t particularly important).

Tasks in Quadrant 4 are what we do to anesthetize ourselves to the stressful effects of an imbalanced concentration of our energy on urgent matters. We often hide in Quadrant 4 tasks, and use them to procrastinate about doing something else, like the more important (and sometimes more difficult) Quadrant 2 tasks.

The paradox is that by spending more time deliberately doing Quadrant 2 tasks, we can avoid many of the crises that fall into the important and urgent tasks of Quadrant 1 and delegate many of the Quadrant 3 and 4 tasks that still need to be done. This frees our time up to focus even more on the leadership tasks in Quadrant 2.

Quadrant 2 is where our true and lasting happiness and our most productive effectiveness resides.

The sorts of tasks that fall into Quadrant 2 are often the ones that we are most likely to procrastinate about or just feel we don’t have time for. But they can be the most important in the longer-term to get your creative juices flowing and achieve significant success.

In addition to the possibilities listed above, Quadrant 2 tasks also include: reading and expanding your mind, developing new skills and abilities, getting physical exercise, engaging in recreation and leisurely activities, devising and implementing systems, preventative activities, and envisioning and shaping your future.

Giving more attention to Quadrant 2 activities will make us more readily able to tackle Quadrant 1 and 3 tasks with ease and efficiency.

Where are you spending your time? Stop for a moment and think about whether you have got the balance right (a Quadrant 2 task) or whether you are letting urgency rule your life.

See QUOTES on ‘Doing the Important Stuff’ below.

———–

If you ever procrastinate when you should be focussed on ‘Doing the Important Stuff’ you need to read ‘101 Tips for Avoiding Procrastination’. In this 60 page guide you’ll learn all the tricks, methods, and strategies for beating your procrastination habit.

Order now and receive these FREE bonuses:

* Time Management and
* The 3 Most Powerful Ways to Get Yourself to Achieve ANYTHING Despite Pressure, Deadlines and Procrastination

PLUS: – to celebrate my birthday enter this Secret Code: BIRTHDAY-SPECIAL
in Step 2 when you order to save $9 off the cost of this product. Normally ‘101 Tips for Avoiding Procrastination’ is only $17 but for the next few days you can use this Secret Code to pay only $8! (plus GST if you are based in Australia)

That’s more than 50% off the full purchase price and a fantastic bargain! For less than you might pay for lunch you could be well on your way to kicking the procrastination habit and reaping the success you deserve.

More details at:
http://HowLeadersGetThingsDone.com/avoid-procrastination.html

But ignore the price on that page because you are getting a special price. When you get to Step 2 of the order process just enter your Secret Code: BIRTHDAY-SPECIAL and the price will be automatically reduced especially for you.

This Secret Code is only valid up until my birthday on November 25th, after which the regular price will apply. So don’t procrastinate! Order now and start reaping the rewards today.

———–

TWO QUOTES OF NOTE:

“I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.”

Marilyn Monroe

“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we know what to do with it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

———–

BOOKS WORTH READING –

“First Things First”
by Steven Covey

“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”
by Stephen R. Covey

What your employees expect of you

LEADING WELL – Helping your leadership grow from Kerrie Mullins-Gunst

* * * * *

In this issue: What your employees expect of you…

And, it’s coming soon! The Leadership Coaching Club will soon be open to the public and you can be the first to know. Register your interest at http://leadershipcoachingclub.com now and receive a free short course on How You Can Become an Ideal Leader. Watch for further details soon!

Kind regards, Kerrie

———–

WHAT YOUR EMPLOYEES EXPECT OF YOU

In their book “Values Shift” authors John Izzo and Pam Withers describe a whole new set of expectations people now have of their workplaces.

As unemployment in Australia hits a 33 year low and even exceptional employers struggle to fill vacancies and retain the best people, you can’t afford to ignore these expectations. As a leader and manager you need to be constantly aware of how you measure against these expectations and how you can meet and even exceed them in day to day practice.

Izzo and Withers identified six emerging expectations you need to focus on.

1. Better work-life balance and synergy.

This is one of the strongest and most consistent expectations, rejecting the all-consuming nature of work as it was for many of the baby boomer generation. This extends earlier concepts of balancing the spread of time between ‘at work’ and ‘out of work’ life, to include a better variety and balance of roles and activities within work hours, as well as ample time out of work for a full and varied lifestyle.

2. A sense of community and connection at work.

With trends such as greater mobility and dual income families, we see less traditional neighborhood connection or sense of community for many people. This has created an expectation that the workplace will help overcome isolation and offer its own sense of community and connection.

3. Opportunities for personal (as well as professional) development.

This becomes particularly important in flat workplaces where there is little opportunity for employees to work their way up a set career ladder. People still yearn to be challenged and stimulated and to grow and develop and expect that you will facilitate that through the workplace.

4. The opportunity to contribute to a more noble cause.

Employees expect corporate objectives to be broadened beyond making money to incorporate triple bottom line and a commitment to the betterment of society. They are looking for meaning and purpose in what they do and expect to find it in their work.

5. A more democratic partnership role.

Information is now ubiquitous and there has been a shift in the balance of power. The ‘decline in deference’ means that employees expect to be able to question authority, share opinions and say what they think – and they expect to be listened to and involved in decisions, as would any partner.

6. A relationship based on trust.

Past breaches of trust have generated suspicion and distrust. Organizations need to consistently demonstrate they are trustworthy and leaders will be held accountable for any breach of trust. Employees expect to trust, respect and even like the companies and leaders they work for – or they’ll move on.

While you may not have total control over any one of these areas in your organization, as a leader and manager you do have significant influence within your own team over aspects of every one of them.

By deliberately doing what you can within your sphere of influence to meet these six expectations you will not only be better placed to retain and attract good employees and team members, you will begin to enjoy your own role as a team leader more too.

———–

The Leadership Coaching Club will soon be opened to the public. To make sure you are the first to know when it is launched, register now at http://leadershipcoachingclub.com and you will receive advance notice, special offers and a free short course on How to Become an Ideal Leader. Don’t miss out. If you lead or manage people you need to register today.

———–

QUOTE OF NOTE

“He who has a why can endure any how.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

———–

The Step by Step Business Plan Guide

If you’ve been spinning your wheels trying to succeed in getting funding for your business and even just getting your business plan on paper, this ebook is going to change the way you have been doing things.
See http://betterbusinessinfo.org

Leading Well – Planting the seeds of success

Recently I caught up with a group of friends from my university days. It was great fun to hear all about what people were up to after so many years.

One of my friends was describing how her new weekend farming life had captured the interest of her team at her city legal office. So much so that, not long ago, her whole team had volunteered to help out with planting the latest vegetable crop.

“We had a great weekend” she told us. “Some teams might go away to the country for ‘Planning days’ but my team went away for a ‘Planting day’.”

Afterwards, the more I thought about the concept, the more I liked the analogy.

As a leadership specialist, I am often asked to facilitate Strategic and Team Planning events and I can’t think of a better way to describe their purpose than planting seeds for the future.

Planning days aren’t magic wands that fix all your problems. But they do plant the seeds that can be nurtured into your ideal outcomes over time.

If you are fortunate (and your planning event is well facilitated) you may secure agreement on the day from all team members about some of the fundamentals: your team vision and values, how your team roles relate to your organizational mission or purpose, and the essential actions and strategies that will ensure you deliver results.

But any team gathering also offers an opportunity to foster understanding and develop a strong team culture – which takes much longer than a day to achieve. Yet you can plant the seeds for a team that works well together even in difficult times, that supports and respects other team members, that shows initiative and embraces change. And over time these outcomes may be even more powerful than the traditional outcomes of Strategic or Team Planning events.

As with any seeds, planting them is not enough. They have to be nurtured, fed and watered over time before they grow to their full potential. And that is your primary role back in the office as leader of the team.

The nurturing of those powerful seeds of success over time needs to be attended to daily and weekly – in fact every time you interact or meet with your team.

This consistent follow-up to any annual Strategic or Team Planning event can be even more critical than the event itself. In it lies one of the secrets of all successful leaders.

Kind regards, Kerrie

PS. If you are wondering HOW to nurture the seeds of your team’s success, watch out for details about my Leadership Coaching Club, coming soon. If you want to be among the first to know all the details, register at http://leadershipcoachingclub.com and be confident of catching our special launch discount or bonuses.

———–

QUOTE OF NOTE

“Our great business in life is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

———–

DON’T FORGET!

Don’t forget to have a look at ‘Powerful Ways to Sharpen Your Memory – A Guide for Leaders and Managers’ – Now available for instant download. It includes both basic and advanced tools you can use to overcome forgetfulness, remember names, faces, numbers, places, events and more!

I wish I had know some of the things that are in this ebook years ago! So many things would have been so much easier…

Have a look now. There’s a free bonus – just for looking! You can register for the Memory Boost MiniCourse for free and try out just a few of the ideas you’ll discover when you pick up your own copy of Powerful Ways to Sharpen Your Memory.

See http://FreeMemoryCourse.com/sharpen for details.