Entries Tagged 'Personal development' ↓
August 15th, 2011 — Leadership, Personal development
Soccer as a metaphor for life
A reflection from soccer…………………
We had our first neighbourhood soccer game on Sunday at a local park. The game went well, people had fun, and everyone agreed it would be great to do every Sunday morning.
The group discussed what time to start each week, what the competition was doing (under 10 years Australian Football League games and other neighbourhood soccer teams) and how to recruit more talent to the team.
Our brave organiser – the game was organised by one of our neighbours – was quite rightly concerned about whether people would continue to come.
And here’s where the accountability bit comes in….
Someone remembered a friendly soccer game they used to run in London. They said that after some very poor attendances, the team set up a scoring system with one of the scores being for attendance. The scores were shared with everyone on the team after each week’s game.
That’s it!
Comments, thoughts, tweets welcome
April 6th, 2011 — Leadership, Personal development
Was just watching KD Lang on the Adam Hills show In Gordon Street Tonight.
A lot of the conversation was about her time as an artist and how she’s now at the stage, after 27 years in the music industry, of being able to do what she wants.
One of the things KD Lang said was that now that she can do what she wants, she’s much more open to listening to others.
My reflection is that the confidence that comes from following our vision and direction as a leader also provides us with the opportunity to being open to change.
Amanda
March 14th, 2011 — Leadership, Personal development, Strategy
Graffiti: All you need is love
Your Leadership Branding
Leadership branding sounds like yet another fad.
But there are many leaders who have used their leadership voice or brand to promote the cause or objective that they are supporting. Some great examples: the Beatles (all you need is love), Al Gore, Ghandi, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Oprah, Olivia Newton-John, Bill Gates…
Who we are and what we stand for influences our success as leaders.
5 ways to build your leadership brand are:
1. Identify what your story is and find places to tell that story
Create your personal positioning statement and the story that goes with it. You may feel uncomfortable about this initially but telling a credible story about you is particularly important in ensuring that a program of change is effective. The Center for Creative Leadership talks about the importance of you as a leader telling your story during change and building trust with the people you’re leading. People need to know who you are to trust you.
2. Build your personal position statement
I’m____________________________________(always helps to tell people your name)
What’s important to me is__________________(reflects your values)
Where I’ve come from is___________________(tells people where you come from)
How I’d like to work with you is______________(creates certainty about how you’re going to work)
Ways you can connect with me are___________(call, email, visit etc)
Continue to tell your story often and in many forums – until you’re sick of hearing it.
3. Decide your goals for communicating
It’s important as a leader to identify your communication goals. Successful leaders never go into meetings and situations without identifying what they want to achieve, who they will be communicating with and what communication style will be most effective.
Practical actions you can take are:
- Before going into a meeting, spending 5 minutes reflecting on what you want to communicate and what goals you want to achieve
- Take 5 minutes in each meeting to reinforce your vision for the area
- Speak up! About your team’s or group’s achievements and goals in meetings, presentations and in discussions with peers.
4. Be yourself—and let your personality shine.
You are unique. In a branding sense you can’t be copied. So tell people about you, your values, your vision, your goals, your dreams.
5. Measure your impact
Find a mentor and trusted advisors who can give you honest feedback on your behaviour, effectiveness and leadership from different perspectives.
March 14th, 2011 — Leadership, Personal development
Reflecting on the heady heights of leadership
Ten questions for leaders
Seth Godin often influences my thinking about how influence works and the other day he challenged my thinking about leadership…
From Seth Godin
Do you let the facts get in the way of a good story?
What do you do with people who disagree with you… do you call them names in order to shut them down?
Are you open to multiple points of view or you demand compliance and uniformity?
Is it okay if someone else gets the credit?
How often are you able to change your position?
Do you have a goal that can be reached in multiple ways?
If someone else can get us there faster, are you willing to let them?
My questions for leaders…
Are you part of the team?
Who do you leave out of decision making?
How often do you ask questions?
As Seth Godin says – “No textbook answers… It’s easy to get tripped up by these. In fact, most leaders I know do.”
January 30th, 2011 — Leadership, Personal development, Strategy, Uncategorized
Leaders' journeys have many tracks and many companions
4 top leadership books
The Leadership Think Tank is a LinkedIn Group. One of the discussion threads explores the leadership books that have made a difference. And while the debate continues, here are my top 6 in no particular order.
- 1. The leader on the couch – Manfred Kets de Vries
Manfred Kets de Vries delivers leadership and coaching skilling programs for INSEAD. I was lucky enough to be part of a small group that explored leadership development with him and his team in August last year.
Their leader and coach development program leads to improvements in leadership behaviour that are outstanding. Leader on the couch provides leaders with many opportunities to reflect on their own behaviour and that of the people around them. It also provides a deeper dig into how organizations work and how to challenge and change what’s happening.
- 2. Leadership on the line – Ronald A Heifetz and Marty Linsky
Leadership on the line gave me some important reminders about leadership. The chapters on getting on the balcony and thinking politically were very helpful and provided practical tactics that could be implemented fast. And the book talks about keeping your heart whole while taking on the difficult job of leadership.
- 3. Quiet leadership – David Rock
David Rock has created the Neuroleadership Institute to build thinking about the intersection between cognitive neuroscience and leadership and what this means for the practical action that leaders need to take to be successful (I don’t have an affiliation to David Rock by the way, other than having his books and being a member of the Neuroleadership Institute).
David Rock’s books provide some really practical and quickly implementable steps to coaching people and also ways improving your own leadership thinking.
- 4. Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics – Ralph Stacey
Ralph Stacey writes about organizations, their complexity and the ways that people interact with them. He gives us tools to analyse what’s really going on in organizations and what happens when things go wrong.
Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics is one of his foundational books and a number of people have adapted his work for use in organizations – see Anthony Suchmans’ website. He has also written many other books on creativity, complexity, organizations, and leadership.
How these books can improve your leadership
- They provide tools that you can use immediately – David Rock’s six step approach to helping someone make a decision is great, as is Ralph Stacey’s approach to managing organizational politics (p116 of the 2000 edition)
- Help leaders reflect – a difficult thing to do when you’re busy, and often not a preference for leaders at the best of times
- Provide frameworks to help you think through issues you are facing and what is driving your behaviour – see any of Manfred Kets de Vries’s books for this.
What leadership books have changed your work?
January 22nd, 2011 — Personal development, Positive Behaviour, Strategy
As Chris Brogan says – the 3 words aren’t goals. I’ve developed goals and actions under each of the 3 words – no more than 2 goals per word so that I don’t over promise and under deliver.
My 3 words are: Generosity:Constancy:Wealth
Generosity: is about giving back to my community through taking action to change people’s lives. Mostly this will be through the Victorian Women’s Housing Association and it will also be through responding to what’s happening in my community.
Constancy: means sticking to my plans for the year. I want to increase my attention on my plans and decrease my attention on interesting but less vital things.
Wealth: of relationships, knowledge and thinking is about sharing what I’ve learnt in my business and consulting journey and writing about the people and research that have influenced my direction and thinking.
What are your 3 words for 2011?
July 1st, 2010 — Change, Leadership, Personal development
Sally not managing change………
Leadership and change – why change is so hard and what to do about it
Over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to explore change extensively at the personal level. Going through the home buying and selling process pushes many change buttons – and not only with the human part of the family (our hunkered-down cats really aren’t happy about prospective buyers viewing their house – Sally has a very malevolent stare)!
What we’re experiencing at home is a microcosm of what happens in organisations every day…
75% of change efforts fail
Much of the change management advice and literature talks about managing change and using a series of steps to successfully deliver this change. However, surveys of senior executives (see Pierre Mourier & Martin Smith, Ph.D., Conquering Organizational Change, 2001) tell us that more than 75% of change management efforts fail to deliver what stakeholders expect. This means that only 25% succeed!
If you cast your mind back a few weeks/months/years, I’m sure you’ve been part of failed or stuttering change efforts – new structures, new IT systems, new policies, new innovations (and personally: new resolutions, diets, exercise and learning strategies).
So what’s going wrong……?
Change hurts
Cognitive neuroscience is telling us that trying to identify how a change will affect us into the future is almost impossible, particularly where we haven’t experienced the world the change could create. So we’re far more likely to focus on the problem rather than the solution.
Also, we can only focus on one major cognitive shift at a time. So if there are multiple problems facing us, we run out of processing capacity fast.
See David Rock’s books Your brain at work and Quiet Leadership for more details http://neuroleadership.org/.
Change exhausts us
Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch talk about the results of an experiment with students who were asked to either restrain from or to eat cookies.
Those who had to restrain (mentally supervise) themselves to stop eating the cookies were much less able to perform a further task than those who were not required to use the same level of restraint.
For more details go to Fast Company
We need praise to go the extra mile required for change
Jonah Lehrer in his book The decisive moment: how the brain makes up its mind (pages 54-58) outlines a set of experiments by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University who was studying learning in children.
Children who were praised for their intelligence were more easily discouraged and less likely to take risks in learning.
However, when children in the classroom were praised for effort and therefore able to make mistakes to support learning, they were much more likely to choose to take on more challenging tasks.
4 ways leaders can make change work
- Focus on one major change. Organisations often embark on multiple change initiatives at once, delivered by different parts of the organisation which don’t connect the dots for the person being affected by the change.
- Create links or package the changes up so that they make connected sense to the people involved – visuals are very helpful
- Let people eat the cookies, that is: ensure the change processes use positive patterns of behaviour that are already embedded.
- Praise people for their effort– and as a leader, even if you’re not running a change effort this is helpful as a leadership strategy!
Amanda
