Category: Leadership Development

Beyond Leadership is Horizon Point’s line of resources for managers of people. Managing ourselves is a distinct set of behaviors from managers the work of others, and we are here to help. Read stories in this category if you are ready to take the next step in your own leadership development (or if you’re looking for resources for someone else).

  • 3 STEPS TO BETTER LEADERSHIP

    3 STEPS TO BETTER LEADERSHIP

    Leaders make more leaders. You aren’t a leader if you don’t. But how do you go about making more leaders? By acting as a career agent, you can successfully combat disengagement and serve the role that a leader is meant to serve- growing others.

    But how do you play the role of career agent? Here are three easy steps:

     

    1. ASK & ASSESS: Asking simply involves deploying the question, “What do you want out of your career?” in individual meetings with your subordinates. You may want to break this down into what they want 1 year, 3 years, 5 years and 10 years from now. This is a simple but powerful question that begins to frame how you can begin to act as a career agent by knowing first hand what outcomes a person is seeking.

    Once you have asked this question, you need to assess where people are in their path to the outcomes they want. This includes an honest assessment on your part and on their part about their strengths and areas for development. You can do this in a casual way through one-on-one conversations, or deploy self-assessment and/or 360° evaluation tools.

     

    2. GAME PLAN: The direction a person seeks and the results of the assessment phase then give you the opportunity to develop a game plan for maximizing that person towards their goals with the organization’s needs in mind. This game plan should accomplish three things:

    • Address areas of strength and weakness in assessment phase
    • Lead to more engagement from the employee
    • Meet business needs

    The game plan should include both:

    • WORK ASSIGNMENTS: These assignments should contribute directly to what the organization needs and should be opportunities for growth for the person. For example, you may have a pressing business need to map out all of your organization’s processes to streamline and create efficiency. Utilizing someone on your team who has this strength OR has never done something like this before (depending on the situation is who you would assign) can help the organization meet the need and help the person grow a strength or develop in an uncharted area.
    • PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES: These activities are things that the person should take responsibility for accomplishing on their own time through their own initiative and effort. For example, it may be attending an accounting class, reading articles on certain topics, or taking on or pursuing a mentoring relationship.

     

    3. EXPOSURE: The final step of the process actually involves following through on your end of the deal as a leader when the person follows through on their gameplan. As we described in a previous article on this topic in Alabama HR Magazine, beginning on page 14, make people aware of opportunities that arise, even if they are outside your organization.

    This may mean letting them go to another organization. If you’re having career agent conversations with people, they are going to be more productive and you probably don’t want to loose this type of employee.

    This may seem counter intuitive to an employee retention strategy, however, making employees aware of outside opportunities that are a fit for their career plans, and helping facilitate those opportunities even if they are outside your organization, is a good move in the long run.

    They become walking and talking recruitment ads for you and your organization, which is hard to come by for free. It leads to a bigger picture recruitment and retention strategy. And who knows, their career path may lead them back to your organization more valuable than when they left.”

     

    The leaders as career agent process can be one that replaces your performance evaluation/appraisal system if done correctly. Consider it as a new paradigm in how you evaluate, develop and grow people within your organization.

    Help Leaders become Career Agents with a helpful tool found here.

    Want to teach people to be career agents? Check out our Leaders as Career Agents course outline.

  • Are you doer who is destined to be a leader?

    Are you doer who is destined to be a leader?

    Are you currently thriving in a position and considering transitioning into a leadership role? If you’re not sure, consider the following:

    Are you praised for displaying company values and known for always delivering?

    Are you a good communicator?

    Do others come to you with problems or to get your advice?

    Do you enjoy the role of leading/encouraging your co-workers?

    If you answered “yes” to the above question, you should definitely consider a role in leadership. So how do you transition from being a “doer” to a “leader”? Tips to Ensure a Smooth Transition into a Leadership Role suggests the following:

    • To start, be sure you know exactly what your supervisor expects from you in terms of performance and as a leader.
    • Once you know what success means in your new role, get to work on becoming a good leader.
    • It will likely be helpful to start by meeting with each of your direct reports individually and it may be a good idea to take the meeting off-site.
    • Finally, remember, to earn respect, you need to be respectful. Don’t show favoritism to any employee, don’t participate in office gossip, and follow through on the things you say you’ll do.

    “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” Sheryl Sandberg

     

    If leadership opportunities are not available with your current employer and you are considering a move, how do you market your transferrable skills? According to The Top Transferrable Skills Every Manager Should Have, communication and empathy are two key skills for leaders. Update your resume to include your transferrable skills. For more about transferrable skills, read How to Identify Your Transferrable Skills. If you happen to be in an administrative role, read this month’s career spotlight: Front Line Leaders of Administrative Personnel.

    Are you ready to be a leader? Check out 10 Books Leaders Need to Be Reading for more insight.

  • Get a Leadership Professional Development Game Plan

    Get a Leadership Professional Development Game Plan

    Leaders take control of their personal and professional development in order to continuously grow and maximize their contribution. As a leader do you have a professional development game plan? If you do, here are some good ideas to consider, and if not, here are some ideas to get you started:

            1. Read- Commit to reading a sampling of the following:

    • A book about leadership a month. For recommendations on books to start with, see our Top 10 Leadership book recommendations. Downloading the app Good Reads and selecting the “Business” category can help you select some good titles. Once you begin rating books you’ve read, it will recommend other titles for you.
    • A great business publication once a month. FastCompany is my go-to for this, but others prefer something a little less edgy and more news oriented like The Economist or The Wall Street Journal
    • An industry specific publication once a month. My go-to for HR related topics is Workforce Magazine (their online content is great too) and HR Magazine published by SHRM and for Career Development it is NCDA’sCareer Convergence that is online content once a month and Career Developments Magazine which is in print.
    • Something outside your industry once a month (Oftentimes reading a great business publication will cover this. For example, I’ve been enjoying reading about the fashion and ecommerce industry in the last severalFastCompany
    • Leadership blogs and blogs related to your industry. Subscribe to ones that are of interest to you and/or get a content mining and archiving app like Flipboard to find, organize and catalogue your info. Make sure you don’t miss out on the Leadership Carnival the first Monday of every month that features a compilation of posts from a variety of key leadership bloggers. Blogs I love in the HR/Career industry are Fistful of Talent,The HR Capitalist and UpStartHR
    • Take your reading a step further and write about leadership. Set a goal to get something published once a year and then quarter. Where should you start to try to get published? Start with the publications you are currently reading.

            2. Engage and Listen. To other experts in your field and those who are learning with you.

    • Attend conferences to hear from the best and network with your colleagues. Record your insights and connections while you are there. You can also do this through webinars and podcasts.
    • Find a thought leader in your field and schedule a time to meet with them regularly (at least quarterly) to discuss ideas, leadership challenges and insights in your field.
    • Volunteer with an organization in which you are passionate about and learn from those around you and from your experience.
    • Request a regular, standing time to meet with your boss (at least one a month) to discuss business challenges and opportunities and plans of action.

    3. Practice and Apply. The reading and the engaging and listening really doesn’t matter if you don’t apply any of it to your work and life. As you read and listen, make notes of things you can apply on the job and set a game plan to do so. A goal setting worksheet may help with this. Take the time to discuss this with your boss in the regularly scheduled meeting you have hopefully established and ask for assignments that help you apply your knowledge, practice what you’re learning and that aid the business in pursuit of success.

    What is your personal career and leadership development game plan?

  • 10 Books Leaders Need to be Reading

    10 Books Leaders Need to be Reading

    Leaders are readers. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow as a leader is to read about leadership and take the knowledge gained from your reading and apply it.

    When asked about the best leadership books out there, here are the ones I recommend.

    1. Great leaders lead themselves first. You can’t lead others if you can’t leader yourself through strong personal habits. The best personal leadership book I have found is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
    2. Leaders are influencers. For a timeless classic on influence, read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
    3. Leaders are Empathetic. Read what I believe to be the best fiction ever written. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.   Even if you read it as a student, it’s a good one to re-read, with a particular focus on the leadership lessons to apply. Also check out The Way of the Shepherd: 7 Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People by Kevin Leman
    4. A leader customizes his/her style based on whom he/she is leading. To understand situational leadership in order to customize, read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard.
    5. Leaders understand how to run an organization. For insights on what makes an organization successful, read Good to Great by Jim Collins. For the entrepreneurial leader wanting to understand how to run a great start-up and/or scale and grow one, read Scale by Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel and EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey.
    6. Leaders know the most important decisions they make are people decisions. To know how to hire the best, read Who?: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.
    7. Leaders know that once they answer the Who question they need to be able to explain the Why to them. To understand the importance of Why, read Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek.
    8. Although answering Why? takes you a long way in motivating others, for more insights on motivation and building people and teams, read The Leadership Challenge byJames Kouzes and Barry Posner and Boundaries for Leaders by Henry Cloud.
    9. Leaders learn from the success and failures of others. Pick up a biography or memoir of a leader. Some good ones are: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and the biographies of different presidents and visionaries by David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose.
    10. Leaders have some good reference books to turn to when they need tools or templates to help them succeed.   Keep a copy of the The Successful Manager’s Handbook on your desk for this purpose.

    Which leadership books have had the most impact on you?

    Like this post? You may also like:

    Horizon Point Book Review 2014

    Horizon Point Book Review 2013

    Harvard Business Review: 11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read

  • Goal Setting – Feedback

    Goal Setting – Feedback

    I want to round out the goal setting discussion by focusing on the importance of feedback.  To illustrate, feedback has played a critical role in a current client business coaching engagement.  To begin the coaching process this past summer, we employed a 360° feedback mechanism to help set priorities for the client’s development.  Feedback was first necessary to set goals and priorities.

    Based on areas for improvement, we developed four questions that she asks herself each and every day.  These are all “yes” or “no” questions.  (As example, a question I ask myself every day is “Did I do something to develop new business today?”  because one of my goals for the year is revenue growth.)  She has them posted by her computer and we begin each session by going through those questions, regardless of the focus of that particular session.  This is a simple personal feedback mechanism that was set in place to hold herself accountable.

    Finally, providing feedback to her subordinates is important to this client’s development as a leader.  She is already good at providing feedback and motivation to her team, but her business has grown large enough that she needs (and desires) to have a process in place that helps her provide ongoing feedback for development and evaluation.

    At every step in the process, feedback has played a critical role in establishing success.

    What feedback mechanisms do you use to personally hold yourself accountable or those you lead accountable?

    For more insight, check out New Year’s Resolutions 101: Don’t Put The Cart Before The Horse.

    **This post originally appeared on Horizon Point Blogpost January 30, 2012.