If you are working to develop your leadership skills, develop a plan.
Identify the following:
- Where do you have opportunities to display leadership?
- How will you be show leadership?
- What kind of legacy would you like to leave?
- How do you distinguish yourself?
- How do you avoid falling into a trap and become a bad leader?
Following is an example of how you can brain storm ideas and develop one for yourself.
Author explained that by going through an assessment you can identify which one of the above is your predominant style of operation. It is good to have a team of people with mixed predominant style. Every organization needs people who are operating out of the above strengths.
Extract from the book: ‘Definition of LEMONs’ is as given below
Luminaries: People who see the world through the lens of ideas, viewpoints, intellectual constructs, the ‘Why’
Entrepreneurs: People who see the world through the lens of opportunity, immediate needs to be filled, the ‘When’
Managers: People who see the systems, the practical workings, the ‘How’
Organizers: People who see the world through the lens of tasks to be done, people to be served, the ‘What’
Networkers: People who see the world through the lens of webs to be woven, people to be connected, elements to be gathered, the ‘Who’
It proposes a Radically fresh leadership view as a LEMON.
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Recently vacuum cleaner I use at home stopped working and I had to go and buy a new one. I bought a new one which has a glass case for collecting dust instead of a cloth one I had before. When I started using new one, I could immediately see how much dust it has picked up within my house and I was impressed by the product. This is when I realized transparency to results builds trust and confidence.
Transparency in organizations is hard to achieve. Transparency into organization can be achieved by using appropriate tools or management techniques.
Communication plays a key role in bringing transparency. In a small company or team, everyone knows what the other person is doing. But as the company or team grows, they get into silos and focused on their team success. This starts building walls among teams and transparency is lost. There is more secrecy of each other’s work and trust is replaced by doubt.
Management needs to remove the barriers and make efforts to bring transparency. A good communication strategy and consistency can help improve transparency.
What tools and systems do you in place to improve transparency and keep teams aligned to company’s success? Even within your organization how much transparency do you have? Is it easy to go on to intranet and find who is doing what?
Wherever you are working, if you don’t have transparency you start wondering whether you are in right place or not. Write down what areas you wish there is more transparency and what you can do to improve it.
I have been writing a blog on Leadership for past few months. I have not posted all the articles back on this blog. I wanted to share this particular post. Read this and you can continue to read rest of articles using links below. Writing on Leadership has helped me reflect on Leadership skills.
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When someone wants to get into a leadership role, they are asked to show their potential before they can claim the role. Leading without title is easier said than done. Here are some tips to show your leadership potential.
Leadership is ability to inspire or motivate others to excel. Instead of thinking about your inability to lead others, focus on opportunities. Either at work or in peronsal life, you are always interact with people. There are a few people who are extremely dependent on the work you are doing. They are key stakeholders or partners in projects you take up. Their success depends on work you do or your success depends on the work they do. Partner with these people and engage with them. Try to getter better understanding of how your work impacts them. Talk to them frequently/regularly. Besides your regular work see what extra you can do to make the partnerships better.
Once you are able to demonstrate ‘locally’ and build a support network, leading with a title becomes easier. This support network is key for success
You can read rest of Leadership posts at this link (opens in a new window)
Leaders must act. Leaders cannot expect to remain leaders only by talking. They have to constantly follow up talk with action.
This calls for self-discipline on behalf of leaders. Self discipline means a lot of things
and more…
Every time a leader messes up any of the above mentioned expectations, team members start loosing trust in leaders. For this reason leaders must first become self disciplined.
I will end this post with an exercise you can try
Think of a movie you liked most. Think about a movie that inspired you and made you feel good. Write down the movie name and what you particularly liked about the movie. What incident or what action from individuals in the movie inspired you.
Do this exercise now.
It will only take couple of minutes and will enable you to discover values you respect
I am reading latest book on Leadership “Leading at a higher level” by Ken Blanchard. This book defines leadership as “The capacity to influence others by unleashing their power and potential to impact the greater good”.
This book goes into leadership in organizational context and how leaders take care of customers and employees alike to build a great organization.You can browse website focused on this book and also read first chapter using link below
Link: http://www.kenblanchard.com/thoughtleadership/authors/blanchard_on_leadership/
When we try to explain any concept in a theoretical way, it becomes harder to learn and implement. Using a story approach is always much better. Lot of books are written in this way.
When I was thinking on how to illustrate leadership through example, I remembered article posted long time back “Leadership lessons from Lagaan”. I did a search and located link to the article. This series of 5 articles posted by Rajesh Jain is a must reading.
Read Leadership Lessons from Lagaan now and then reflect on it. Which part of the movie appealed to you most? Why? If you have not watched the movie from this perspective, watch it again after reading this.
Most important part I liked in the movie is the way Bhuvan builds the team. He sees key (hidden) strengths in each person and how they can help in reaching the comon goal.
Share your reflections through comments on this blog.
I have started a new blog called Leader’s World on Silicon India forum. I will transfer the posts to this blog also a week after it is posted on Silicon India Blogs.
I wanted to write on topic of leadership for sometime and I wanted the blog to be completely dedicated to only that topic instead of mxing it with my personal blog.
You can see Leader’s World Blog here: http://blogs.siliconindia.com/leadersworld
Following was introductory entry on that blog:
A leader has to pay attention to a multitude of things to become and stay a leader. Leader’s responsibility increases constantly when more people start following him. Leader needs to stay in tune with everything around him and at same time build a vision and make it a reality.
In this blog I plan to cover a variety of topics that a leader needs to pay attention to. These topics will be mostly on Self Discipline, Thought Leadership, Communication, Management Trends, Best Practices, Technology, Networking but not limited to these.
If you are interested in Leadership skills and planning to build on your skills, you can follow this blog. If you are already in a leadership role, you can share your views on this forum in response to my posts. I plan to post at least once a week on this blog.
Building and maintaining a professional network has become quite easy due to internet. Linkedin.com is the site I use. Before Linkedin, networking was mostly happening through distribution lists created on available public mailing groups. It was difficult to keep track of changes in network. Linkedin solved the problem by providing an ability to maintain professional profile and make it visible to your professional network.
Linkedin Website is simple and easy to use and offers variety of features.
LinkedIn has become a success as it served a very simple but powerful need of time. If you are not using Linkedin, I would highly recommend that it is time you started using it. Go to the link provided below and start building your network.
As you continue to build network you can watch changes happening to your network, when people change jobs or get promoted etc. You should see benefits yourself.
Links: http://www.linkedin.com/
I have started following Robin Sharma’s blog after reading his book: “The Monk who sold his Ferrari”. This was a good book with inspiration to get organized and focus on important things in life.
Robin Sharma’s blog has been very consistent with inspiring messages. If you are interested in getting some inspiration to your blog reader, this is one I will recommend.
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