A great way to improve your leadership skills and abilities is to study and then practice leadership. In the last few months, I have worked really hard to study and learn better leadership skills through reading leadership books and blogs. From there, I have done all I could to practice what I learned. This approach has helped me to improve my leadership abilities.
This week, the following blog posts were some of my favorites.
Four Strategies To Make Your Vision A Reality By Todd Nielsen
Vision, strategy, and goals are important …but they are not enough. One of the greatest challenges in business—and frankly, one of the greatest challenges in life—is doing the things necessary to make one’s vision a reality.
To ensure the realization of your vision, you need to set up structures and processes that act as guardrails to keep you from falling off the path.
1. Get Organized
2. Tracking And Measurement
3. Accountability
4. Rewards More…
Brandon’s Thought’s
This is a great post. It goes hand-in-hand with a post that I did the other day about vision. In leadership it is so important to have a vision! Todd’s steps to make your vision a reality are great. If you skip any one of the first three steps you will not reach your goals of obtaining your vision.
Do You Know What Gear Your Life Is In? By Craig Jarrow
How fast is your life going? Many individuals feel that they are going too slow. Some people think life is passing them by at an alarming rate. Others still are just cruising through life, unaware of their speed or destination. Sometimes, we need to take a moment and check just which gear our life is in. More…
Brandon’s Thought’s
In leadership, it is important to pace yourself. You can’t do everything all at once, but you must be moving forward all the time. Craig gives some good examples of the different gears you are in at different times. In addition to pacing yourself, you must be sure to keep your life in balance. By doing that you will see marked success in your work.
What’s Best For Them? By Mary Jo Asmus
As a manager, you feel responsible for the well-being of your staff. It’s good for business to assure that everyone is happily engaged, motivated, and on the road to success. You know exactly what your followers need to be satisfied and successful, and you are here to deliver it to them.
However, when you tell these people about your great ideas for them, you sense resistance. For some reason, they aren’t as enthusiastic as you expected them to be.
There’s often a very simple reason for that: you don’t know what they want. More..
Brandon’s Thought’s
As leaders, you must know what your people want so you can help them. Sometimes it is hard to find out what they want because you get so busy with YOUR life and YOUR schedule. In the hustle and bustle of everyday business, you must take time to get to know your people so that you can help meet their needs. Ask them what they desire, what they seek in life, and what their career goals are. As you find the answers to these questions, you and your employees will be able to work together and be on the same page.
7 Keys to Charisma By Lyn Boyer
[…]Diane explained that the Presence of Flexibility encourages others to relax, experience insight and make personal connections. She also talked about how a leader’s emotions can affect the emotions of others through a physical and mental process called Limbic Resonance. Diane offered Sharon some tips to practice flexibility alone and then with other people:
- Relax your body.
- Smile. Allow your face to show enthusiasm.
- Look around as if sensing everything in your surroundings.
- Breathe everything in.
- Raise your hands as if realizing that ideas and opportunities may come from anywhere.
- Ask questions. Make your voice light and animated.
- Listen to ideas and thoughts of other people.
- Be open to possibilities.
More…
Brandon’s Thoughts
As leaders, it can be easy to have an iron fist one minute and expect collaboration the next minute. These types of leaders may get their employees to “collaborate”, but if the leader has the iron fist, very often the employees may be guarded. If the employees are too guarded, the leader may not get any of the great ideas that their employees have. The leader needs to be open-minded and let go of some of their tendencies to have an iron fist. From there they must also convey their message through their body language.
Why Leaders Can NOT Procrastinate By Jason Womack
Here are three ways to get going and sustain an action-orientation to your own productivity:
- Choose smaller verbs. One of the reasons that people don’t do things as they think of them (especially entrepreneurs and senior leaders) is because of their skill at Visionary Thinking. Because they CAN think big, they do. Chunk your objectives into smaller markers along your path to success. Recently, I worked with a Managing Partner of a Fortune 500 company who realized that more important than managing time is her need to more effectively direct her focus within the small chunks of time she has to work.
- Find, create, utilize and assess the extra time you have each day. Arrive to an off-site meeting somewhere early? Other people running late? Maybe you get a last-minute cancellation of an appointment you had scheduled. What can you do during that time? Get ready for 15-minute blocks of time (what I call “bonus time”) throughout the day. Why 15 minutes? That window is long enough to actually “do” something and short enough to find!
- Focus on what has happened. Regularly through the day (before lunch, and before you go home), take a moment and mentally check off what is complete. Oftentimes, there is so much going on, and so much you can think of that is UNDONE, you tend to forget how much is finished. This is your chance to recharge – as acknowledging completion is a quick way to get back on track. (Have you ever made a list of to-dos…after you’ve already done them?!) More…
Brandon’s Thoughts
Procrastination is a horrible trap to get into. If you procrastinate once, it becomes much easier to procrastinate again and again until all you do is procrastinate. Just as the blog pointed out, sometimes it is easy to procrastinate by getting into the trap of putting the urgent things ahead of the important things. It in turn leads to good things getting done, but not the best/most important.
Summary
This weeks topics were vision, maintain leadership pace, put your people first, promote leadership interaction, and don’t procrastinate. As a leader, it is very important to master each of these topics so that you can be an effective leader. What topics do you focus on as a leader? What are your habits for becoming a better leader? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!
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