This week’s top five leadership posts will help motivate you to be a better leader. The leadership posts have a lot of good content that you can use to improve your leadership abilities. The topics of this week’s posts are learning from mistakes, living out your dreams, obstacles that get in the way of change, the importance of thanking your team, and accomplishing your goals. I hope you enjoy!
The Top 5 Mistakes Leaders Make by Beth Armknecht Miller
Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of leaders many who have displayed specific leadership shortfalls, that when improved, have had a positive impact on the effectiveness and profitability of the organization. Both new and experienced manager/leaders can make these top five mistakes; which one is your Achilles heel? And what is your plan to improve?
- Focusing on the urgent and not the important
- Lack of consistent communication
- Ineffective feedback
- Failing to define clear goals
- Misunderstanding motivation
Brandon’s Thoughts
I really like the points that Beth made. It is very important to not fall prey to any of these pitfalls. As a leader, it is so important to regularly evaluate your performance and identify what works well and what does not. As you do that, you will avoid the mistakes other people had to painstakingly go through.
How To Live Your Dream When You’re Scared To Death By Jeff Goins
There is a tragedy in our world today. Most people aren’t living their dreams, and the reason is simple: fear. They’re scared to be who they are.
When you endeavor to find your life’s work, there is a lot at risk:
- You could fail.
- You could lose the respect of your friends.
- You could go broke.
You could mess up in a hundred different ways. But—and this is important—you could also succeed. And until you start living into your calling, you’re robbing the world of a gift. […]
How did this happen? Simple. I believed in the dream before it happened. I didn’t wait for fear to go away; I started living into the reality I was longing for.
If you’re going to live and lead intentionally, you’ll have to do the same. There are three steps you need to take if you’re going to pursue your passion.
- Step 1: Declare it.
- Step 2: Believe it.
- Step 3: Do it.
Brandon’s Thoughts
I don’t know the stats, but I would imagine most leaders don’t start with a dream of “being a leader”. Instead, they dream of making the world a better place through their talents, intuition, innovation, or some other means. Obtaining their dream requires them to stand up and be a leader. Once you start on the path of leadership, you will encounter many challenges and risks. If you are not willing to step up and work hard, you will not fulfill your dream. The steps mentioned in this point will help you to stay focused to obtain your dreams.
Change: What Gets In The Way? By Steve Roesler
Defending the status quo.
- “That will never work.”
- “… That said, the labor laws make it difficult for us to do a lot of the suggestions [you] put out. And we do live in a lawsuit oriented society.””
- “Can you show me some research that demonstrates that this will work?”
These are just a few of the real-life quotes about defending the status quo from a Seth Godin post that I saved about six years ago. Given that our work here always includes organizational or individual change, we’ve heard most of them more than once. How about you?
Brandon’s Thoughts
When you are going to change something, you have to work very hard to have all measures in place to make the change succeed. If you don’t set the change up properly, you will get a lot of kickback from all involved parties even if it is a great idea. The greatest ideas in the world will fail if they don’t have proper execution which comes through change management.
Leadership How-To: Thanking Your Team By Lisa Petrilli
As leaders, do we thank our teams enough? It’s often the case that as the leader we become the one who receives the visibility and “spotlight.” But we don’t earn that spotlight without a strong team behind us. When we receive it, we owe it to our teams to:
1. Thank them, purposefully
2. Show some emotion: our sincere gratitude that reflects our own genuine sense of emotion
3. Share the spotlight and thank them publicly whenever possible
4. Remember to thank them when no one is watching
5. Do our own jobs to the best of our ability, seeking every opportunity for growth
Because our success as leaders is wholly related to the success of our teams. The more we provide them resources, empowerment, encouragement, and gratitude to fuel their success, the stronger we perform. It’s a win-win.
Brandon’s Thoughts
In leadership, it is very easy to get caught up in the mundane day-to-day life to the point that you just think of your team members as resources to get the job done. If you ever fall into this rut, you are failing as a leader. Your people do great work regularly and you must show appreciation for all they do. As you show appreciation, you will see greater loyalty from your followers and you will find more unity within your team.
Goal Accomplished By Bret Simmons
I ran my first marathon on October 3, 2004 at the age of 43. I’d been a casual runner my whole life, but always thought that running a marathon was something “other” people did, and certainly not something an old fart like me could even consider. In 2003 I was working at North Dakota State University when a colleague of mine, Joe Mike Jones, mentioned in casual conversation that he had run two marathons when he was in his 40’s. I knew then that if Joe Mike could do it, so could I.
As I learned how to train for a marathon, I discovered the biggest barriers to accomplishing this goal were between my ears. It’s amazing what your body can do once your mind gets with the program. I learned a lot about how to train from a good book by Hal Higdon, but I learned the most from two very gracious women that let me crash their party and train with them. They taught me much of what I know today about how to prepare for a marathon. More…
Brandon’s Thoughts
As a leader it is very important to set and obtain your goals. You must start out with what may seem like small goals. As you obtain one goal, you will be more prepared to obtain the next goal. Every great leader starts with one goal and builds from there. I have seen it happen time and time again where a leader will have the goal of doing something small. After each small goal, they set a new goal. Once they have progressed to the point where they can look back on their progress, they find that they have come a lot farther than they ever imagined possible. The key is to push forward through the hard times.
Summary
Each of the leadership posts teach a principle of leadership success. To become a great leader, you must focus on one principle at a time and do all you can to master it. With each mastery, you will get closer to your ultimate goal of being a great leader.
What is your favorite leadership principle taught in the posts above and why? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!
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