Many organisations are suffering a critical shortage of effective senior managers. A senior manager is usually a manager of managers or a manager that needs to lead highly competent individuals. It is critical that that senior managers master some foundational skills if they are to be successful in this role. Here are some of the critical skills that I teach during my Critical Skills for Senior Managers Program.
A leader who wishes to bypass resistance, prepare hearts and minds and facilitate lasting changes for his or her organisation must understand and be able to use the power of story and metaphor. In a previous post I shared about the construction of metaphors and wanted to expand on this with specific relevance to leadership in today’s challenging environment.
What stories are you telling your people? Do you know what stories are you telling yourself? Continue Reading »
As a leadership consultant and executive coach I am often asked by my clients to help them understand and navigate organisational politics.Most people I speak to have a negative perspective of politics, they associate it with backstabbing and pushing your own agenda at a cost to others. I have a different perspective; my experience is that business politics is about human nature and to ignore it is to ignore reality. In a perfect world the best workers would be promoted on merit alone and the best ideas would be adopted regardless of personal interest – but we do not live in Utopia we live in the real world. If you want to survive and prosper in the real world you need to combine good work with smart politics.
The term ‘Machiavellian’ is often used to negatively label those who have mastered the Art of Politics in Businesss but this may be paying a disservice to Nicolo Machievelli ( 1469 -1527) who wrote a handbook for politics and human nature called “The Prince”. I read The Prince as a young man but I recommend that my coaching clients read “The New Machievelli” by Alistair McAlpine. Continue Reading »
Modern organisations strive to develop their leaders to gain a competitive advantage; and smart companies are changing from the traditional management style of command-and-control to a model of self-leadership and shared-leadership. This is particularly important with knowledge workers in virtual teams or in flatter, matrix organisations.
Self-leaders have a drive for autonomy, are more creative and persist, even in the face of adversity. Shared-leadership allows team members to influence peers, superiors and sub-ordinates with the objective to lead one another to innovation and the achievement of high performance objectives.
In this video, inspirational speaker, Andrew Bryant shares a contingent model for developing leaders with self-leadership.
This blog is a draft from my new book on self-leadership with Dr. Ana Kazan.
“Why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are?”- Plato
Self-leadership begins with self-observation, which means noticing our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Self-observation is like checking the instruments of an airplane to ensure it is flying level and on course. By checking in on ourselves we can make adjustments which allow us to be more purposeful and effective. Continue Reading »
In a popular previous post, ‘dealing with difficult questions’, Sandy Kaye explored techniques for handling your audience. As part of my video series on Presentation Skills, you can view how I handle questions.
Mentoring is a developmental partnership between a Mentor, a leader with expertise in one or more areas, and a Mentee, an individual seeking learning and growth in these areas.
High potential, commmited to their career, hungry to learn and disciplined enough to execute what they have learned.
In short, the ideal mentee is leadership material. Continue Reading »
When communicating any message it is essential that we are congruent, that is to say our words match our tonality which matches our body language. It is also important to get our facts right, because to fail to do so will lose you all credibility.
You may be familiar with the above statistics which are regularly rolled out by communication trainers to make the point that tonality (38%) and body language/facial expressions (55%) are important in getting your message across. The irony is that people, who I believe should know better, are promoting a myth by quoting statistics without knowing what they mean. Continue Reading »
Do you want to be a motivational or inspiration speaker or trainer? Then there is one thing you must avoid – Death by Power Point.
You know the symptoms; you are sitting in a slightly darkened room and the speaker drones on in a montone whilst showing you slide after slide, dot point after dot point, spreadsheets you can’t read and before you know it your eyelids feel heavy and your consciousness floats away.
Power Point is a powerful tool that is often misused and yet with a little preparation can bring your presentation to life and free you to inform and inspire your audience.
I trust you enjoyed the short YouTube video above. For more information about presentation skill training and coaching, visit www.selfleadership.com.sg
in a previous post, How to Influence Your Boss, I explored how to influence upwards, but just as important is how to influence laterally.
When I teach a programs on influence or influence without authority, I ask participants to create a circle of influence like the diagram below.
I then ask them to put ticks or crosses, representing ability or inability to influence, against each circle. Obviously some circles will need sub-circles to represent individual key people. This is a useful exercise to map out where you need to develop or strengthen your influence.
In a modern matix style organisation, your success will be determined not just by what you do, but by what you can influence others to do. The effective manager/leader learns to find out what is important to the people in their circle of influence and communicates to them in terms of what matters them rather than directly stating their own needs.
Another previous post, titled ‘Leadeship is Influence’ expands on finding needs and looks at what are people’s currencies. When you know what is valuable, a currency, to another person you can trade them what they want for what you want.
I have been coaching a senior manager who had a history of antagonising clients and colleagues alike by telling them what he thinks is the right thing to do. We had discussed this and he had commited to stop “telling” and start finding out what’s important to the people in his circle. This week he reported a dramatic improvement in his relationship and that he was getting things done quicker. This result surprised him because he thought it would take longer to ask questions than to tell people what seem to him to be an obvious solution.
Have you drawn a circle of influence? Do you know the currencies of the people you work with? Are you exercising all the influence you could?
Feel free to let me know.
