Entries Tagged '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.

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. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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?

Photos from Victoria: my 3 words

Following in the footsteps of Chris Brogan http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-3-words-for-2011/and Beth Kanter http://www.bethkanter.org/seek-sense-share/ I’ve created my 3 words for 2011.

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?

A few years ago I attended a 5-day workshop facilitated by a great man, Max Clayton.

Max’s facilitation process was wonderful, wise and at times incredibly confronting for me.  There was one space in between workshop sessions where Max, who at that time wasn’t well, was moving chairs around.

I offered to help.  Max said something like “helping is your problem, not mine”.  It doesn’t sound like much but it’s shaped my leadership and organizational change work since then.

Why helping doesn’t help

1. Helping creates a power and control dynamic, the helper and the helpless
2. The helpless don’t actually have to do anything, that’s the helper’s job
3. Helplessness gets embedded through learned behaviour, thinking and organisational systems. Symptoms are:

• people not stepping up as leaders because of the energy required to help everyone (in the education arena this was reflected in the number of school principal vacancies)
• policies assuming the worst case scenario and try to cover all eventualities
• new ideas generated by the leadership cohort, rather than being generated throughout the organization.

Shifting from helplessness

Martin Seligman has explored both learned helplessness and ways to address this through positive psychology.  The University of Pennsylvania website has some great tools etc to explore.

Positive psychology and its associated thinking tools which aim to build happiness are applicable to us as individuals, teams, organizations, and communities.

3 ways to be a better leader (and not helper)

1. Find your own strengths and use them to create better engagement with those around you.  You should also celebrate your strengths and greatness – see Martin Seligman’s website at www.authentichappiness.org.
2. Recognise and reward the strengths of the person you’re leading or coaching. It’s so easy to respond to the “F” results and “fix” them, rather than the “A’s” (See Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch which I’m still reading – p47 – and yes I know I mentioned it yesterday but it’s really interesting).
3. Be mindful of your assumptions. Before you start a leadership or coaching conversation, be aware of what you are assuming about the person you’re meeting with ie am I helping because I’m assuming this person is weak in this area? Write these assumptions down as a pre-meeting exercise.

Some References

Heath, C and Heath D (2010) Switch: how to change things when change is hard Broadway Books, Random House Group Limited, Chatham UK

Seligman, M.E.P. (1998). Learned Optimism. New York: Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster).
Gillham, J.E. (Ed). (2000). The Science of Optimism and Hope: Research Essays in Honor of Martin E. P. Seligman. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press.

Seligman, M.E.P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press.
Peterson, Christopher & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues A Handbook and Classification. Washington, D.C.: APA Press and Oxford University Press.