Leadership

I had the misfortune of working with a leader for some time who is quite moody, inconsistent, and unpredictable. You never know what he is going to say or do the very next moment. Since you don’t know what to expect, you surely become hesitant, fearful, and nervous. In addition to that, quite contrary to my nature, I remember always going to him with the problems instead of the proposed solutions that I have in my mind.

My colleagues and I struggled to figure out how to navigate his leadership and predict what he wants and had a severe impact on our productivity. One minute he will ask you about your kids, and the next minute he will threaten you. Sometimes he will help us with the solution, and other times he is angry that there is a problem. Often as a team, when we planned to celebrate small wins, we are not sure whether to invite him or not. When we request a minute of his time, sometimes he will hug us, and other times he will push you away. When you greet him in the office or the cafeteria, sometimes, he will smile and say hello, and other times he will ignore you. We always looked at him as a self-centered leader because he is always focused on his feelings, thoughts, priorities, and plan. He intentionally or unintentionally never had room to focus on the team he is leading and always puts his needs and wants ahead of his team members and everyone else.

Sometimes as a leader, you want to remain as unpredictable for a certain period on certain policies but certainly not with your people in your day to day interactions. Psychologists have proved that being unable to predict what happens in a team environment is extremely stressful and requires complex coping skills to deal with. Unfortunately, being unpredictable was a life and leadership strategy for my manager. He took a lot of pride in his unpredictable nature and often thought about it as a strategy to keep his team on their toes whenever they think they have figured out how to work with him. He ended up creating a lot of noise at the workplace.

What would you do if you worked for a moody boss who yelled and cursed you regularly? The answer is simple; you would work hard to find another job because life is way too short to work with fools. If you think you are an unpredictable leader, then its time that you should start working on consistency. It would help if you made it easy for your team to meet your expectations because unpredictability is a nightmare for people trying to manage upwards. The question is, how do you know whether you are displaying unpredictable nature or not? Simple; check if you have any one of the below qualities.

1. Do you get angry about small mistakes and problems?
2. Do you find it difficult to control your emotions or mood?
3. Do you treat people with disrespect?
4. Do you withhold information from the team and thereby making them incapable to take the right decisions?
5. Do you struggle to recognize people’s contributions or success?
6. Do you jump to conclusions and pass judgment without having all the facts?
7. Do you lack listening skills?
8. Do you feel insecure and unwilling to allow the team to decide without your involvement?
9. Do you say something, meaning the other and doing the third one altogether?

Pastor, best selling author, and leadership evangelist Craig Groeschel says that when we say the same thing repeatedly as a leader, and your actions are consistent with your words, that builds trust. Consistency matters in leadership. People would follow a leader rather with a consistently average plan than a leader with a great plan, bad plan, or a mediocre plan that changes all the time.  When you are predictable and consistent, your team knows what is important to you and how you decide on priorities.

The below actions can help you make consistent in your decisions and makes you predictable.

1. Be intentional to respond instead of reacting.
2. Firstly thank people for bringing problems or concerns to your attention. Do not forget to ask questions, get their perspectives, and evaluate their feedback for any solution proposals.
3. When in doubt, refer to your organization’s purpose and values, which always act as a guiding light and help you make correct decisions.
4. Take time to discuss with the team and explain how you arrived at decisions for recurring situations.
5. Do not hesitate to admit when you’re wrong or when you do not have all the answers.
6. Connecting with the team requires energy. Make an effort to greet your team pleasantly.
7. If you conform to a course of action, follow up and see it through to the end.
8. Do not hesitate to remove yourself from the situation and seek advice.
9. Never make a decision when you are angry and never make a promise when you are happy.
10. Let every conversation to be a constructive conversation rather than an emotional dump.
11. Finally, take more blame than you deserve and less credit than you deserve.

Remember you don’t have to know it all to be a great leader. Be yourself, because people would rather follow a leader who is always real than one who is always right.

While the last few months have been unprecedented in human history, we also find ourselves at a moment of unparalleled transition. Let me explain what happened during the last few months while we are stuck with Corona.

• Amazon took over retail without owning any stores
• Uber took over the taxi industry without owning a single car
• Apple and Spotify have taken over music with no stores or artists signed to their name
• Netflix has taken over movies and TV without ever showing a single movie in a theatre
• LinkedIn has taken over job searching and hiring

No one can predict the future, but we must be prepared for it –– don’t you agree? There’s a saying, “We don’t know what we don’t know” and that’s why Growth Cast 2020 team has gathered some of the best experts that they know to give us unique insights and strategies to prepare our businesses and lives for the future.

I had the opportunity to participate in Growth Cast 2020 and talk about Leadership Principles for Entrepreneurs.

Below are some of the topics discussed in this session:

1. What is leadership?
2. How can you become a leader by design?
3. Everyone is important in the organization
4. What are the Proven Leadership Strategies that worked well in my organization?
5. Sometimes promotions are found to be the common cause of the workplace demotivation. How can we deal with them effectively?

Most people can prioritize between the good and the bad or between right and wrong. The real challenge arises when they are faced with two good choices. Which should they choose?

An excellent illustration of this can be found in a parable of a lighthouse keeper who worked on a rocky stretch of coastline before the days of electricity. Once a month, he received a supply of oil to keep the light burning. Not being far from town, he often had visitors.

One night an old woman from the village begged for some oil to keep her family warm. He had pity on her and gave her oil. Another time a father asked for some oil for his lamp so that he could search his missing son. Another needed some to lubricate a wheel to keep the machinery going so that he and his employees could keep working. Each request was good, and each time, the lighthouse keeper gave them the oil for their worthy cause.

Toward the end of the month, he noticed the supply of oil was very low. By the last night of the month, it was gone, and the beacon went out. That night in a storm, a shipwrecked on the rocks and lives were lost. When the authorities investigated, the man was very repentant. To his excuses and pleading their reply was, “You were given oil for one purpose-to keep that light burning!”.

As you become more successful and busier, you must learn to navigate the choice between two good things. You can’t always have both. How do you choose? Remember that the good must sometimes be sacrificed for the best !!

#leadership #johnmaxwell #borra #developingtheleaderwithinyou #dontcoast 

Being able to turn an organisation around by being a positive change agent is the real test of a great leader. People feel awkward and self-conscious when asked to do something new. It could be as simple as changing staff seating arrangement or rotating staff across different teams or proposing a cross-training plan for few identified staff due to change in circumstances or business priorities.

When people hear that change is coming, the first thing they do is ask, “How is this going to affect me?” Why? Because they are worried that they will have to give up something. Here is what I learned over the years, “For everything you gain, you lose something”. So it’s unrealistic to expect not to give up anything and achieve progress. Most of the time, people undergoing a change in the organisations forget that they are not alone in the process.

As a leader, you would need to develop a process to plan what needed to be changed. Ask yourself “How do you eat an elephant? ” One bite at a time, correct. Usually, once I predetermine the change, I focus more on the process than the event. If you overestimate the event and underestimate the process, then you are setting up yourself for failure.

I don’t share the information about changes with everyone in the organisation at one time. I don’t make the communication “fair”, and I make it strategic. As a leader, before you let the masses know what’s going on, you need to meet with your key people and communicate with them. How do you know who your key people are? Ask yourself two questions. Who needs to get behind this to make it fly? Who actually has to fly this change? The answers to the above questions point me to the people who need to know about changes before everyone else does. Most of the times, the structure of your organisation will help you identify these people.

I meet first with the people whose influence is needed to make the changes fly because if they don’t buy-in, the plan is never going to work. I’ll need to work with them to earn their buy-in. Usually, these meetings happen one-on-one or in tiny groups. By telling them about the change before it’s public knowledge, I am giving them valuable information, making them feel special, and including them on the journey. It is an act of inclusion that most people appreciate.

This personal approach also allows us for open discussion, honest reactions, questions and objections. I think of these connection times as meetings before the meeting. If these go well, then I share the information with the people who care the most, that is the one who will carry out the implementation of the plan. Once everything goes well then we will announce it to larger groups throughout the organisation.

If my meetings before the meeting don’t go well, then I meet with those key individuals again and keep meeting with them until we can work through the objections and they buy into the change. The key players on the team or in the organisation must be willing participants and involved in the process for it to work.

In this article, I have shared a valuable #LeadTip, which I learned by being John Maxwell Team member. It certainly worked for me and helped me to bring a lot of changes in my organisation. Try it yourself and do let me know whether it helped you or not?