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#Leadership : The Self-Driven Manager’s Guide to Leadership…I’ve often Found that Self-Driven People make Good Leaders. After all, They usually are Harder on Themselves than anyone Else Could Ever Be, Which Drives them Towards Success.

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Because of this, they act as their own accountability partners and they rarely need to be pushed. They also are not afraid of hard work; perfection must be reached, regardless of the hours. While self-drivers possess many qualities that help them climb the management ladder, they also might struggle when leading people who operate from different motivators.

Free- Stones stacked on each other

Here are three keys for self-driven leaders to remember:

1. There is no such thing as perfect.

For the self-driven leader, it’s not uncommon for them to demand perfection from themselves. The target is a benchmark that is impossibly lofty, but as a high achiever, you sometimes manage to reach it. The problem is when you try to hold your team to the same stringent standards as you do for yourself. People are never perfect. To err is human.

When perfectionists expect their teams to approach goals with the same degree of precision, the employees are doomed to never meet expectations. Not only that, this type of leader will tend to get annoyed by even the most inconsequential imperfections, causing enormous frustration.

Related: How Leaders Can Best Manage Conflict Within Their Teams

Does this mean that lowering expectations is the answer? Not necessarily. It’s a combination of choosing what to focus on and looking past stylistic differences. The perfectionist by definition wants everything to be just right. This can result in focusing too much attention towards what isn’t going right — even if it is not a key result area of your business. While you should not ignore an important constraint, ask yourself if it’s really where your attention should be concentrated. If not, focusing on the bigger picture can help you steer your team in the right direction.

Shifting emphasis away from the minor imperfections also can give your team more leeway to operate within their own style preferences versus strictly adopting yours. This can be tremendously valuable in not only getting the most out of each individual team member, but also in the discovery of better approaches you otherwise might not have pursued.

 

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2. Your drivers may differ from your team’s.

One aspect self-driven leaders often share is that they know exactly where they want to go and are in a hurry to get there. Whether it’s a big promotion, an income target or a juicy assignment — your motivators are clear and compelling. While this surely works for you, it’s very likely your team is going to be comprised of individuals with lots of other drivers. Great leaders don’t operate under a one style fits all model. They get to know the team first and work with each individual to put together a mutually beneficial plan.

Related: 10 Insights on Building, Motivating and Managing an Exceptional Team

3. Others may need your ability to push yourself.

One of the reasons some people rise up the ranks faster than others is because they are naturally able to grasp concepts quickly and apply them without much supervision. These individuals are able to produce prodigious results, whether their leader is exceptional or not. They are successful and have been promoted in many ways because they can operate largely in a self-sufficient manner. Through years of experience, these individuals have learned how to motivate themselves.

Upon being asked to lead others, these individuals can become frustrated that their teams do not have the same skill sets. This should not be mistaken for either a lack of effort or disinterest. It’s more likely they need someone to help hold them accountable. They require the occasional nudge, pat on the back or kick in the rear. Gradually, they can reach a level of greater self-sufficiency, but it needs to be coached, learned and practiced.

Related: 4 Smart Strategies for Managing a Small Team

The best leaders have the ability to relate to each member of their team, regardless of their diversity. Remembering that every member is unique — and allowing for such differences — can help determine whether you become a great versus good organization.

 

Entrepreneur.com | August 15, 2016 | Marty Fukuda

 

#Leadership : Leadership is a Role, & the Best Managers are Brilliant Actors…You were Selected to the Role of Leader for a Reason, to Perform. That Performance goes Beyond Delivering Results. It Includes Portraying That you Know What you’re Doing, even Though you Sometimes Don’t.

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Imagine having your team go from five people to 80 in an instant.  That’s what happened to Mike Calihan, a senior executive with Aldridge Electric Inc., a national infrastructure construction company based in Chicago.

Free- Man on Skateboard with Sign on Ground

He had been a project manager, managing relatively small electrical projects. He had been involved in crafting a response to a bid put out by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

As he tells it, “It was a longshot, because we hadn’t managed a project for this type of work at the scale specified in the bid.”

Calihan had a big-gulp moment when the bid was opened and he saw that Aldridge had won the contract. He was tapped to lead the behemoth project, which meant leading a team that was 16 times larger than he had ever led before.

As he explains it, “At first, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was in way over my head, and scared as hell.” When asked how he went from being a manager of five people to a leader of eighty, he replied, “Sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. You don’t start with the skills; you develop them along the way.”

A lot of leadership and organizational development books have started to underscore the importance of authenticity. When you’re a leader, the people you’re leading want to know that the power that accompanies your leadership hasn’t gone to your head.

They want to know that you “get” that leadership is a privilege, not an entitlement, and that you still pull up your own britches, just like they do. People want to know that you remember your roots and that you haven’t forgotten where you came from. In short, they want to know that you’re real.

 

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It’s important to remember, though, that leadership is not just a way of being and behaving, it’s a role. And when you’re in the role of leader, you have to perform that role. What you display to others sometimes has to be based on what the role calls for, and what others’ need, versus what you may actually be feeling.

For example, if people are freaking out about a large new acquisition the organization is making, you’ll only get them more upset if you freak out, too, even if you quietly are. What you portray and what you’re actually feeling may sometimes be at odds. But you don’t lead people according to where they are, you lead them according to where they need to go.

Often that means that your leadership demeanor needs to be compensatory to your followers’ demeanor. When people are freaking out, you need to portray confidence and resolve. When people are complacent and apathetic, you need to portray worry and concern. This may not exactly be authentic, but it’s what people need and what the role of leader calls for you to portray.

You, authentically inauthentic

The trick is not to be so caught up in your leadership role that you look like a histrionic Shakespearean thespian. You’ve still got to be real and unpretentious.

When you don’t know something, you still have to be honest about it. It’s just that you also have to cloak your true feelings every now and then. When you do, you’ll often start out with one set of feelings and end with another anyway.

At the start of a big hairy project, you may be full of knee-knocking fear — and keeping your anxiety under wraps will serve the project better than if you inject it into everyone else.

The more you get into the project, the more the fear will start to lift and confidence will start to grow. Yes, as Calihan suggested, after faking it you start to make it.

By the way, feeling like you’re faking it will be a predominant feeling throughout your career.

It’s normal and natural for leaders to have a nagging feeling that this is the day they’ll be found out.

No leader has all the answers to every problem, so it takes a lot of improvisation. You’ll be making up a lot of stuff as you go along.

As you do, people still need to see you as competent. They don’t expect you to have all the answers, they just expect you to not shrink from the questions. Here are some tips for being a Genuine Faker:

  • Let ’em see you: People need to know that you have a life outside of work, just like them. They need to see your non-work identity. Occasionally share stories from your family life. Let people know what you like to do for fun outside of work. Include pictures from your outside-of-work life in your workspace. Show people who you really are when you step outside of the role of leader.
  • Plumb your unconfident past: Think about moments in your career when you felt in over your head. What was the situation/opportunity, and how did it come about? How did you deal with your lack of confidence? How did your confidence evolve as the situation/opportunity progressed? How transparent was what you were experiencing to others around you? How might the lessons from that situation/opportunity be used as a reference point when you feel over your head in future situations?
  • Clarify Point B: Leadership often involves moving people from Point A to Point B. The behaviors required to be successful at Point B are usually different than those at Point A. As a leader, you have to practice the behaviors that the future requires before others will catch on. People take cues from you. Draw a line down a piece of paper and create two headers: Point A and Point B. Differentiate between the behaviors that make a person successful today (Point A) versus the behaviors that will make a person successful after they’ve moved to Point B. Acting as the leader means adopting the Point B behaviors before others do.

Bill Treasurer is the chief encouragement officer of Giant Leap Consulting, Inc. He is the author of four books, including “Leaders Open Doors: A Radically Simple Leadership Approach to Lift People, Profits, and Performance” (TD Press, 2014). Learn more atGiantLeapConsulting.com.

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Read the original article on SmartBrief. If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s email listfor our daily newsletter on being a better leader and communicator. Copyright 2016. Follow SmartBrief on Twitter.

Businessinsider.com | April 28, 2016 | Bill Treasurer, SmartBrief

#Leadership : 4 Things You Need To Know About Working With #Teams Today…Not all Teams are Created Equal. So if Working in Teams is as Normal as the Workday Itself then Remember These 4 Points When Working With your Team

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Businesses today are compelled to keep up with the rapid pace of change if they want to survive. If they want to stay competitive, however, they must get ahead of that change curve. Companies—and the people who run them—must adapt to change by finding new ways of working for which there are no blueprints. And they must do so together.

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Nothing gets accomplished as effectively or as efficiently as it does through a team. Everything in business today happens through a “team” or group. (I use quotation marks because not all teams are true teams.) It must. The complexity of business challenge is too great for any single individual to think through on one’s own.

However, not all teams are created equal. So if working in teams is as normal as the workday itself then remember these four points when working with your team:

1. The team’s decision is more accurate than your decision. In his book The Wisdom Of Crowds, James Surowiecki explains how team decisions are more accurate than any single decision made by an individual. When there’s confrontation or differences of opinion within a team, members don’t typically ask dissenters to change their opinions. Instead, the team is forced to work through the problem, thereby discovering new solutions previously unforeseen. Strangely, the best way to encourage “smart” team thinking is to promote individualism.

 

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2. Team potential depends upon the leader’s maturity. Teams oftentimes don’t realize their potential because leaders aren’t sure how to do so; they’re unaware of what it means to be a team or how to adapt their leadership style to the situation. Leaders fall into one of two roles within a team. They fill a top-down role where they delegate, instruct and outline rules and boundaries, or, they fill a peer role where they work side-by-side with fellow teammates. This role change requires a mental shift that isn’t easy for leaders and it stunts team development.

3. What’s not said is just as important as what is. The challenge for many teams and the leaders who run them is not just managing the social dynamics, but being aware of them. Running a meeting, for example, demands an enormous amount of focus and attention to the content at hand, and trying to process the emotions exchanged throughout the group is too much for any single person. Agendas fall off topic, egos get in the way, sidebar conversations create new agendas and all of a sudden nothing gets accomplished. What’s needed is a third party to observe these trends and drive the team back to its stated goal; to raise the individual and collective awareness of the team.

4. The message sent isn’t always the message received. The game of telephone that we all failed in kindergarten (it’s OK, I did too) was a simple exercise in communication. You simply listen to the message passed and relay that message to the next person. The reason playing telephone fails is because we inject our own interpretations into the process. That is, we interpret a message based on what we think it should mean and then pass that message as the original. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon occurs in business everyday.

We assume that the message sent over email will be the message received but without precise language, that message falls prey to interpretation which leads to duplicative efforts, excess costs and wasted time. Now, scale this to a team–or a large company–where people are geographically dispersed all over the globe and you understand why organizational chaos exists. Teams require consistent communication and (role) clarity to get ahead. Without clarity, it’s easy for members to play the blame game (“That wasn’t my job”) and without communication, the ball gets dropped.

Teams are everything and they’re everywhere, and the first step to realizing the hidden potential of your team is being aware of the unspoken challenges ahead.

Jeff is an executive coach, author of Navigating Chaos: How To Find Certainty in Uncertain Situations, Managing The Mental Game and former Navy SEAL.

 

Forbes.com | April 8, 2016 | Jeff Boss

#Leadership : True Grit: How My Team Learned To Thrive In The Face Of Adversity…Business is a Game of Dramatic Ups & Downs, Especially for Teams that are Trying to Create Something New or Bring about Meaningful Change in a Stagnant & Complacent Market.

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It’s easy to feel a bit bipolar at times. Some days you’re on top of the world, and other days you’re just trying to stay alive. How a team manages these swings, and the periods of adversity in particular, is what separates successful businesses from failures.

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Every business encounters adversity. It’s one of the few constants that you can count on and it can be all too easy to allow these setbacks to get you down, discourage your efforts, and extinguish the fire that keeps you going. Good leaders recognize this fact but find the courage and wherewithal to help their teams avoid these pitfalls.

I’m not an expert on many things, but one area where I have plenty of experience is dealing with adversity. At BodeTree, my team and I have had our fair share of failures, strikeouts, and unfair situations. Despite these setbacks, however, we always keep moving forward. We’ve learned to use adversity to our advantage, and it all comes down to one trait: grit.

Remember that character is king

Grit is just another word for strength of character. An individual or team who displays grit is someone who can take a hit and just keep on going, no matter what. It’s this resilience that enables successful teams to avoid the pitfalls of depression, lethargy, and apathy that people tend to run into when faced with adversity. It may seem like grit is an innate virtue that people people either are born with or not, but this isn’t the case. Grit can be developed, just like any other skill.

Developing grit in yourself is difficult; trying to develop it in others is even harder. It takes equal parts understanding, compassion, and dedication. Over the years at BodeTree, I’ve learned that grit starts with intellectual honesty and the ability to face your fears. Leaders looking to foster gritty teams can start by fostering an environment of transparency and trust. When team members know how they’re being judged and what the expectations are, they’re more willing to be honest about shortcomings and face their fears. If team members feel as though their next mistake will be their last, anxiety sets in and people tend to crumble in the face of adversity. Leaders must create an environment that encourages grit and resilient thinking across the board.

 

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Turn anger and frustration into something productive

If you’ve developed a gritty team,  you can use adversity and challenges to your advantage. There are only two ways to handle bad situations; you can accept what happened and roll over, or you can get mad. I’ve found that turning the other cheek is rarely productive in business. Instead, I like to work to focus the collective anger and frustration of my team into something productive and transformational.

We’ve faced some difficult situations at BodeTree over the last few years, including deals and partnerships falling through at the 11th hour. The news can be devastating at first, but it can also be motivating. We’ve learned to let our feelings of self-pity give way to righteous indignation. We channel our anger into productivity and let it renew our passion to bring about change. For us, succeeding in our space is no longer a matter of business or strategy; it’s personal.

I’m fortunate to have such a dedicated and gritty team. The adversity we’ve faced could have derailed us, robbing the team of its drive and dampening our will to move forward. Lesser teams would have crumbled, but we’ve managed to turn adversity into an advantage. Our anger and resilience pushes us forward and gives us purpose. We’ve become a team hell-bent on advancing constantly, uninterested in anything short of total market dominance.

I hope that our experience can serve as an example for other teams. You will face adversity in your endeavors no matter what they are, that much is certain. Just remember that success isn’t determined by whether or not you encounter challenges, but rather by the way you respond to those challenges. Leaders of teams must work to developing grit, both in themselves as well as the people they lead. The resilience that results will enable individuals and teams to transform anger and frustration into a powerful motivator that can you forward, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

 

Forbes.com | February 15, 2016 | Chris Myers

 

 

Chris Myers is the Cofounder and CEO of BodeTree, a web application designed to help small businesses manage their finances.

#Leadership : 8 Ways to Not Only Survive But Prosper Around Negative People…To Be an Manager/Entrepreneur, you Have to Have a Thick Skin & Not be Defensive to Customer Feedback & Constructive Criticism. On the Other Hand, No Manager/Entrepreneur should Tolerate Negative Vibes & Complainers on their Own Team.

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The challenge is to understand the difference between these two situations — and to respond effectively to both. You can’t reinforce negative thinking and stay positive.

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Related: People Hating on You? Here Are 4 Ways to Use That Negative Energy to Your Advantage.

Even active listening to negative team members and partners, as you would with customers, will perpetuate the toxic habit. In addition, the other members of your team may become infected with the same negativity and will erode the passion and innovation that you need to compete and survive. In my experience, good entrepreneurs proactively minimize negativity as follows:

1. They stifle their own occasional negativity in front of the team.

We all get frustrated when the economy turns against us, investors can’t be found or a customer turns into a nightmare. In these cases, you must keep your thoughts to yourself, and be the role model for positive creative solutions. Your team will practice what they see and hear.

2. Extract and highlight potential positives from every negative.

If your team is struggling with quality problems before shipment, remind them that it’s great to have found these problems before customers could be impacted. The alternative is that everyone, including yourself, will eventually feel defeated and de-energized.

 

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3. Turn responsibility back to the complainer and ask for solutions.

Sometimes, team members are frustrated and just want to vent, so asking them to bring you solutions, not just problems, will set a more positive tone and may circumvent future negative outbursts. For those who don’t learn, it’s time for swift job reassignment and performance counseling.

Related: Stressed at Work? Ditch the Drama Already.

4. Don’t accept excuses for any negative outcomes.

Excuses are a way of not accepting full responsibility for actions, if there is a negative outcome. Even worse, some people believe negativity is a way of impressing everyone with their wisdom. Make sure that complainers understand from your reward system that excuses don’t mitigate failures.

5. Restrain from engaging complainers at their level.

If none of these approaches work, it’s better to defer the discussion to another time and place with no emotion. Trying too hard to convert people to the positive view will likely result in you becoming the target, or permanently breaking the relationship. It’s better to listen in silence.

6. Remove yourself physically from a toxic environment.

Presence without engagement may be taken as tacit concurrence, so it’s best to exit the situation to somewhere neutral and quiet. The last thing you need is to be brought down to the same level, and lose your ability to provide positive leadership to the team.

7. Overlook occasional lapses in yourself and others.

Even the best professionals and leaders find themselves being negative occasionally. It’s human nature, in times of stress, when people are physically or mentally exhausted, or multiple deadlines loom. The challenge is to make lapses less frequent as a habit rather than more frequent.

8. Build a personal negativity shield from your confidence and passion.

All business leaders as well as innovative thinkers learn to deflect negative energy with an invisible cloak that allows them to move forward despite negative feedback from the crowd. They continually remind themselves of their vision to make the world a better place.

When negativity is positioned by team members as constructive criticism, be sure to ask for the constructive positive part of the message, offered in a friendly manner. Living with complainers in any business is a burden you don’t need, and it impacts everyone’s performance and mindset. Just as a positive mindset is infectious and brings the whole team up, a few negative ones will sicken your whole team and jeopardize your business. You can’t afford that kind of help.

 

Entrepreneur.com  |  February 2016 | Martin Zwilling

#Leadership : Top 10 Leadership Books of 2015…Hone your #Management Skills with the Latest & Greatest #Books on #Teams & Leadership.

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“Whenever I found myself pressing on, even though I’d pissed off my boss, his boss, my whole department or another department, I find myself thinking, ‘What is the worst that can happen? They will fire me.’ I had realized that I’d rather be fired then be a yes-man, and it’s been the single best thing for my career.”

 

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