Guest post by Jen of JenLeads Blog
In business, being a leader doesn’t just fill a job title. You must have the capacity to motivate your team to enable them to deliver their tasks in a timely manner and in line with the overall goals of the company.
On the other hand, unmet targets are only the start of the problems caused by bad leaders in any organization. Today, let’s talk about the effects of poor leadership on your team.
Guest post by Paul Sean Hill
Creating and leading high-performing teams in any setting requires a high-trust environment. A critical component in creating and keeping that trust is complete transparency across the team. Having seen the empowering effect of this simple notion, I regularly reminded my direct-reports that the expectation was, “All cards are face-up on the table for the full team, in every decision and on every topic.”
I first learned the value of this kind of full transparency during my years working in the Mission Control Room while operating Space Shuttles and the International Space Station. Everyone on the team reviewed every report, procedure, and mission-related communication of any kind between Mission Control and the astronauts.
My heart is heavy as I write this article; my father passed away a few days ago. I’ve been thinking about Dad and the important lessons he taught me, both when I was growing up and lived with him in my childhood home, and in the years since. He was an honest, hard-working, humble man. He was always happy and loved to crack jokes—I didn’t think they were funny when I was a teenager, but now I find myself doing the same thing with my sons.
Though I don’t think it was ever his specific intent, he taught my siblings and me – and many others in the community – how to lead in whatever we pursued. Here are three important lessons that have helped me get to where I’m at today:
Accountability is a key leadership principle. Those who do great things, or do small things in a positive way, succeed because they apply the right principles, they do the right thing.
Taking ownership of every aspect of aspect of your situation is the first step.
The most successful companies have motivated leaders, and those leaders inspire motivation at all levels of the organization.
Is it possible to create an environment where great work happens and everyone is motivated?
Guest post by James E. Lukaszewski
One of the most common weaknesses I see in crisis response is the lack of specific roles and assignments for top management. The result of this gap in crisis management is mismanagement, lack of management, or paralysis that afflicts leaders as they try to figure out what to do while things are leaking, stinking, burning, foaming and worse.
Rather than running the crisis response, six powerful leadership tasks need to be undertaken before, during and after a crisis erupts. In the course of directing client’s crisis responses and analyzing past failed management responses, it’s clear to me that crisis response success depends on having essential leadership responsibilities spelled out carefully for your senior team (or the leaders who survive):
Most organizations are made up of teams that work together to accomplish a common objective. Within those teams are individuals who are responsible for specific tasks. The combination of those tasks create the desired outcome. What is the secret to influencing others to work together effectively?
Guest post by John Blakey
Stewards inspire trust by re-defining the purpose of business to deliver in a new way—triple bottom-line goals—and then putting themselves and the organization in service of those goals.
The triple bottom-line creates a vacancy for a different type of executive leader. Tomorrow’s executive leader will not be yesterday’s manager, driven by one dominant owner, to produce one measure of success. In contrast, tomorrow’s executive leader will balance the diverse and dynamic expectations of stakeholders. She or he will be a steward.
Accountability leads to success. Why? When people take responsibility for their actions they make changes that lead them to do things differently, to do new things and/or to stop doing things that held them back. This may sound simplistic, but its true. Continue reading
How do leaders create sustained growth and make an obvious improvement to the bottom line of their company? Is it really possible for one (or a few) people to make a major difference in the results of a big organization? The answer, of course, is ‘yes’—if they take the right approach.
When leaders engage with their employees and gain their trust, the employees in turn provide a positive experience for the customers. Delighted by their experience, customers come back. They not only come back, they tell their friends who buy products and services. The bottom line grows and, if practiced consistently over time, the company has long-term, sustained growth.
Michael Hyatt describes how influential leaders improve customer focus and make a major difference: Continue reading
Lead on Purpose 