5 Top Leadership Articles for the Week of October 31, 2016
Your organization’s future depends on capable, motivated leadership. Even so, most middle level managers and executive leaders spend very little time cultivating their younger talent for leadership responsibilities. We hear these complaints all the time: “My millennial’s want to lead, but don’t want to do the work.” Or “There’s no loyalty – I can’t get anyone to stay long enough to train them.” Or “They’ve been here six weeks and get impatient when they’re promoted to management.”
The good news is that you have fantastic leaders in the ranks of your millennial talent. Your younger leaders can be an incredible source of talent, innovation, and productivity.
Join three internationally recognized leadership experts for a conversation about developing your millennial leaders. You’ll walk away with:
How to build a culture that develops leaders before they have titled responsibility.
Ways to talk with your younger talent to keep them engaged and bought in to the development process.
Key mistakes to avoid – don’t push your leaders out the door!
A process to identify and draw out the best from your emerging leaders.
And specific answers to your questions!
We are excited to combine experience, wisdom and perspectives from across generations – and across the world.
Michael Teoh (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is the Founder of Thriving Talents, a ‘Millennials-focused’ Talent Development company which delivers training and consultancy for Fortune 500 companies across 39 countries, in the areas of Attracting, Managing, Retaining & Motivating Millennials. He has shared the stage with other notable business icons like Sir Richard Branson, Sir Bob Geldof and even presented a workshop in the presence of President Barack Obama.
Karin Hurt (Baltimore, MD) is a top leadership consultant and CEO of Let’s Grow Leaders. A former Verizon Wireless executive, she was named to Inc. Magazine’s list of great leadership speakers.?
David Dye (Denver, CO) is a leadership keynote speaker, former nonprofit executive, elected official, award-winning author, and president of Trailblaze, Inc., a leadership training and consulting firm. Karin and David co-authored Winning Well: A Manager’s Guide to Getting Results Without Losing Your Soul.
PS: This webinar is completely free – there is no charge and we’ll deliver real content (not an hour long sales pitch…we hate those as much as you do!)
Welcome to this Halloween roundup! 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.
Leadership Effectiveness (or its absence) Starts At the Top by S. Chris Edmonds
What is your leadership team’s “reason for being” today? Whether your organization is a small business, a global multinational, a division of a larger company, or anything in between, your leadership team has a focus, whether it’s formalized or not.
The vast majority of leadership teams I observe see their primary focus as boosting results, helping the organization’s products and services find success in the marketplace.
Results are a good thing, but delivering promised results is only half the leader’s job. The other half? Creating workplace sanity, creativity, and trust, between and among leaders, team members, and customers, every day.
My Comment: Culture is the engine that drives your business results and no one does a better job of getting to the bottom line of culture and helping you practically address your team’s culture than Edmonds. If you’re looking for practical solutions, check out The Culture Engine (as well as the video in this article).
Five Irrefutable Paradoxes of Leadership by Andreas Jones at Forbes
When we picture someone who is a leader, we tend to imagine a certain kind of person. Certainly, the so-called “Type-A” personality is high on the list — someone who might be called a perfectionist or hard-charging. We imagine someone who is supremely confident in their own abilities, makes decisions quickly and works fast; someone who occasionally seems arrogant in their self-confidence and who consistently succeeds in whatever they try to do.
The paradox of leadership is that sometimes actual leaders have to embrace qualities that don’t come naturally to them. In this article, we will explore the five paradoxes of leadership and look at how they can make you a more effective leader.
My Comment: This article includes five observations about what great leaders do that often seem counterintuitive to newer or less effective leaders. In my experience working with thousands of leaders across industries, nearly every leader gets caught in one or two of these paradoxes. This is a great list to read through and look for your own inclinations.
Teachable Moments: Learning to Win Well the Hard Way by Karin Hurt
When I told “John” what I did for a living, he chuckled. “Oh, I learned how to be a good leader the hard way.”
Don’t we all.
It’s often our most klutsy moves that teach us how to Win Well.
Here is “John’s” story…
My Comment: John provides a fantastic look at one of the best resources you’ll ever have to be a fantastic leader: your team. Ask them the questions about what they know. Get their input and solutions. Frame the problem, establish success criteria, and enlist their aid. You’ll be amazed at what they can do!
Grit: Why Talent Needs Drive to Succeed an Interview with Angela Duckwork by Knowledge @ Wharton
Knowledge@Wharton: Could you talk about grit affecting our successes? Where did the idea have its genesis?
Angela Duckworth: I could date it back to being a teacher, teaching math in the New York City public schools and seeing many kids. Just by sitting next to them and talking to them at lunch time, you knew they were smart enough to learn everything that you needed to teach them, but still weren’t succeeding [and] weren’t fulfilling that potential. I could date my interest in grit to that point, but it would be probably more complete if I dated it to childhood. I grew up with a father who was obsessed with achievement and I think I may [have] modeled or inherited an interest in what makes people successful from him.
My Comment: If you haven’t already encountered Duckworth’s work on ‘grit’ – the ability to stick-to-it and get back up, it’s well worth your time. In this article, the interview discusses the differing roles that talent and drive play in your success. In my experience, people with great drive and middling talent outperform people with great talent but middling drive. Duckworth makes the same point – drive, determination, and stick-to-it character make a huge difference in your personal and leadership success. The good news is that these are behaviors that can be learned.
Are You Asking Stupid Questions? by Mary Kelly, PhD
Are your leaders asking stupid questions? If they are, they will likely get stupid answers when they do get answers, and they will believe the answers.
Leaders like the illusion that if they walk around and ask employees questions that generate single syllable answers, they are being a good leader. For many managers, this satisfies what they perceive as doing what they need to do to find out what is really going on in the organization. They are wrong.
Most organizational leaders ask questions that don’t elicit any real information. These are common exchanges. Note that no real information is exchanged…
My Comment: Kelly gives great examples of questions that you might ask that do nothing for you as a leader. They certainly don’t contribute to results and they don’t really do anything to build results either. She follows up with great examples of the kind of questions you can ask that will help your team be more productive and solve real problems. Don’t waste your precious time with questions that don’t accomplish anything.
David works with leaders to get results without losing their soul (or mind) in the process. Have David keynote your next event or deliver corporate training: Email today or call 303.898.7018!The post 5 Top Leadership Articles for the Week of October 31, 2016 appeared first on Leadership Speaker David Dye.
Book David today for your event, workshop, or training: david@trailblazeinc.com or 1.800.972.582
