Business Tips Guides

Whether you are the captain of an amateur Sunday league football team or the CEO of a multinational corporation effective leadership and success some hand in hand. Leadership is something that can be developed to a certain extent however many successful leaders will voluntarily tell you that you are born with certain skills. Many leadership training professionals will disagree with that and this article explains why.

Everyone has different leadership qualities within them, although many might not possess certain bullish qualities that stereotypically are associated with leadership. The art of developing these unique qualities through leadership training lies in various stages which can be applied to any team and any process.

Defining the leadership role is an essential initial stage of leadership training and this involves identifying the difference between leadership, management and the rest of the team. Here the role of leader can be defined based on the team objective and strategy. The skill set and attributes of the individual in a role leader need to be evaluated and applied to the strategy using the framework of various leadership models.

Leadership training is not just focussed on any one leader learning about their role, attributes and skills. Understanding the team is equally as important as understanding ones self. Marian Anderson was a singer and civil rights figure, she said ‘leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it’ and this is applicable to any team structure.

There are various different techniques that can be used for understanding a team and the needs associated with that team. One of the most prevalent is the Belbin Interplace which is an assessment devised from defining personality and productivity within a team focussing on the framework that a successful team will possess nine key roles. This has been at the forefront of management and leadership training since the early 80s.

Understanding what motivates individuals and teams is one of the most important of leadership training and techniques in motivation, spotting talent, promoting, discipline and communication are important parts of mapping out a leadership role in line with the overall business strategy. All of this comes under the umbrella of leadership styles.

Leadership training is a safe environment to explore and identify different leadership styles. These different styles are applicable when faced with certain individual team members or certain situations. Knowing the team means that a leader knows what sort of management style to apply to any given member of that team to achieve the best results bearing the overall objectives in mind.

Creative approaches to develop individuals and the team are essential and come hand in hand with the personal development plan of any leader. As John F Kennedy stated, ‘leadership and learning are indispensible to each other’. So the process of realisation of individual styles of any leader and the effects on the team are crucial to successful leadership, communicating as a leader.

Other practical elements such as financial and human resources leadership are also important however they are extensions of the core principles that can developed in leadership training. As the late Peter Druker, a leading figure in management training said, ‘Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.’

Dominic Donaldson is an expert on leadership training and contributes to trade publications on the subject.

As a business leader, one of the most important leadership skills you’ll ever demonstrate is knowing how to communicate. When you think about it, most business leadership consists of communication of one sort or another.

You hold meetings with staff or board members or suppliers, you interview potential managers, you meet customers and shareholders, you chat in the corridor or on the phone. All of these formal and informal moments offer you the chance to influence, to enthuse and to inspire.

So how can you make the most of these moments - how can you become a truly successful communicator?

Communication involves a variety of interactions. It involves discussing, and listening, and debating. But communication also often involves a senior executive passing on some information. This may seem a fairly simple task. But it’s amazing how often business leaders don’t give enough information, or shroud it in jargon, or tell the wrong people.

HOW you pass on information can significantly affect what happens next. If you want people (whether your staff or your suppliers or customers) to act on the information, you need to make sure they understand it. And that’s not as simple as it sounds.

There are several lessons we can learn here from people whose whole business is communication. Journalists depend entirely on their words. And journalists are taught a range of tips and techniques for making their information compelling, interesting and easy to understand. Many of these techniques are just as useful for business executives, and are well worth exploring.

I’ve found that thinking about how news stories work in newspapers, for example, can help executives communicate complex messages in a simple, brief and yet memorable way, both in print and in person.

News stories are designed to grab our attention from the opening sentence. They try to tell us the news in simple, easy-to-understand language. And they don’t assume we know much about the subject already. So when you as a business executive have some information to pass on, it’s worth trying to compile it as a news story - that way, you won’t miss out anything vital.

So what makes a good a news story? In an ideal world, the opening paragraph should:

- sum up the story
- have the most important facts first
- be short and punchy and contain only essential facts
- use emotive words early on
- possibly contain an appropriate quote
- appeal to the reader in his or her area, in his or her business, or because it affects his or her pocket or way of life.

That’s a lot to fit into a few lines. So the easiest thing to do is make sure your opening paragraph answers all the questions a reader may have:
Who? What? How? Where? When? Why?

Take an example of a news story from a business newspaper:
Who? Former senior executives at X Corp
What? were arrested
How? by FBI agents
Where? in New York
When? today
Why? on suspicions of tax evasion.

This works equally well when you’re announcing something to your staff (the order in which you answer the questions can vary):
Who? I (John Doe, CEO of Y Company,)
What? want to thank
Where? all of you in our Toronto division
Why? for raising sales an impressive 5 per cent
When? in the fourth quarter
How? and invite you all to a celebration lunch next week.

In a news story, it’s important not to venture your own opinion or comment. The above item may appear to cross this line - it describes the sales increase as ‘impressive’ - but further down in the story (or in the internal memo or in the email to staff) the writer could justify the use of the word ‘impressive’ by comparing it with the target or with increases in previous quarters.

If the fundamental purpose of news is to inform, it’s essential that you allow your readers to make up their own minds on the information you provide. Do not try to sell your own opinion as fact.

To sum up, the crucial point to remember when you’re communicating information is that the most important information should appear first. If you do that, answering all the questions as suggested, there’s a good chance that you’ll get your message across and that everyone will understand it.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from business journalist Jacqueline Moore and Steven Sonsino, authors of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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My son plays the clarinet. I don’t know if you’ve seen one up close, but it’s a beautiful instrument: a glossy black wooden tube, encrusted with silver stops and levers.

But it takes time to learn how to play. (It takes time to learn how to put it together!) Everything to do with this beautiful instrument takes time.

One thing I found particularly amazing, when my son started learning how to play the clarinet, was the instructions he was given on how to practise. And I thought I’d share them with you because - in terms of getting better as a manager or leader - they could also be useful guidelines for you.

The notes start like this:

1. “Establish a routine,” they suggest. “You can even practise before you go to school.”

How many of us regularly set aside time to become better managers? Not many I guess. So set a routine. Five minutes a day, an hour a week.

2. “Always practise soon after your lesson so that you can remember what you have to do and how the music goes.”

This is a really useful piece of advice for us as managers or leaders. Practise before you forget the lesson. Too often when we’re trying new skills, new tactics, we just don’t practise.

3. “Leave your instrument out at home where you can always see it.”

I love that suggestion. Leave your notes, your books, whatever it is you’re trying to practise, out so that you can see it, so that you can be reminded to try new things. Too often we don’t; we go back to the old ways of doing things.

4. “Practise the bits you can’t play.”

I love this point, too. Practise the bits that you can’t play, not the bits you can. Too many of us get trapped in the routines and rituals of success. The things that made us successful are the things we keep on doing.

You need to practise the elements of leadership that you can’t do.

5. “Learn to do pieces of cake,” the notes say. By that they mean practise the small bits over and over and over again.

So too with your work. There are key elements of your work - hiring people, firing people, motivating people - that you need to be able to do almost without thinking about them. Practise them again and again and again, until you get them right.

6. “Learn how to practise slowly,” the notes suggest.

I think that’s a fabulous piece of advice - practise slowly. Don’t just rush it through, don’t skim-read some notes on a new way of managing or leading. Practise slowly.

7. And the final point, “Remember that some practice is better than none.”

Please don’t assume that you, as a manager, have finished learning. You need to understand that you have to practise leading. Leadership is possibly the most complex interpersonal human skill that there is. You’d better be sure you’re good at it.

Practise. Develop your self. Develop your skills. Develop your style. And remember that some practice is better than none.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
Get more FREE videos and articles right now: http://www.deathofleadership.com

Put people first. It’s the great cliche, isn’t it? When a business school professor like me asks you ‘what’s the most productive leadership style?’, you know the answer don’t you? Put people first.

But if everyone knows the answer, why aren’t more people doing it? Why aren’t executives focused on motivating and inspiring their people?

The reality is that people put profits first. They focus on the short-term financial gain without realizing that there is a direct link between putting people first and building outrageous profits.

In one of the very few great books on this topic, ‘The Human Equation’, Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford Business School paints a simple and striking picture of how to build profits by putting people first. I don’t have a lot of time here to recap the whole book, but if you want some bald statistics, if you need numbers to justify putting people first, then get this book.

Pfeffer tackles head-on some of the sacred cows of many CEOs today - he particularly challenges the view that downsizing, competing on price, and operating globally are really necessary. It’s very thought provoking.

One of the most striking pieces of evidence Pfeffer cites is a study of one thousand large US companies. Pfeffer found that investors place a much higher value on companies that improved their bottom line through revenue growth, rather than cost cutting.

Why? Well, investors want growing companies not shrinking ones. You can only cut cost once, says Pfeffer, or only a limited number of times, before you bite into the muscle of the business. Cut too much and you lose the competitive edge that makes the company great.

You might be wondering at this point, though, isn’t downsizing something that the US does a great deal? And isn’t the US one of the most competitive and innovative countries in the world? You’d be right. So there’s an apparent paradox here.

Not so, says Pfeffer. He reminds us not to confuse success that occurs IN SPITE OF what leaders do, with success that comes BECAUSE OF what leaders do.

I love this idea. That not everything you do leads to financial success. If you are successful enough - and profitable enough - that success will mask some of the mistakes you make.

Probably the most significant practical key of this story is for me captured by a quote from Sir Richard Branson, founder of the UK’s Virgin Group. At Virgin, says Branson, the people come first, the customers second and the shareholders third.

In a speech to the London Institute of Directors, Branson said: ‘In the end, the long-term interests of shareholders are actually damaged by giving them superficial short-term priority.’

And this is the key point, isn’t it? Customer satisfaction generates recommendations and gets our clients back for more. That’s what it’s about, after all.

But to get great customer satisfaction you need great customer service. And to have excellent standards in customer service means having staff who are proud of the company they work for and who respect the managers of the business.

Pfeffer closes the book with a key quote from Sam Walton, who built the Wal-Mart empire. ‘The more you share profits with your people, the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats its people is exactly how its people will treat the customers.’

If you want some bald statistics, or if you need numbers to justify putting people first, you must get this book. Then convince everyone around you, who isn’t already doing it, to read it too. Let’s really try to put people first. It will be profitable.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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We learn most from our mistakes. It’s true. But problems occur for us when we forget this. Or when we deliberately deny that we made a mistake. And - if we’re honest - most of us do this, from time to time.

So in this article I want to share with you the IMPORTANCE of learning from your mistakes. AND how best to learn from your mistakes.

These ideas were first captured for me in a little known book by Calhoun Wick and Lu Leon way back in 1993, but their thinking on how to learn from mistakes has never been bettered, so I want to share my views on this with you now.

The key point I want to get across is that that success stops you learning. The main suggestion I want to put to you here is that, when we take action and we succeed, we just don’t learn. We don’t bother. We say things like - ‘I always knew I was going to succeed’. Or ‘I’m clearly the best’. Or ‘what’s next in my in-tray?’

This is the case unless you actively build in time to review that success. Most of us, however, prefer to push on to the next challenge, perhaps never being really clear HOW we succeeded. For most of us, just winning is enough.

This mindset creates a major problem for us. Because when we fail at something, when we don’t meet the expectations we set out at the start, it’s a shock, a major setback.

Now the good news is that this sets up the possibility of learning. So the second key message is that, in the same way that success kills learning, failure kickstarts learning.

However, there is a problem; or rather, three problems. There are three things we tend to do when we discover that we made a mistake somewhere along the line. Let’s look at these in sequence.

First, we don’t admit we made a mistake. It’s a natural habit, not to admit we made a mistake. Actually it’s more likely that we can’t believe we made a mistake. Our subconscious mind is trying to protect our ego, to save face. So we just don’t admit we made a mistake. Big mistake.

Secondly, either subconsciously, or worse still consciously, we try to conceal or minimize our mistake. To bury it so no one can find it. Find a shallow grave somewhere…

Now, I’ve seen this in a major restaurant chain. They reported their weekly sales figures to head office and they were rising. But this masked the fact that the number of people attending the restaurant, the number of covers, was actually falling.

To mask the fall in customer numbers someone just increased the menu prices to make up for the shortfall. No one noticed that the number of covers, the people attending each week, was falling off dramatically.

The third problem is blame. If you actually do admit you made a mistake, but then you start a witch-hunt, you’ll kill learning. The sole purpose of a witch-hunt is to blame someone else, to direct attention away from you, to someone in the team or in another department, perhaps. ‘Who did this?’ we say. ‘C’mon, who did this?’

So let’s recap: there are three situations where you have the possibility of learning, but your action - how you respond to the mistake - can kill learning.

1. You can kill learning if you don’t admit you made a mistake.
2. You can kill learning if you try to minimize or conceal the mistake.
3. You can kill learning if you admit there’s been a mistake, but try to blame someone else.

But there’s something even worse just round the corner. If you don’t tackle these three problems, the mistakes won’t be fixed. This could happen all over again tomorrow.

The only surefire way to learn from our mistakes is firstly to admit there’s been a mistake and then to act differently next time.

Don’t waste energy and emotion on finding the culprit to blame them. By all means find the weak link in the chain of command, so you can help, but don’t focus on the past, on what happened in the past.

Instead focus on the future. What needs to happen next time? Then just do it. Act differently in the future.

Successful learning involves analysing the past and present, yes, but it’s mainly about acting differently in the future. Learning is about change. And to lead change successfully you need to accept that we’re human and we make mistakes.

Use the way that you personally deal with mistakes - your own and those that others make - to inspire your team. Don’t blame them - build them up - improve their skills or knowledge for the future. Remember the words from the immortal song - it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.

Learning - your learning, your team’s learning, your company’s learning - demands change.

How much change are you prepared to embrace when it comes to admitting mistakes? What’s your mistakes policy? If you haven’t got one, get one.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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It’s daunting for business leaders who aspire to improve their leadership to be told to follow the example of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. These people are certainly inspirational, but they’re a tough act to follow in the real world.

I’ve therefore been looking at what we can learn from leaders who get it wrong. In researching ‘The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders’, I’ve discovered there are thousands of managers who continue to demotivate their colleagues and subordinates every day, and in doing so they destroy bottom-line value.

Here I’m going to look at a couple of the really key failings that good leaders should strive to avoid.

First, Really Useless Leaders kill emotion. They shut emotions out of the workplace. They say ‘leave your personal life at home’. And they can’t detect the real moods and concerns of their people.

We know that people work harder in a happy and productive workplace. So your ability to create a happy and productive workplace is an important lever, one that helps people to tap into that discretionary 49% of their effort that only they control. They’ll work harder for you if there’s less fear in the workplace, for instance, or if innovation is ‘allowed’ and not punished when it doesn’t work out.

So if you want to inspire and motivate your people, one of the things you need to do is learn more about emotional intelligence.

Let me ask you then: how do people respond to you and to your leadership style? Do you truly know? If the answer is no, you need to become more aware of your own moods and the moods of the people around you. Then you must explore how you can regulate or manage your moods and influence the moods of the people around you.

Why is this important? Well, emotional intelligence is more significant for leaders today than ever before.

A research group I started in 2002, the tomorrow’s leaders research group, found that 20 of the world’s major companies were beginning to assess managers not just on their tangible performance, but also on their intangible performance - in other words, their emotional intelligence, their EQ. That being so, we all need to become more adept at dealing with emotion in the workplace.

Interestingly, I once overheard a manager in human resources discussing a possible promotion for a particular manager saying: ‘But they’re too emotional. To get on in this place you’ve got to be 100% logical and rational.’ Let me tell you, the times they are a-changing.

For me the conclusion is obvious. If a Really Useless Leader kills emotion, an inspirational leader must manage emotion in the workplace. You must build a workplace where emotions are not buried but are tapped, where people are willing and able to invest their best effort.

And you have to set the scene; you have to lead the way. Leadership is about having the emotional maturity to lead people to higher levels of performance. If it’s your job to deliver performance through others, then it’s your job to create an emotionally mature workplace. How emotionally mature are you?

Another of the serious failings of Really Useless Leaders is that they kill explanation.
They never bother to explain themselves.

I have heard some managers using the words ‘It’s obvious’, when patently it isn’t. I heard someone else say: ‘If you have to ask, then clearly you don’t know.’ The lowly subordinate, suitably chastened, left the room with their tail between their legs.

Really Useless Leaders don’t understand that people see things differently. We all have different experience and knowledge. When we ask our people to undertake a particular task, they often don’t understand why.

Why is this ‘why’ important? Well, it turns out that all of us need three things. First, we need to feel that what we’re doing contributes to the overall goals of the unit or team. Sometimes managers or operators on the shop floor or in a remote unit can’t make that connection.

Secondly, we need to know why, so that we can refine or even improve the process. Remember, our people need to have ownership of the how - if we spell out why we’re doing something and our people can come up with a better faster cheaper way, we’re all winners.

And finally, all of us need to feel from time to time that we’re part of something bigger, a community of managers.

In conclusion, in the same way that children are always asking ‘why’ and won’t accept ‘because I say so’ as an explanation, our people need to understand why they should do what they do. A good explanation is worth gold to you. A coherent business case motivates people.

For me the conclusion is obvious. If a Really Useless Leader kills explanation, an inspirational leader must explain their vision for the business. You must build a workplace where explanation and vision are not buried or skimmed over, but are open and clear.

This makes people willing and able to invest their best effort. You have to explain because you have to lead the way. Leadership is about having the clarity of vision to lead people to higher levels of performance.

If it’s your job to deliver performance through others for the business, then it’s your job to create a clear vision for us all. How good are you at explaining your vision for the business?

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
Get more FREE videos and articles right now: http://www.deathofleadership.com