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Financial Services Marketing Insights: A Marketing Compass
What we now call “marketing” began long before the name was coined. In the mid-1800s, traveling salesmen dressed “snake oil" and other tonics in fancy packaging and extolled their virtues to a gullible public. New marketing applications soon...
“Getting Back to Basics: A Customer Service Tale”
“Getting Back to Basics: A Customer Service Tale” By: Joy Fisher-Sykes One hot summer day my daughter and I ventured to our local craft store with one mission in mind – purchase velvet covered coloring panels called fuzzy boards. Little did we...
Lead People...Manage Things
Master The Five Key Facets of High Performance Leadership Many people in leadership positions struggle with understanding what makes a great leader. While billions of dollars are spent annually on leadership development, quality leadership is...
Leadership & Teamwork
Strong, positive teamwork is defined by a leader who has a vision and the ability to inspire his or her team to work toward the realization of that vision.
The leader is not threatened in the least by the expertise and diversity of his or her...
Modern Managers Need Leadership Skills
Managers and Leaders - Are They Synonyms?
A manager is the person in charge of commanding and running a
business or a project. Leadership deals with the interpersonal
relations. Managing means planning, developing and organizing.
In the...
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The Secret of High-Trust Leadership
A good friend of mine, C, was the manager of the human factors
group for a telecommunications software engineering company. Her
boss called her aside one day. It turned out that the CEO of the
company had noticed and complained that a number of her team
members were regularly seen hanging around, small-talking in one
office. That's not what he was paying them to do, the CEO
complained. Didn't she notice what was happening? Her boss
instructed C. to pass on the reprimand and see to it that the
situation improved.
C. knew her team was a bright, highly productive group. They
were also mostly new hires, just forming their sense of team and
how they would work together. The timing for this type of
reprimand was lousy. She didn't want to do it, but she knew she
had to do something.
She called her group together, and began with, "I know you're a
great team and you've done everything I've asked you to do,
oftentimes more." She then described the issue to them without
criticism, saying that there was a problem in how they were
being perceived by the CEO, that it was serious, and that it
needed to be cleared up immediately.
Instead of warning them, she asked them to come up with the best
course of action to change their boss' perceptions, so he would
get a more accurate picture of the hard work they ere actually
doing. Rather than get defensive or hurt, the team took up the
challenge and together they found a set of solutions that worked
beautifully. The best part for C. was that a potential
trust-damaging episode actually improved her credibility with
her team. And in fact it improved her respect for them, as well.
After the success of her managerial experiment, she decided to
relate to her team all the time in that way. "Whether things are
going well or not," she told me, "I've let go of 'I know best,
here's what you should do,' and instead I've embraced, 'You're
excellent, I'm proud of you, and here's a problem we're facing,
so let's brainstorm together'." It wasn't always as directly
spoken as that, but as a general place to come from, she found
it very powerful.
Doing this had a strong impact on the quality of their work and
productivity, she discovered. Enough to get noticed. A few
months after C. started this form of trust-building with her
team, her boss one day called her a "natural manager," something
he had never said to her before in five years with the company.
Some time later, when the telecommunications industry slid into
decline, all thirty engineers and the entire support staff for
her office were let go, leaving only her team left. "We were
absolutely stunned. They basically kept the office open just for
the five of us to keep doing our work. Ordinarily an R&D group
like ours would be let go first, yet here we were. I think it
was because we listened, took challenging problems and came up
with creative solutions for the company. It really wasn't me, it
was them."
There are some good lessons in this story about creating
high-level trust. Trust, like all other worthwhile qualities,
comes in degrees. My interest is helping leaders take their
capacity for inspiring trust to the highest possible level. When
C. said, "...here's a problem we're facing, let's brainstorm
together," she hit on a powerful source of inspired leadership.
She had discovered that her unique gift as a leader was giving
people the room to find their own greatness.
Every leader will have
something different to offer. To get at
your own version of what C. had hit on, ask yourself this
question: what qualities do I bring to my leadership role that
make me unique at what I do? These are the qualities that you
feel are important to share. Sometimes they are the way you
often wish others would treat you (rather than the way they do).
They will nearly always also be the qualities that are
responsible for your professional and economic success.
What do I mean by qualities? I'm talking about the particular
life-enhancing virtues that you give to people at work when you
are operating at your best as a leader. People will feel most
inspired by your leadership guidance when you're simultaneously
drawing on your personality strengths, your core values, and
your expertise. For some leaders it is their sense of humor that
inspires, for others it is caring, or thoroughness, poise under
pressure, unflagging enthusiasm, or the ability to help people
think creatively or to discover their greatness.
A good way to identify your unique leadership gift is to
remember a specific time at work when you felt particularly good
about what was happening between you and a person or team you
manage, or between you and your boss. Try to identify the
positive inner qualities these people were receiving from you at
the time that met their needs and made them feel good about you.
Perhaps their confidence or peace of mind or ability to see
light at the end of the tunnel went way up as a result of what
you said and did. Is this something that people receive from you
when you are at your best? If so, then that's your gift.
Keep this alive in as many ways as you can. So if you identified
something like "I'm great at supporting creative business people
who want to turn their bold ideas into marketable products,"
then why not add that phrase to the way you think about your
current job or position? "As the Director of New Product
Development I actually get paid to do what I love the
most--helping a team of creative business people keep their
confidence and vision alive through the difficult process of
turning great ideas into marketable products."
You see the difference? You are shining the light on the very
thing that makes you great--the unique gift that people receive
from you. Sometimes you just forget or lose sight of your gift
in the daily grind. By reminding yourself what it is that you
give people, you'll be able to use it more consciously and
consistently.
But how often do we fail to recognize and acknowledge in
ourselves this avenue to greatness? It's easy to take our unique
strengths for granted--"well, that's no big deal, that's just
who I am." The next time someone asks you what you do, you might
try replying with a variation of your leadership theme instead
of giving your job title right off. "You know how difficult it
is to get a new product idea into the marketplace? Well, what I
do is..."
When you fully and humbly and proudly take possession of your
unique leadership gift and use it more and more intentionally,
you may find that it's the key to your career success. As a
result of promotions, your gift will "naturally" find wider and
wider avenues for expression.
About the author:
Joe DiSabatino helps companies turn aroud morale problems by
building high-trust work environments with an emphasis on
integrity and core values. For more information go to:
www.phoenixleadership.com
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