Leadership is Leadership

"Control is not leadership; management is not leadership; leadership is leadership. If you seek to lead, invest at least 50% of your time in leading yourself—your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct. Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you and 15% leading your peers."— Dee Hock

As long as you're learning and growing, and are open to both, so will others be. If you live your word, then trust will be there. If you have purpose and conviction, then people might disagree with you but they'll still respect you. Managing people tp death for the purpose of having control over them isn't leadership. It's dictatorship.

In my opinion, managing from a perspective of 'power over people' is keeping people under your thumb and saying "I'm important and you're just here to serve a purpose...my purpose". Leading them in the way that inspires others to be their best, do their best and encourage others to do the same says "You're important and contribute to our organizational purpose".

What do you think is best?

Managers light a fire under people and have to do it often. Leaders stoke a fire inside people and feed it just enough through their leadership so it continues to burn.

Know Thyself as a Manager

Blogger Phil Clark posted a great blog titled Communications Made Simple. In it he lists 4 questions a manager should ask him/herself daily which are:

1. Does the person know the critical duties of their job?
2. Do they know what my (the manager) priorities are?
3. Have I let the employee know if they are doing the job correctly?
4. Do the employees know what I look for in successful performance?

He has a very good point. All too often I see managers assume their staff knows exactly what to do, how to do it and when it's got to be done for. That is not the case. In one organization where a staff survey was implemented and analyzed the staff stated that in many cases they didn't even know who some of their managers were. I kid you not! When asked who their direct managers reported to in their department, branch, etc they couldn't answer. That alone should send a signal.

I wonder if the survery was redone, if the results would be different?

Managers need to pay attention. Often they don't see some staffers are about to burn out, are up to their eyeballs in work with no relief in sight or are doing things that are no longer a priority. At the very least, they need to know enough so they can determine whether or not some of the work is redundant and speak to their managers about redefining priorities.

If they know what their managers' priorites are, then you can be certain they'll know whether what they're doing is in alignment with that or not. That one answer alone will save a lot of people a great deal of grief, wasted time and energy, not to mention money to the organization.

Have you asked your staff these questions?

Best..

Donna Karlin

*Note: Welcome new subcriber from The Republic of Tanzania. 114 countries and counting!

Interviews Go Both Ways

This morning I came across an interesting blog from the Chief Happiness Officer (yep it's true. Would I make something like that up?) The post was fantastic as it doesn't talk about all the things you have to prepare for when going on a job interview. It has to do with what questions you should ask of the potential employer and present staff before even considering going to work for the organization.

In it he says "What you really need to know now is, “Is this a nice place to work?” Are people happy at work here? Are the managers good? Are the co-workers nice? Or is this company a branch office of one of the nastier levels of hell?" Good questions, don't you think? For the rest of this excellent pre-moving-to-a-new-job thought provoker go to his post "Some Killer Questions to Ask In Your Next Job Interview"

Question: Going back to the old days of Fast Company Magazine where they used to have all kinds of fascinating information printed around the perimeter of the pages, job titles of the future and all those wonderful additional things that made me look forward to the unexpected in every issue, if you could rename your title, what would it be?

If you want a head start and some ideas, here's the link from the magazine which lists some of their job titles of the future http://www.fastcompany.com/articles_by_topic/careerjt

Best!
Donna Karlin