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Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

Although the New Year has just begun there might be some of us who have already broken some of our New Year’s resolutions. When you set about making big changes in life, it makes sense to reflect back before moving forward.

Don’t neglect to take time to review and assess your personal and professional challenges and accomplishments of 2011 as you plan for an exciting 2012 to come. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you take time to assess your personal and professional challenges and accomplishments from the past year:

1. What are your proudest successes and accomplishments from this past year?

2. What people, books, events, or activities created good memories for you in 2011?

3. Who and what supported your personal and business growth and success this year?

4. How consistent is your work with your deepest values?

5. What are you most grateful for this year?

6. What slowed you down or stood in the way of fulfilling your intentions?

7. What unexpected opportunities came up and what did you learn from them?

8. What have you been putting off that you know you need to execute on before the end of the year?

9. What goals did you fail to achieve and why?

10. What big, major goal are you working on for 2012?

Now here’s a bonus question:

How can you bring more love, enjoyment, and peace into your life in 2012?

Taking the time to think about what you’ve done, what you wanted to do but didn’t, and what you’d like to do in the year ahead is a great way to get some closure and begin the year on a positive note. Be sure to celebrate your accomplishments, but don’t punish yourself for the failures. Trying and failing is the only way to make forward progress.

Wishing you a healthy, prosperous and Happy New Year!

Marshall Brown, a certified career and executive coach, entrepreneur coach and personal brand strategist, has always had a passion for helping people find ways to live more fulfilling lives. As a coach, Marshall helps individuals to find their passions and encourages them to move ahead in reaching their goals. For more information, contact marshall@ mbrownassociates.com, 202-518-5811 or visit www.mbrownassociates.com.

Effective personal branding requires that you know yourself. Brands are based in authenticity. In this video for Personal Branding TV, William Arruda shares with you some questions you can ask yourself so you unearth your personal brand.

Every manager has a leadership style. Just ask the staff. Great bosses understand they need to adapt their style to fit the situation.

This video lesson will help you understand the variety of leadership styles a manager can use and how they can adapt those styles in response to specific situations.

Welcome to the December issue of According to Marshall…

The purpose of this message is to share just a quick summary of some of the topics that I think are relevant to your personal and professional success.

I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for your readership and your feedback over the course of this year. I wish you good health, happiness and  success in 2012. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can support your success in any way in the New Year.

If you have trouble reading this or seeing graphics click here for the online version.

Lessons in Leadership from Andy Bernard of ‘The Office’

By Julie Rains

“Underdogs inspire us. That’s the lesson Robert California, the fictional owner of the fictional paper vendor Dunder Mifflin, teaches us when he promotes Andy Bernard to branch manager of the Scranton sales office (aka The Office). Despite his Ivy League credentials, Andy is an unlikely choice to replace the departing Michael Scott. Watching Andy navigate his new accountabilities in the episode entitled “The Incentive” prompted me to consider how a less-than-perfect leader can inspire people.”

Click here to read the full story. . .

Best Gifts for Employees

By Helen Zhang

“During the holidays, giving the perfect gift is always a challenge. With tons of friends and family members on your shopping list, it’s easy for employees to get left behind. And let’s face it, it’s easy to dole out generic and thoughtless knick-knacks to your staff.

This year, take advantage of the holiday season to show genuine employee appreciation. We’ve talked about how important this is to your office morale, productivity and, ultimately, your bottom line. So why not use this time to show your employees how much you care? Here are 10 easy gifts, from affordable to high-end, for every type of employee.”

Click here to read the full story. . .

10 Innovative Ways to Reward Your Employees

By Kentin Waits

We often think that rewarding employees means big bonuses, which can affect the bottom line. But recognition for a job well-done can come in all shapes and sizes.

Small tokens of appreciation given at the right moment not only provide well-deserved acknowledgement—they can keep your employees motivated. Let’s explore the art of saying “thank you” in new and innovative ways.

Click here to read the full story. . .

Companies Hiring in Large Volume

By John Smith

“December often becomes a transition month for job seekers. As the busy holiday season approaches, calendars get filled with parties. Relatives come into town for a visit. Children have a few weeks off from school and need to be entertained. Plus, there’s probably shopping to be done.

In addition to this jam-packed schedule, many job seekers believe the myth that employers aren’t hiring new workers until next year. As a result, some job seekers decide to take a step back from sending out résumés and attending networking events and instead focus on how they will revise and improve their job search in 2012. You should always be thinking about how to tweak your job search, but don’t put everything on hold until next year. Employers aren’t.”

Click here to read the full story. . .

Focus on Others to Keep Social-Network Posts Professional

By Michael Crom

”Question: I work at a large financial company.

I have always maintained very professional behavior at work, and I believe this has led to respect from my co-workers. But like many of young professionals I enjoy social networking and I have built my profile on these sites. I recently started receiving requests from some of my younger co-workers, clients, and even higher-level professionals to add them as Facebook friends. Since I really want to maintain my professional image moving forward, I need some tips on how I can keep my profile on these sites as professional as possible.”

Click here to read the full story. . .

I also invite you to forward this to a friend.

Whether you’re learning to swing a golf club, baseball bat or tennis racquet, coaches always emphasize the importance of follow-through. It’s not just hitting the ball that matters, it’s how you continue your swing once contact is made.

The same thing applies in job interviews, networking, sales and almost any work situation: without purposeful follow-through on your actions and interactions with others, you won’t really be able to reach your professional potential.

“Failure to meet deadlines, honor commitments, monitor staff, return calls and keep track of long-term projects is the most underrated cause of chaos and failure in business life,” writes Stephanie Winston in Organized for Success.

So often we feel we’ve completed a task because the action of it is “done,” but we underemphasize how powerful it is to continue developing, tracking and monitoring operations and relationships even after they’ve been set in place. As Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan note in Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, “Follow-through is the cornerstone of execution, and every leader who’s good at executing follows through religiously. Following through ensures that people are doing the things they committed to do, according to the agreed timetable.”

It’s Not Just What, But How

When we think of follow-through, we tend to think of taking action. But a large part of follow-through is about first figuring out how things will be done. Once you define your goals, set aside some time to decide just how you will reach them. What steps will be needed to accomplish them? Who will do which steps and when? What is the desired timeline? If a strategy does not address the how, it is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Take meetings, for instance. A plan for follow-through should be detailed at the end of every meeting. “Never finish a meeting without clarifying what the follow through will be, who will do it, what resources they will use, and how and when the next review will take place and with whom,” Bossidy and Charan suggest.

Organizing and Delegating

A good organizational system will support follow-through more than almost anything. If you are among the organizationally challenged, do one of two things:

1. Make a vow, buy an organization book or two, reserve a weekend or a week, and just do it. Get organized once and for all. You’re not likely to follow through well, if at all, when the disorganization gremlin has hold of you. Getting organized is one of the biggest keys to success; not doing so is an extremely common and most unfortunate form of self-sabotage.

2. Hire someone to organize you and keep you that way. The investment will pay for itself when you begin following through more consistently.

Delegating should also be part of an organizational system. “Getting things done through others is a fundamental leadership skill,” according to Bossidy and Charan. “Indeed, if you can’t do it, you’re not leading.” Delegating is an efficient way to ensure that the greatest number of tasks, including follow-up tasks, get done in the shortest amount of time. In other words, if you want to be successful, don’t be afraid to dole out the workload to others. The key is to always think in terms of the big picture instead of focusing only on whatever task is in front of your face at the moment.

Pro-activity and Integrity

Following through means taking action and keeping your word. Below are some additional considerations regarding follow-through.

•  When you say you’ll do something, be scrupulous in meeting your commitment, whether to a client, supervisor, customer or direct-report. If you can’t deliver it, don’t promise it.

•  In job interviews and networking, rapid follow-up can mean the difference between landing the job and/or client. Hiring decisions are often made very quickly after interviews. And getting in contact with people soon after meeting them means they will remember you, increasing the likelihood they will eventually buy from you.

•  Be sure to send a thank you note after you close a sale or receive any courtesy. This will make you stand out from the others, inviting an ongoing relationship to develop, or continue to develop. Also, a short thank-you note gives you a great excuse to add anything you forgot to say in a meeting or interview, or to highlight details you only glossed over.

•  All top salespeople are masters at follow-through. Lack of follow-through is the primary element missing when sales are not keeping pace with leads generated. You may have hundreds of leads with a great deal of potential. But unless you follow through and actively market/sell to these leads, they will not turn into sales.

•  Following through after sales have been made also makes good financial sense. Getting business from new customers costs significantly more than securing additional business from existing customers.

When it comes to follow-through, something is better than nothing. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing. The best is to follow-up as frequently and best as you can, a practice that can even affect productivity positively.

“On a day-to-day basis, consistent, automatic follow-through can deflect a lot of the firefighting that can push your day off course,” Winston writes.

If you’d like some support in honing your ‘follow-through’ skills, contact me today and let’s talk about how coaching can help you to achieve the life you desire.

By, Dwight Frindt

The term “comfort zone” has become a popular way to describe how we are feeling about various activities we are taking part in – “that pushed me way out of my comfort zone,” or “that was not in my comfort zone,” are pretty common phrases these days.

When we talk about our “comfort zone” what we are talking about is our personal orbit, our range of personal activities. Each of us has a daily routine, a weekly routine and perhaps even a monthly or yearly routine. Generally speaking we are creatures of habit and we develop comfort zones we like, and of course, feel comfortable in.

Often, even when we do try to venture out of it, we are quickly pulled back in to it. There is a dynamic called “homeostasis” which is critical to this. Homeostasis has both psychological and physical implications and what it’s pointing to is the fundamental and biological drive for equilibrium and stability in a system, (and yes, we are including human beings as systems). In effect, homeostasis helps create and regulate our “comfort zones.” This is a very important phenomenon to understand. It works for us in critical ways. For example, it helps keep our body temperatures stable. As we know, we all have a set-point for body temperature that is on average 98.6 degrees. The homeostasis in our bodies helps insure that when our temperature fluctuates, it comes back to this comfortable set point. The downside is that when we challenge ourselves psychologically and emotionally in various ways, there can be a “homeostatic back lash,” and a strong pull to go back to our existing comfort zone until we have solidly established a new set point.

So our comfort zone is somewhat like a thermostat. Unconsciously it has been set at a particular point and when we change it, it takes some time to “heat up or cool down” to the new set point.

An amazing example of this is the research that has been done on lottery winners. It has been found that generally, if someone was poor before winning the lottery, they will end up poor again. If they were middle class, they would ultimately end up middle class again and so on. This is a powerful example of what happens when our set points or comfort zones are radically and unexpectedly challenged and how powerful homeostasis can be.

As we discuss comfort zones, set points, etc. we want to be clear that this is not a piece about people who plod along and move slowly or people who seem risk averse. If you are a fast-paced, “go, go, go” type of person that is your comfort zone. What if you had to slow down, be more reflective, bring your energy “down and in” instead of being an “up and out” kind of person? What if you had to take on a meditation practice? Would you still be in your comfort zone? What if you are a thrill seeker and look for ways to “push the envelope” all the time? What would happen if you lived a more mundane existence and had to experience the ordinary? Would you still be in your comfort zone?

The thing is, if you want new outcomes, bigger results and to achieve your vision are you ready to expand your comfort zone? Are you ready to alter your personal orbit? Are you fortified and prepared for the inevitable backlash that may come from inside you, but also from those around you who may feel threatened or unnerved by change? If you are part of their system, their orbit, their comfort zone, and you change, what happens to their comfort zone? If you aren’t ready to expand your orbit, how can you expect your colleagues, team, or employees to do it?

Source: http://www.2130partners.com/leadership-are-you-in-your-comfort-zone/

“If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message.” —Jim Kouzes, co-author of Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It

When people trust and believe in you as a leader, they’ll follow you far and without much question. But without credibility, that critical foundation of leadership, you face an uphill battle, because you’ll have the extra strain of trying to pull people along with you. And whether you’re the one pulling or the one being pulled, pretty soon you’re both weary and ready to give up.

Credibility stands on several legs: expertise, trustworthiness and integrity.

Expertise is an objective judgment, determined by such things as your credentials, your rank in the company and your prior accomplishments.

Trustworthiness is a subjective judgment, formed over time from a person’s experience interacting with you. Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Do you know what you say you know? How does it feel to work for you?

Integrity is another subjective judgment, formed over time from a person’s observations of you. Do you walk your talk, or do you say one thing and do another? Are you honest? Do you admit and take responsibility for your mistakes?

You may think you have a pretty good sense of your credibility among your team members, but what are they really thinking?

One of the best ways to truly know how people are experiencing, observing and judging you as a leader is to conduct a 360° assessment. Named for the 360 degrees of a circle, this type of assessment measures your performance from the perspective of everyone you work with, including your direct reports.

It takes courage to enter into this process. You may not like everything you hear, and it may highlight some things that need changing. And that’s exactly why bringing credibility issues to the surface is such a crucial matter.

On the other hand, you may be doing most everything right, but your credibility in the eyes of your team members is still not where it needs to be. The most likely cause is that they don’t see what you’re doing.

In this case, it’s time to become more visible in the organization. Turn your office into a fishbowl and reveal what’s been going on behind closed doors. Then, get more involved and aware of what everyone else is working on. Practice “management by walking around,” the successful Hewlett-Packard strategy that Tom Peters and Bob Waterman popularized in their book, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies.

A 360° assessment will reveal how credible you are in the eyes of your team. Then you’ll have the opportunity to improve that rating. It’s not enough to have the expertise and credentials. Your team members need to observe and experience your trustworthiness and integrity for themselves. So open up the office door more often, and get out and interact with people more. Show them you’re someone they can believe in.

Author’s content used under license, © 2008 Claire Communications

Properly setting expectations for directors and employees/team members is a critical dimension in quality workplaces, according to a study of managers undertaken in the 1990s by the Gallup Organization. Below are some tips on setting clear expectations that will set standards for excellence and results.

1. Start with a vision of what you want the end result to look like. Not just what you want done, but the results you want to achieve when the project is completed.

2. Discuss the how you define “excellent performance.” Paint a complete picture. Refer to your performance review form. Don’t assume.

3. Focus on the desired outcome, not on describing each and every step. Your goal is to guide, not control. Letting individuals find their own route toward productive outcomes encourages them to use their strengths.

4. Tie the mission of the department to each job. People want to know that their role, whether large or small, makes a difference.

5. Put the expectations in writing.

6. Stay on the sideline. You may be tempted to step in and ‘play the game’ for a subordinate, but if you do, no one will learn.

7. Give feedback, and often! The annual performance review is too late to let staff members know how they are meeting your expectations. Schedule informal review time weekly (quarterly for larger departments). Feedback given along the way sounds more like coaching, not like punishment.

8. Ask for staff members’ feedback on how they think they are doing. Two-way communication clarifies expectations.

9. Give positive reinforcement. Don’t mix negative and positive. Mention the thing you like and you’ll get more of it. Be specific and prompt.

10. Don’t take it personally. When staff members don’t perform as you think they should have, look for solutions, not blame.

I am fortunate enough to be on assignment in South Africa and will be blogging when I am able too.   I want to share my experience with you while I am here.

I am working with people in the international development field from all over Africa. Let me tell you from a career stand point, if you have interest in making a difference; this is an area that desperately needs help. I am with people that are fighting malaria, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition and poor (if any) sanitization and agricultural development. They are from countries such as Uganda, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Madagascar, to name a few. Many of these professionals are with USAID and the State Department.  They are hard working individuals that despite the conditions that they face are passionate and committed to help in humanitarian relief.

I grew up not really knowing too much about the international development profession. Although I have coached individuals that have returned from missions in Africa, I have not been on “their turf” before. It has certainly changed my perspective on the work they do.

One man was telling me that after spending 20 years in the practice of law, he decided to join the Foreign Service so that if he lives until he is 80, he can say he did something, other than suing people and making a lot of money. He is now living in a metal “pod” in Afghanistan, developing a more effective way to filter water. Talk about making a difference!

So the reason I feel compelled to write this blog is 2 fold.

1. If you are not aware of the field of international development, explore it!
2. Go for your passion, live your dreams and in whatever way you choose, make a difference; people less fortunate than us, will appreciate it.

I hope to share more stories with you about the folks that I am meeting on my journey.

I provide a series of stepping stones in the form of hands-on personal training and interaction that can rapidly move you and your organization closer to world-class status.  You can read more about my offering here:
http://www.mbrownassociates.com/leadership-more.html
     
I have been selected to facilitate a 2-week Leadership Development Program in South Africa.  As you read this I will be in route. 

Marshall