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#Leadership : 3 Things Leaders Must Consider For The Sharing Economy…A Constantly Changing Landscape Needs People who are Willing and Able to Constantly Change with It —People who can Adapt Not Only as Individuals, But also as Teams. They Must be Adaptable, Resilient and Curious Enough to Learn So as to Embrace Change Quickly and Continue On.

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With teams on the rise in business today according to research by this article, people must be able to coordinate disparate interests, communicate across silos and do so without the added advantage of a stable team environment. After all, the business environment of today is anything but steady—it’s fast moving, constantly changing and a bit chaotic.

Clockwork

If, for example, you work in a hospital where your team changes every shift, then every time it disbands and re-bands there are new interpersonal dynamics to learn, new skills and competencies, new mindsets and fears that you must re-familiarize yourself with every time.

The problem is, in such fast moving environments, there’s no time to learn about each other’s backstory or practice working together. You must be able to work together before called upon because otherwise the patient (client) suffers.

A constantly changing landscape needs people who are willing and able to constantly change with it —people who can adapt not only as individuals, but also as teams. They must be adaptable, resilient and curious enough to learn so as to embrace change quickly and continue on.

However, it’s not simply up to each and every individual to “get there” but rather organizational leaders to set the right environment for such behaviors to occur. Here are three considerations for doing so:

Knowledge feeds knowledge. When you know more, you more you want to know. In a study conducted by psychologist George Loewenstein, subjects were divided into two groups. In the first group, each participant was placed in front of a computer whose screen was segmented into 50 different squares. Behind each square was a different animal, so every time a participant clicked on a square, a new animal was revealed. After a few clickthroughs the participants stopped clicking because they knew what to expect.

Now, compare this with the second group who faced similar computers with 50 squares on the screen again. Except this time, behind each square was a picture of the same animal. What happened? Every participant clicked through because their curiosity was heightened the more information they received. Information enabledprogress, just as it does for people in your team. That’s why…

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Knowledge is not power. Yes, you read that correctly–knowledge is not power. The old adage that knowledge is power is no longer relevant in a world of interconnectivity and global dispersion . If you’re holding onto information because you think it’ll protect your own interests, think again. Knowledge enables. Knowledge arms. Knowledge feeds knowledge , just as we saw above. It builds the capacity for others to build theirs. Unless you want to be bogged down with information overwhelm anddecision fatigue, you must share what you know with others to:

  1. Avoid duplicated tasks
  2. Maximize time and reduce wasted costs
  3. Stay sane

The increased rate of technology today beckons more subject matter experts to be able to “diagnose” technology, but the global dispersion of information warrants generalists who can assimilate those unique pieces of information and fit them into a larger puzzle. What this means is that people must learn how to team, how to share information and fill each other’s knowledge gaps.

Teaming is a skill. There’s a realization taking place in business today. Companies are realizing that the hierarchy in which they’re structured isn’t how work actually get things done. Instead, work is accomplished through clusters of relationships; through teams of people—it always has and most likely always will. This has profound impacts for competitive advantage because if these clusters aren’t leveraged for their scalability then that means the tacit knowledge held amongst these networks can’t be shared. Relationships are sources of intimate knowledge, which is a challenge for any leader to set a psychologically safe environment for people to share what’s on their minds with the team rather than at the bar, I mean, water cooler.

The ability to team is a learned skill–one that starts by sharing information and trusting each other to share.

Jeff is the author of Navigating Chaos: How To Find Certainty in Uncertain Situations and former Navy SEAL who helps business teams find clarity.

Forbes.com | September 12, 2016 | Jeff Boss

#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.

Free- Boat going Nowhere

 

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 : 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.

Free- Locks

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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#Leadership : Why this CEO Makes his Executive Team Climb a Mountain that has Claimed more Lives than Everest…CEO Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani Has his Leadership Team do Something More Adventurous than Gathering at a Cushy Resort.

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Like a lot of big companies, the Japanese internet giant Rakutenused to host annual offsite retreats where all the executives would meet at a golf course to connect and talk strategy. About seven years ago, that tradition changed radically.  CEO Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani tells Business Insider that he now has his leadership team do something more adventurous than gathering at a cushy resort.

Rakuten Tanigawa 4

CEO Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani.

Instead, execs now meet on Mount Tanigawa every year, a Japanese mountain that hasclaimed the lives of more climbers than Mount Everest.

Despite that jarring death toll, Mikitani decided to change the company offsite after hiking the mountain with his young son. Although the climb is difficult, some trails, including the one Rakuten employees take, are less dangerous than others.

Mikitani sees the tradition as the perfect way for execs to get to know each other better through a non-conventional bonding experience. Even more importantly, the struggle to make it to the top altogether symbolizes the idea of working through company difficulties as a team.

Rakuten Tanigawa 3RakutenCompany executives climbing through the fog. “Rakuten always goes to the peak,” Mikitani grins.

 

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One other exec who has climbed Mount Tanigawa several times gleefully told Business Insider that he almost died last year when he started sliding on the rocks under his feet. He almost careened off the side of a cliff before managing to grab onto a rock. His teammates and their guide then threw him a rope he used to climb back onto the path.

Rakuten Tanigawa 2 (1)Rakuten

Although the offsite is all about team building and pushing boundaries, another exec jokes that it also acts as a good way for employees to stay in good physical condition through the year.

“The fear keeps you fit,” he laughs, saying that he would remind himself to go to the gym more often in the months leading up to the retreat.

Mikitani recalls one particularly memorable climb where he invited a journalist who planned to profile the company to join the expedition. After a grueling ascent and witnessing how execs continually pushed themselves and each other to the limit to make it to the top, the journalist, between his own tired gasps, apparently said, “Now I finally feel like I understand Rakuten.”

Rakuten Tanigawa 6Rakuten

 

Businessinsider.com | September 21, 2015 |