Communication

Leadership Qualities You Need to Develop

By Brandon W. Jones on May 22, 2013 1

This is a guest post by Paul Smith. He likes music and comedies. He knows perfectly what he wants to achieve in his life. He is fond of writing and you can evaluate his works at essay writing service uk.

Your life is dull and boring, the days are similar and nothing special happens. You have a hateful work, your colleagues don’t seem to be friendly and you don’t know what you want to achieve. You dream about the better future, however don’t do anything to come closer to it. The leader always executes the possible ideas and it is the main difference between him and the dreamer. Stop living in your dreams – develop your leadership and make your desires real.

What are the main leadership qualities? Here I want to present you a short list of the required qualities to develop if you want to change your life for better.

Good communication. Well-developed communicative skills are very important in business, especially when you are a director. If you have some great idea concerning some future project or whatever else and cannot state your thought clearly, you will never come to a united cooperation and will never arrive at a consensus. That is why it is important to work for the improvement of your communication. [Read more…] about Leadership Qualities You Need to Develop

Effectively Communicate With Writing Skills

By Brandon W. Jones on April 18, 2013 6

Several years ago, I wrote a paper for school where I was supposed to convey a message. I felt like this would be an easy assignment because I had great writing skills, or so I thought… I got done with the paper and felt like I had done a great job. My thoughts changed, however, once I received it back from my teacher. After writing the paper, I realized that I had a long ways to go to improve my writing skills. My teacher read my paper and marked up many places where I had made small grammatical errors or other mistakes. Luckily that was at the beginning of the semester and my writing skills improved by the end of the semester. During that semester, my teacher taught me a lesson about the importance of having great writing skills.

In leadership and business, writing skills are very important. When you have strong writing skills, you are able to effectively communicate your message to your intended audience whether that is the board of directors, stockholders, employees, or anyone else.

Two Steps To Improve Your Writing Skills

Writing skills are essential for communicating in a professional environment. There are two steps you can take to improve your writing skills with little effort. [Read more…] about Effectively Communicate With Writing Skills

Speak Up Leaders

By Brandon W. Jones on April 3, 2013 4

There are many companies and organizations in the world that follow the Peter Principle by promoting from within. They promote from within to create a strong sense of unity and loyalty amongst the employees. With this philosophy, there is one problem that is very prevalent. The people being promoted are learning their organizations inside and out, but they are not acquiring all the skills necessary to be a great leader. One skill being underdeveloped is the ability to speak in public to grab the attention of the audience. I call this the ability to “Speak Up” as a leader. Public speaking is a learned skill that many people are not learning as they progress through their career.

How can you speak up?

The goal of any leader is to speak up so they have confidence while giving their presentation to get their message across. As people speak up, there are three main barriers that inhibit leaders from conveying the message. The three barriers are verbal, vocal, and visual communication.

Verbal

To speak up as a leader, it is important to use effective verbal communication. Verbal barriers are the barriers created from the words coming out of the speaker’s mouth. The verbal barriers come out when people stutter, have lots of “ums” or “ahs”, or have other issues causing them to stumble over their words. When speakers are “winging it,” there is a greater tendency for them to have these problems. It has been said that what you communicate is 7% verbal. [Read more…] about Speak Up Leaders

The Five B’s Of Leadership Organization

By Brandon W. Jones on February 7, 2013 4

In order to be a good leader it is very important to be organized. As a leader, this can also be quite a challenge because in most cases leaders have many responsibilities that they must constantly balance to be effective in what they do. It can be very easy to become very organized in your approach to one responsibility, while letting others gradually get less organized.

The Five B’s of Leadership Organization

The five B’s of organization will help you as a leader to focus your energy so that you can stay organized and maintain balance in your life.

1. Be organized In your communication.

As a leader, you must communicate with others regularly. That communication is done in many forms, e.g. public speaking, email, letters, meetings, etc. To be organized in your communication means that you have a consistent message that goes out to everyone. To be organized, you are also direct in the message that you convey.

Have you ever worked for someone that would tell you one thing in front of your coworkers and then something different in front of your boss or other departments? Isn’t that frustrating? A leader that is organized in their communication, maintains their integrity by keeping the same message on all fronts. When you, as a leader, are organized in your communication, you gain the trust and respect of those you lead and they are more willing to follow you. [Read more…] about The Five B’s Of Leadership Organization

Find The Right Setting For Feedback – Part 2 of 2

By Brandon W. Jones on November 27, 2012 0

This post on feedback is a continuation to yesterday’s post.

On a couple of occasions I took the opportunity after the meetings to have one-on-one meetings with each person that attended the meeting. Prior to each one-on-one meeting, I sent out a list questions that I wanted to discuss with the person. In those one-on-one meetings I would discuss some of the following questions:

Do you have questions lingering from the meeting? If so, what are they?
How are the changes effecting you personally?
What challenges have you seen with the changes?
How do you think the meeting was run?
What improvements could be made to run the meetings more efficiently?
How can I be a better leader for you so that all your questions are answered?
Is there anything that I am doing as your leader that you feel I could improve upon to better help you and the other team members?

Each of those questions sparked a different type of feedback. Some of the questions were general relating to the work that we were doing while others were very specific to me as a leader.

As I went through both the group and one-on-one meetings, it was very interesting to see the level of feedback I received. In the group setting a few individuals gave a lot of the feedback while the rest of the group would sit back and listen and not say much. Then in the one-on-one meetings, I got a much more in-depth level of feedback. In my situation each meeting was important and effective for different reasons. The group meetings allowed me to discuss the broad topics that were troubling the whole group, whereas the one-on-one meetings helped me to get feedback from the individual team members.

Find The Right Setting For Feedback – Part 1 of 2

By Brandon W. Jones on November 26, 2012 0

A little while back, I wrote a post about feedback. The post was titled Have You Discovered The Value Of Constructive Feedback? In that post, I mentioned different people from which you should request feedback. All those people fell within the following four groups.

Your leaders
Your followers
Your co-leaders (leaders on your same level)
Your customers

Each group provides a different angle of feedback because they have different perspectives on how you act as a leader towards them. Once you get feedback from one of the groups mentioned, it is very important to act on it so you can improve your leadership skills.

How To Ask For Feedback

While that post addressed many aspects of the “Who?” behind feedback, it didn’t address the “How?” Knowing how to ask for feedback is just as important as knowing who to ask. In response to my previous post I was asked in a response comment, “Do you recommend a one-on-one discussion or is a team discussion setting as a more effective setting for getting feedback?” [Read more…] about Find The Right Setting For Feedback – Part 1 of 2