What are the characteristics of a great leader? Exceptional leaders should have exceptional qualities because ordinary traits are not going to help them achieve greatness in one way or theRead More
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]]>Exceptional leaders should have exceptional qualities because ordinary traits are not going to help them achieve greatness in one way or the other. You can easily find many competent leaders, but only few of them eventually qualify as exceptional leaders. Of course, there are leaders who seem to have great ideas, but when you ask them to execute them in real life, they fail miserably. One might look like a great leader in ordinary circumstances, but once you get them out of their comfort zone, you will get to see who they really are. When the going gets tough, when the money is tight or the stakes are high, it is only the great leaders that live up to the expectation; ordinary people just quit it.
So, if you want to separate great leaders from ordinary leaders, you need to have a detailed understanding of the qualities that a great leader possesses.
Sometimes, it just happens that we have great ideas in our head, but when we try to communicate those ideas to the people who are going to implement them, we face the inconvenient truth that they are not getting it. Most leaders met with a blank expression from people when they try to communicate their ideas.
The ideas may seem great on paper, but making people act on it depends much on how you are communicating it. So, if you wish to be a great leader, you need to have great communication skill. There is no way around it.
How on earth the team is going to achieve its goal if the leader fails to communicate his ideas in plain and simple English.
A great leader should encourage fun at workplace because nobody wants to work in a dull and boring environment. It is important to keep your head high even when things are going wrong. There will be times when things will go horribly wrong like the funds may run dry, the client may stop responding or the company may incur heavy loss; but you need to take them as challenges without pressing the panic button.
As a leader, you have to accept the challenges as they come along; try to use humor to inspire other people to face the challenges. People make mistakes, but rather than crying a river over those mistakes, you need to face them with a smile in your face. This will create a positive vibe in the workplace and all you have to do is to encourage it.
Honesty is certainly one of the main characteristics of a great leader. Since everybody around you follows your order blindly, you need to be honest and straightforward. A leader needs to accept his faults if there are any; blaming others for your fault can demoralize people working with your team. Moreover, you will lose all the love and respect of employees working with your team. You should not do anything that can make people doubt your integrity.
If you want every member of your team to work really hard, you need to set an example first. Preach what you practice. You simply can’t expect people, working under you, to arrive at the office early if you are a late comer on a regular basis. There is nothing in the world that motivates the workers than seeing their leader working hard alongside. By showing your commitment towards the company, you will be able to earn the respect of the team members and also will be able to encourage them to deliver their best.
Sometimes, you will have to deal with problems that demand a different kind of solution. No, not the usual approach is not going to help here anymore. You will need to take some drastically different decisions to deal with those problems. This is exactly where the importance of creative decision making comes into play. A great leader needs to think outside the box, otherwise he will never be able to offer cool and creative solutions to complex problems.
The Front-Line Leader by Chris Van Gorder | Click here for a detailed summary according to Chris Van Gorder
Leaders Open Doors by Bill Treasurer | Click here for a detailed summary according to Bill Treasurer
MOXIE – The Secret to Bold and Gutsy Leadership by John Baldoni | Click here for a detailed summary according to John Baldoni
The Best Place To Work by Ron Friedman | Click here for a detailed summary according to Ron Friedman
Lead To Succeed by Chris Roebuck | Click here for a detailed summary according to Chris Roebuck
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Best Place To Work according to Ron Friedman: Introduction In this episode Ron Friedman shares his book, The Best Place toRead More
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]]>In this episode Ron Friedman shares his book, The Best Place to Work, where he offers game-changing advice for working smarter and turning any organization into an extraordinary workplace.
In his book, Friedman explains how to effectively diffuse a workplace argument, elevate your thinking, and reach smarter decisions. The goal of the book is to provide you with scientifically-proven techniques to help you promote smarter thinking, greater innovation, and stronger performance.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs or business executives who are looking to turn an average, low performing work atmosphere into an effective and extraordinary environment.
I recognize what it’s like to be an entrepreneur because I’m an entrepreneur myself and I wanted to write a user’s guide for someone who is busy. I realize entrepreneurs need action items and this book is really stocked with action items both for managers and for employees.
Every chapter in the book is focused on a different aspect of the workplace. It’s a variety of different topics and not one that you have to read in a linear fashion.
One of the takeaways is that psychological needs are at the heart of employee engagement. If you are looking to create an engaged workforce you need to provide people with psychologically fulfilling experiences.
The second takeaway is that organizations are a lot more successful when they address rather than ignore the limits of both the mind and the body.
The third key takeaway is that rather than encouraging employees to find work life balance, organizations can be a lot more successful by allowing employees to integrate the two aspects of their life in an active way.
This book is a journey of different topics of the psychology of the workplace and summarizing all of this in a short amount of time can be a little bit of a challenge. I am going to explain the top three gaps that I saw in the workplace.
The first gap was how organizations hire. If you are looking to grow a business you are going to be during some hiring and regardless of how well you structure your workplace if you don’t get the right people in your organization it won’t be affective. One of the critical pieces of hiring is the in person interview. As it turns out there is plenty of research showing that these interviewers are not a very effective tool for predicting how good someone is going to be in a particular position. The reason is because we have all of these cognitive biases that prevent us from actually measuring someone’s effectiveness for the role we are looking to fill. I talk in the book about research showing that we tend to favor good looking people because we assume that they are also competent. Another biased is tall people because tall people tend to be viewed as having greater leadership potential. Deep voice candidates are viewed as more trustworthy. All of these impressions affect not just the way that we view that candidate but also the questions that we ask as a result. I talk about all the biases and then I talk about ways that entrepreneurs can correct those biases.
The second gap is how managers motivate. In the book I present a completely different frame for thinking about engagement in a section on what videogames teach us about creating an extraordinary workplace. If you think about your own experience playing videogames you get sucked in doing a whole host of behaviors that you would normally avoid. What’s fascinating about videogames is we spend so much of our personal time doing these activities that we aren’t getting paid for. I think the reason we find these games as enjoyable as we do is because they deliver the very experiences that we seek in our workplace. For examples we have a clear set of goals and we get recognized and rewarded for our work. The key takeaway here is that engagement is not about the actual job; it’s about the conditions that we build around it.
The third gap that I wanted to highlight is the gap in workplace design. Within the book I survey all the research on office design and the psychology of how our minds react differently to different environments and what I argue is that there is a connection between space and innovation. What I mean by that is where we are affects the way we think. There is research that I cover in the book looking at how the ceiling height of a room affects our ability to think abstractly. The rooms’ layout communicates the type of interaction that is expected. I discuss all the ways that companies can leverage a lot of these insights to deliver a better working environment.
“When your attempt rate is high each individual failure becomes a lot less significant.” – Ron Friedman
I am a social psychologist and I specialize in human motivation. I have taught at the University of Rochester, Nazareth College, Hobart and William Smith, and I write for the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Forbes. I’ve also founded a company called ignite80 that helps smart leaders build extraordinary work places and the way we do that is via speaking, workshops and occasionally consulting. If you are wondering about the name of that company it’s because 80% of employees worldwide have been found to be disengaged at work so we look to correct that.
One of the things I talk about in the book is that the book really happened by accident. I spent years in academics studying human motivation and teaching human psychology courses and my goal was to become a full-time professor. Eventually I achieved that goal and I got a full-time teaching job and when I got there I found myself itching for a new challenge. If you got in to academics for the reasons I did, it was to learn new things and as a professor you are covering the same material again and again.
I wanted that new challenge so I decided to go off into the corporate world where I was hired to work as a pollster. When I got to the corporate world I noticed a lot of the things that I took for granted as a professor. But when I got to the corporate world I witnessed a real disconnect from everything from the way that companies hire and the ways that managers motivate to the design and layout of the modern office. I got to meet a lot of these business owners and a lot of entrepreneurs who are really interested in building great workplaces but just don’t have the tools for doing that.
Getting Things Done by David Allen
The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry
Buy The Best Place to Work by Ron Friedman on Amazon today
Visit Ignite80.com to learn more about Ron’s research and sign up for his mailing list
Follow Ron Friedman on Twitter and LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Leaders Open Doors by Bill Treasurer | Scrum – The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | The Front-Line Leader by Chris Van Gorder
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Lead To Succeed according to Chris Roebuck Introduction In this episode Chris Roebuck takes a deep dive into his book, Lead ToRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Lead To Succeed according to Chris Roebuck
In this episode Chris Roebuck takes a deep dive into his book, Lead To Succeed, where he gives you a guide for leading people and organizations at the speed of sound.
In his book, Roebuck delivers a roadmap for 12st century leadership with real life examples and practical advice for being successful. The goal of the book is to help you and your teams significantly improve performance quickly, simply, and effectively.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need help creating a new leading edge system that improves work performance individually or as a whole team with no cost and little time.
I tried to do something new and something different. If you look at a lot of leadership books they tend to fall into two categories. You need to have both categories in line because when we are in organizations to some degree we are a bit of both. We have our people who report to us but there are others who we have to influence. It’s the group of leaders to leaders who is nearly always forgotten in other leadership books. I believe so passionately that we have overcomplicated leadership and I wanted a book that was so utterly simple anybody could take those ideas in any size organization and make them work straight away.
Just go out there, inspire your people to give you their best and then focus that on what really matters.
The principle of Lead to Succeed is about how to get the best from our people and how do we then focus that onto what really matters to drive our organizations forward and service our customers.
The chapters flow by looking at yourself and how to get the best from your people as an individual leader. And if you are in a small or large organization you need to figure the things that you need to tweak to make that work for everybody, not just your own people.
I think the key is that people have lost track about what leadership is about. They have made it too complicated and we need to get back to the real basics how we make leadership work so it inspires people. To get our organizations of any size working well we have to accept that the world has moved on from where it was before the financial crisis. In many organizations there are fewer people having to do the same work due to job cuts. The complexity of the work that we exist in as leaders has dramatically changed. What that means is that we have to get every single ounce of effort out of the people who work for us through inspiration and leadership.
In the book I have a self-assessment for the leader to assess their work, see how they are doing and search for improvement. Once the leader does these things I give you the correct tools to help you with your assessment.
We know that if every leader in every organization told their people how what they do fits in to the bigger picture it could improve performance by over 30% in those people. If they are given day to day feedback on how they are doing that can improve performance by up to 39%. And if you just show you care that can have an impact of increasing performance by up to 25%.
The conclusion of the book is that if you get your people to really care about your organization by showing you really care about them they will do whatever is necessary to make you a success. If you show through inspirational leadership that you believe in them they will believe in you.
“Leadership is about making a difference and transforming people’s lives.” – Chris Roebuck
I started off training as a Chartered Accountant in the UK and decided that wasn’t the most exciting thing in life. I spent five years in the British Army as an officer then came out and set up my own business as an entrepreneur. From there I did an MBA and got involved with larger organizations such as London Underground, UBS and KPMG. Since finishing that role I’ve worked as an advisor for organizations as diverse as the UK National Health Service, investment banks and I speak around the world.
Over the 30 years or so that I’ve been experiencing organizations one of the things I’ve noticed is that there is a lot of people out who aren’t really able to live up to the potential to do their best work. They aren’t necessarily inspired to go to work but just doing it because they have to. It’s only a fortunate few who are inspired by what they do.
Lone Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela
Buy Lead To Succeed by Chris Roebuck today
Visit Chrisroebuck.co to learn more about Chris and download the extract
Follow Chris Roebuck on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Leaders Open Doors by Bill Treasurer | MOXIE – The Secret to Bold and Gutsy Leadership by John Baldoni | The Front-Line Leader by Chris Van Gorder
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Discomfort Zone according to Marcia Reynolds Introduction In this episode Marcia Reynolds gives a deep dive into her book, The DiscomfortRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Discomfort Zone according to Marcia Reynolds
In this episode Marcia Reynolds gives a deep dive into her book, The Discomfort Zone, where she shows leaders how to think through problems, see situations more strategically, and transcend their limits.
In her book, Reynolds give you exercises and case studies to help you use discomfort in your conversations to create lasting changes and a better workforce. The goal of the book show you how to short-circuit your mind’s defense and habitual thought patterns.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are having trouble coaching others to stretch their limits and meet their personal goals while not making them suffer consequences.
There are two things that make it different. The discomfort zone is how leaders turn difficult conversations in to breakthroughs. There are a lot of conversation books out there but they really just focus on what the leader should say instead of what the leader should listen for. It’s really about helping the person achieve their goals instead of the leader achieve his or her goals. Another thing is it is a leadership coaching book but most coaching books are linear in problem solving and this goes to a much deeper level of what coaching really is and how to use it as a leader.
Each chapter has very specific things that they can do so if you were to jump to any chapter you would get value. But reading it all together allows it to be cohesive.
This sounds difficult but the big thing is they have to turn off their thinking brain. We rely on our thinking brain and we think that we need that in order to think through problems and resolve situations but it’s that thinking self-monitoring brain that often gets in the way.
The introduction of the book describes what exactly the discomfort zone is and why it’s so important that everyone truly understands what is necessary to create behavioral change. First I go in to what needs to occur in the brain to make the breakthrough.
In chapter one I describe the difference between most conversations and coaching techniques and why it’s important. It also looks at some of the common excuses that leaders give for not engaging in these types of conversations. I explain how it is still important for them as leaders to engage in these conversations and why if they want to achieve their results.
In chapter two I move in to the guidelines. First we explore how to establish trust and the intention for the conversation in order to make it successful. As a leader you need to consider what emotional tone you want to set. You need to have the intention that they are going to achieve their goals and you are there to help them succeed.
In chapter three we look at the model and I give a very specific model for having these conversations.
In chapter four we go in to deeper listening and how to listen with your entire nervous system which we label as intuition. This chapter describes very clearly how you can actually access the major processing centers in your nervous system which includes your gut, heart and head, to make decisions as well as listen to people.
Chapter five and six are filled with case studies where I show you how to implement these skills. Chapter five looks at how to break through people’s defense routines and chapter six explains how to help people move forward through whatever is holding them back.
In chapter seven I give you a plan on how to actually maintain your practice over time. I show you how to implement this in to your own organization and how to create your own personal development plan to make sure that your own changes sticks.
“They want you to be present more than they need you to be perfect.” – Marcia Reynolds
I have been teaching leadership for over 30 years. It’s always fascinating because the more we learn about human behavior the more there is to consider in being a leader. My family was always a family of entrepreneurs so I went out to start my own business about 17 years ago.
I think the most misunderstood area of leadership is the whole topic of listening. Leaders know that they have to listen but they confuse it with just being patient while someone is talking until it’s their turn to talk. I really feel that there is a stronger purpose for listening than most leaders realize. In order to change people’s minds they have to listen for specific things. It’s not just how to listen but the purpose and I really wanted to put this down on paper to help all leaders understand what it takes to change people’s behavior.
I and Thou by Martin Buber
Buy The Discomfort Zone on Amazon today
Visit OutsmartYourBrain.com to get more exclusive content and assess your own discomfort
Follow Marcia Reynolds on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | Leaders Open Doors by Bill Treasurer | Managing Whole People by Mark Herbert
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Leaders Open Doors according to Bill Treasurer Introduction In this episode Bill Treasurer takes a deep dive into his book, Leaders OpenRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Leaders Open Doors according to Bill Treasurer
In this episode Bill Treasurer takes a deep dive into his book, Leaders Open Doors where he gives you very simple ideas for becoming a valuable and successful leader.
In his book, Treasurer helps you create opportunities for the growth and development of the people that you lead. The goal of the book is to show you how to inspire people as a leader and help people reach their goals by inspiring a willingness to take initiative.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs that are not natural born leaders, but need a radically simple leadership approach to motivating people, lifting profits, and encouraging performance.
I think other leadership books spend too much time trying to prove that the author is smart by using big SAT words and such instead of simple ideas that really matter.
Chapters 1-3 are important that you read all the way through. The rest of the book you can skip around if you want. I always suggest you read the whole thing though.
I would say to get out of yourself and stop focusing on you and focus a little less on results, but rather focus more on the means to the results and the people you lead.
The first chapter deals with Open Door Leadership and it situates the reader in to this idea of the need for simple and important ideas of leadership. This chapter helps define the idea of open door leadership which is not about the leader but rather those being lead. A lot of leaders focus on their own ambition and their own climb and don’t recognize that the people who help make that climb for you are the people that you’re leading. Open door leadership is really about creating opportunities for the growth and development for people and organizations that you serve when you’re in a leadership role.
The second chapter is a deeper look at the idea of an Opportunity Focus. So many people in the workplace pride themselves on being “problem solvers” and what leaders really need to be is opportunity focused. People will move mountains for you if they know that in exchange for moving the mountain there is something in it for them.
The third chapter is what we call Purposeful Discomfort. We seem to exist on this grand continuum in any situation that we are dealing with that ranges from safety seeking behavior to opportunity seeking behavior on the other hand. And most of us are willing to go out on that continuum to some degree which we call our comfort zone. But what this chapter reinforces is that human beings and organizations don’t grow in a zone of comfort. Rather we grow, progress, and evolve in a zone of discomfort.
From there we move in to part two of the book which describes six doors of opportunity; six doors that you can open for the people that you are leading in your organization.
Chapter four is The Proving Ground Door. People need something to prove. People work really hard and are really motivated when they are trying to prove something to you but mostly when they are trying to prove something to themselves.
That takes us to chapter five which is The Thought Shifting Door. A leader needs to provide a thought shift so that they can see in a bigger and broader way that opens up more imagination than possibilities.
Chapter six is called The Door to a Second Chance and the focus of this chapter is the fact that people will make mistakes but if you want them to innovate you have to have some tolerance for mistake making. The first question when a mistake is made should be what went wrong and how can we prevent it from happening again. Instead of who did it or caused it to happen. This chapter is about the importance of leaders taking mistakes and turning them in to learning opportunities so that you can extract lifelong lessons for the person who made the mistake.
The next door in chapter seven is Opening a Door For Others. This is our diversity chapter. This chapter is about the importance of going out of your way as a leader to discover and pay attention to the people who are least like you. This chapter is about diversities and men creating opportunities for women.
Chapter eight is called The Door to a Personal Transformation. This chapter is about how a leader can say something to you in one moment that might have a transformative impact on the rest of your career.
Chapter nine is the culmination of the book and it’s called The Door to Your Open Heart. If you are never revealing who you are behind your role as a leader people will never be loyal to you because at the end of the day people want to know that you care about them.
In the epilog of the book I invited 10 world-renowned leaders to submit stories about leaders who opened doors to them.
“All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.” – Albert Einstein
I am a dad of three kids who are 11 year old twins and an 8 year old as well. I am also a business owner/entrepreneur and started Giant Leap Consulting 12 years ago after spending six years at Accenture where I was a manager. Before that I was with a company called Executive Adventure which was an experiential team building company and I used to take executives to the outdoors doing rope courses and such. Before all of that I was the captain of the US high diving team and I used to dive from 100ft platforms into small pools for a living. I have a bit of a colorful background but my specialty is leadership and courage building.
I have been a practitioner of leadership development for over 20 years and have designed, developed and delivered many leadership development programs comprehensive in nature for emerging and experienced leaders. I felt like I knew a thing or two about leadership. I’ve written four books now, I have an off the shelf facilitator training program. I did my thesis on leadership in graduate school and literally traveled around the world teaching leadership development. One day I got some new counsel that really schooled me in the idea of leadership and it came from my five year old son, Ian. Ian got me back to what matters most about leaders and that is to open doors of opportunity for the people and the organizations that you serve in a leadership role.
Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram
Buy Leaders Open Doors on Amazon today
Visit LeadersOpenDoors.com for bonus material and fun graphics
Visit GiantLeapConsulting.comfor more about Bill and his company
Contact Bill through his email here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Hello, My Name Is Awesome by Alexandra Watkins | How the World Sees You by Sally Hogshead | Courage Goes to Work by Bill Treasurer
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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