5 Top Leadership Articles for the Week of April 4, 2016

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Each week I read a number of leadership articles from various online resources and share them across social media. Here are the five articles readers found most valuable last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think, too.

Do you foster a culture of encouragement? By John Stoker at SmartBlog

Stoker recounts a recent college basketball tournament game where a player played through an illness to contribute to his team. Stoker reflects on the workplace cultures, and specifically the role of encouragement, that contribute to that level of commitment.

My Comment: You get more of what you encourage and celebrate, less of what you criticize or ignore. Stoker offers several useful lenses through which you can create a culture of encouragement.

10 Signs You Really Are a Leader (and Might Not Know It) by Lolly Daskal in Inc.

We often feel that to be a leader you need to be born a leader, or be drawn to leadership, or have a leader-ly position. We think of leadership as a title that has to be deserved or earned. But leaders are rarely, if ever, born. If we had to isolate a factor that creates leaders, it’s probably some combination of circumstance and persistence. Many, many leaders walk among us–in all kinds of people, places and positions. Some of the greatest leaders you’ll ever meet aren’t even aware of their own leadership.

My Comment: If you want to have influence, Daskal’s list is an excellent place to start. If you think you have influence, but aren’t sure, honestly assess your reality against these ten traits and you’ll have a good sense of whether or not you’re leading.

5 Ways to Stop Wasting Time on Conference Calls by Karin Hurt at Careers in Government

Perhaps you’ve been on one of these soul-sucking calls. There are lots of updates, most of which don’t require any action on your part. It would be politically incorrect to bail, but you and everyone else on the call would rather be getting real work done. A direct report stops by, and, grateful for a distraction, you mouth “Oh it’s just our regular update call,” put the phone on mute and attempt to a have a meaningful conversation. Just when you’re fist-bumping yourself for being a high-energy multi-tasker, you hear your name mentioned…twice. Oh crap.

My Comment: Conference calls are a fact of life, but they can be productive. My co-author and I share some Winning Well wisdom on making remote meetings work for you and your people. We rely on productive remote meetings for a host of business needs – so we know they can work.

Why Culture Is No Longer A Nice To Have When Driving Business Strategy by Chantal Bechervaise

There are many reasons your business strategy may be stalled, but often the issue lies in a misalignment with your corporate culture. Through years of experience advising clients, it is clear to me that culture is the biggest obstacle leadership faces in executing business strategy. Your organization’s culture determines the values and habits that ultimately shape how strategy becomes a reality. If you do not have the right culture, your strategy will likely fall short. This is because, to be effective, organizations need employees to understand the company’s vision and carry it out. Even the most well thought out strategy can be derailed by not first considering corporate culture.

My Comment: Recently I’ve come across several business leaders, some in startups and some in established businesses, who are so focused on the immediate time-horizon that they consciously put off worrying about culture until ‘someday.’ The reality is, ‘someday’ never comes and you’re building your future team and results in the culture you create today. Bechervaise takes a look at Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report and reminds us that culture is a manifestation of how people experience life at work – and that impacts everything.

Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned About Management by Julie Zhuo at Medium

Zhuo’s article begins: I love my job. I find it hard and crazy and wonderful because it is all about people. Interacting with people. Understanding people. Getting the best out of people. Realizing that everyone is imperfect but in our imperfections, we can still come together to do more than we ever could alone.

And yet, despite management being — like parenting— a certain kind of black art with no hard and fast rules, of course there are better and worse managers. A better manager gets better results. You can’t always measure this in weeks, months, or even sometimes years, but it eventually emerges clear as daylight.

My Comment: This is a great article. It’s real, based in Zhuo’s real experience, vulnerable, and has some great observations. At the core of Zhuo’s reflections is that managers are most effective when they like people – and of course it only makes sense…you’re working with people after all. Even so, this apparently self-evident maxim is frequently ignored by those taking positions or those promoting people into them. Zhuo offers several other spot-on reflections that will help you improve your management or decide if team leadership is really for you.

David works with leaders to get results without losing their soul (or mind) in the process. Have David to speak at your next event or corporate training: Email today or call 303.898.7018!

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