About the Episode
Thank you Whitney Mincey and “Legacy of Leaders” podcast for the opportunity to share some of my leadership lessons learned. It was fun sitting down with you. As you’ve discovered, once I get started, it’s hard to get me to stop! Here is a quick summary below, including the points we didn’t get to.
5 Leadership Nuggets
We have all heard the importance of vision casting and communication skills as necessary qualities of executive-level leaders. In addition to these, I have observed 5 strengths that pay big dividends in leadership effectiveness that are applicable to all levels of leaders. Let’s get right to them:
- Self-leadership is critical. Model the behavior and the character you expect from your team. If you want a culture of hard work and grit, that’s how you show up. If you want (and hopefully you do) your people to make decisions from a place of integrity and do the right thing every time, you cannot as the leader play around in gray area.
- Be the CALM in the storm. This is cliché for sure, but it is so difficult for so many leaders. Part of the issue is there isn’t much in the way of strategy when you tell yourself, or worse yet, someone else tells you to calm down. I created an acronym to help those I work with:
- Collect information about the issue. Do your best to get to the truth and speak with anyone involved candidly.
- Assess what you find. Don’t jump to conclusions. The truth is often somewhere in the middle of varying stories. Not always though.
- Lay out the path forward. Now that you have complete information, write out the steps to resolution.
- Move. Take action on the path you created in step 3. Whether it’s convenient or not, settle the matter quickly.
- And a bonus – sometimes, like getting cut off in traffic, or someone is just mean in passing, you can’t go through the CALM strategy. I always remind myself that people are doing the best they can with what they are dealing with at the time. Some have an emergency and need to get home. Others have a really rough past and have difficulty processing emotions. Others may have some sort of medical imbalance or diagnosis that causes swings in behavior. Let’s give some grace, we aren’t perfect ourselves.
- Delegate repetitive and especially mundane tasks. What to do? What not to do? Who else to do it? Stop doing it altogether? Outsource it? If it isn’t one of your Critical Few Objectives as a leader, you may give some serious thought to whether you should be doing it at all.
- Don’t get complacent. If you have been a leader for any length of time, this will resonate with you. When things are going really well, things aren’t as good as they seem and big challenges can materialize rapidly. I have seen this play out many times, and I believe the real antidote is to make sure you and your team are always improving. When you are performing at a high level, it becomes a little too easy to relax a bit and take your eye off the ball. Make sure you are always recruiting new performers and re-recruiting your team. What are some ways you can level up your skills and look for innovative ways to operate?
- Stay curious. Always seek growth and innovation.
Tune into Part 2, “5 Leadership Myths and What to Do” now!
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