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Showing posts from November, 2011

Successful Leaders Need Mental Toughness And This Is Something Anyone Can Learn.

Image via Wikipedia My last post said that with practice you can learn to think positively and confidently about making changes.  You   can develop a resilient mindset.  This post takes this further and offers help! People with inborn talent may be good at what they do—but experience shows that only the mentally tough reach the highest plateaus in their field. Mental toughness is something anyone can learn. Director of mental training for the St. Louis Cardinals and a top-tier executive coach, Dr. Jason Selk knows everything there is to know about developing mental toughness! Inspired on the vision of legendary basketball coach John Wooden , Dr Selk has developed a program that is as simple as it is effective. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. You will have to put effort in if you are serious about being successful.   But this is a great way to build up your mental “muscles.”  Dr Selk provides hands-on daily exercises for breaking old, sel...

Leader, Leadership and Leadership Styles

According to Alan Keith of  Genentech  " Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen”. A leader is a person who influences a group of people towards a specific result. But how that person influences varies with the style of the leader. Leadership styles can range from the autocratic (“I’m going to tell you what to do”) to completely free reign (“You do it your way but get it right!”).  The easiest way to think of it, is in three main flavours. Leadership Styles Transactional Leadership Transactional leaders provide rewards if, and only if, people perform as they require and are believed by the leader to work hard enough! This leader wants to contract with you in detail to set the exact reward you will receive for an exact amount of effort. This leader is unlikely to want to change how things are done or to listen to your suggestions for improving things; just make sure the agreed performance goal...

Leading from Within

"For me, leadership is a shared responsibility for creating a better world in which to live and work.  It manifests in our passion to engage others in bringing about purposeful change."  Leading From Within -  Nancy Huber Harvard Business Review on the Mind of the Leader Emotion is not always given its due importance in leadership literature. This is what the Harvard Business Review  has to say about ‘The mind of the Leader’: “If you are looking for leaders, how can you identify people who are motivated by the drive to achieve rather than by external rewards? The first sign is a passion for the work itself — such people seek out creative challenges, love to learn and take great pride in a job well done. They also display an unflagging energy to do things better and are forever raising the performance bar.” Since we can’t all lead, all the time, it is emotion - passion for a particular work - more than intelligence - that can help us find who has...

When things go wrong! Giving criticism and negative feedback! Seven Ways to Be!

When things go wrong Sometimes in leading or managing a team we need to give criticism or negative feedback.  Not everything can be perfect every time.  Sometimes things go wrong.  And sometimes that something is down to an action or lack of action by a person or a group of people. First and most important be sure of the facts.  Try to find out exactly what went wrong and why. To do this properly you need to have won the confidence and trust of your team.  They need to know that you will deal with them honestly, fairly and with compassion.  That does not mean that you will never give criticism when it is due. Make sure that your criticism is constructive – it should be about getting things right in the future not about punishment or about scapegoats.  It should not be about the personal qualities of people.  You are not a parent, a school teacher or a judge in a Court of Law. Dealing with discipline If you think there has been a discip...