Monday, June 21, 2010

5 Ways to Improve Your Leadership Quotient

Good leaders can get better, and great leaders should teach others. And through teaching, the great ones continue to learn new ways to lead.  You don’t need to go to an expensive week-long seminar to improve your skills, however. The classroom is right under your nose!


1. Look around you. Every day you are surrounded by leaders. From the person behind the front desk, to the one who’s responsible for preparing meeting rooms, all the way up, down and around the web of an organization. These individuals make decisions from one minute to the next, and solve problems throughout their day.  In David Hakala’s March 19, 2008 post in HR World, “The Top 10 Leadership Qualities” you will find the following terms used to describe a leader: vision, integrity, dedication, magnanimity, humility, openness, creativity, fairness, assertiveness, and sense of humor. Does this describe you? Add those traits to your leadership bag.
2. Leaders don’t have to be in front. Penelope Trunk hits the nail on the head in her January 13th blog post “You should lead from the middle”. She reminds us that positional leadership, or leading purely from authority, will get you nowhere with most of the workforce (Gen Xers and beyond). In my opinion, a good leader can lead from any situation and rarely, if ever, has to resort to a title to get things done.
2. Observe more, talk less. My grandfather gave me the best advice a leader could even get: “Your learn more from listening than from talking.” The power of observation is most important during times of crisis as well as the beginning of a leader’s tenure. “The First 90 Days” in Issue 7 of Business Management’s Process Improvement series zeros in on the notion that observation plays a key role in determining your next steps as a new leader. You can’t decide what to do next if you don’t know what has been done, who’s done it, why, and who’s been affected by it.
3. MBWA. Simply put by Tom Peters, Management By Wondering Around, is one of the best ways to improve your leadership quotient. Why? Because to most of the organization, you are nothing but a title until you set that title aside and show them who the real you is. When you come out of your office on a regular basis, you become more real. You become approachable by the masses. You become human. Leaders are more successful and have a longer shelf life if their people know them and eventually trust them.
4. Inspire By Example. In Jill Geissler’s “What Great Bosses Know” articles about leadership  (“SuperVision”, she continuously circles back to the idea that leaders can talk all they want. It’s what they do – and don’t do - that gets people’s attention. Don’t try to be perfect; just recognize your mistakes and humbly move on. Let people see that recover is possible after error. And show them that just because you’re a leader, it doesn’t mean you know it all. When you learn something new, share it, and encourage others to do the same.
5. Ask for help. If you’ve done the other 4 things above, then this will be a natural step to improving your learning quotient. At first glance, you probably think that asking for help is the worst mistake a leader can make. On the contrary; it’s what delegation is all about. A leaders knows the talents of the people around her, is aware of how people work together to solve problems, knows they will do what she needs them to do, because they trust her and can count on her. And a true leader knows what she knows and doesn’t know (“Self-Improvement 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know” from Amazon.com.

Now that you’ve read all 5 ways to improve your leadership quotient, you probably think I compiled all of these ideas from Mr. Maxwell’s book. No, I didn’t get my idea for this blog from that book. But by the time I finished writing #4, this particular book came to mind. I grabbed it off my shelf, took a look at the table of contents, and realized I’d learned very well from reading that book! And in doing so, I improved my leadership quotient by always remembering to be a learner first and teacher second. Leadership is in the art of knowing when to follow.

Peace,
Shelly

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