Category: Skills Improvement

We all need a little personal development mixed in with our professional and career development. Read blogs in this category for personal skills improvement.

  • Leaders Kill two Birds with One Stone through Delegation

    Leaders Kill two Birds with One Stone through Delegation

    Leaders constantly face demands on their time, and discerning what to do, how to do it and when can be a challenge. Delegation provides:

    An effective means for managing time wisely and

    An effective way to develop others.

    Leaders make more leaders, and are also good at killing two birds with one stone.

     

    So how to delegate?

     

    Delegation Steps and Levels:

    What needs to be delegated? All your responsibilities should be put in to one of three buckets: 1. Don’t do it- get rid of the task or responsibility 2. Do it yourself. 3. Delegate it. Take time to catalogue all your responsibilities/tasks based on these three categories.

    Pick the right person– Are they competent or can they be trained to do the task/job? Do they need opportunities to develop in certain areas?

    Establish open channels of communication– Ensure that people feel comfortable coming to you with questions when a task or result is delegated to them. Remind them you are always available to answer their questions and act as a sounding board for making decisions related to their responsibilities. Schedule regular feedback sessions if necessary to encourage dialogue.

    Delegate part of the task or activity (gradual delegation). Make sure to communicate the results you want achieved and by when.You may need to give direction of how to perform the task at first or provide training for completing the task/activity effectively.

    Delegate the whole task. Make sure to communicate the results you want achieved and by when and leave the person 100% responsible.

    Delegate the result(s) you want achieved. Instead of telling them what to do and how to do it (ie- delegating the task or activity) tell them what you want to be achieved and by when and get out of their way.

    Delegate authority and responsibility. Put the person in charge and leave it to them to make decisions about what gets done, how and when, leaving them responsible for establishing priorities and results. All you will need to do is establish parameters (such as budget constraints).

    Leave the person alone.

    More thoughts on Delegation:

    2 Tips if you have Bored Employees

  • Lessons from CO-OP

    Lessons from CO-OP

    I was nervous about giving up my time in school to be in the Co-Op program. I wanted to be involved in as many things as I could. I didn’t want to have any regrets. The choice to Co-Op was not easy. I had to give up a few activities like soccer and chorus, but I made the right choice to do Co-Op.

    It was always hard for me to focus in school. I was always pretty much brain dead by 4th block. Now I only have two classes to focus on a day. My grades have improved because I cut out all the extra things that took up my energy. Now I go from about 3 to 5 hours a day, which makes me a lot more motivated.

    In school it is easy to be completely focused on you. If you score badly on a test it doesn’t affect anyone else but you. With a job if I am sloppy or late, if reflects badly on the business. My actions affect more than me. Having already learned that, I can go into my next job with experience and a different mindset than when I first started at the beginning of this year.

    Co-Op gave me independence. I don’t have the school taking care of me for 7 hours a day. I can leave for lunch or run errands; everything is on your own time.

    Co-Op also has helped me narrow down what I want to major in. In my job I am at a desk and also take care of my boss’s child. While both areas have been good for me, I realized that I loved working with children more than handling the business aspects. That helped me decide on my major of Child Life Studies. I now have an idea of what I want to do with my life.

    I haven’t felt like I gave up my senior year experience to be in Co-Op. If anything it has made me appreciate high school and not wish it away.

  • Want to be a millionaire? A Good Leader? Manage Your Time First

    Want to be a millionaire? A Good Leader? Manage Your Time First

    Want to be a good leader? How about a millionaire? Manage yourself and your time first.

    What does it take to think like a millionaire? In reading The Millionaire Mind, I was struck by what seemed to first be a contradiction. Based on the study of almost 1000 millionaires, it was obvious these individuals as a group managed their expenses just as wisely, if not more, than their revenue generation. Most bought at discount retailers and had very small or non-existent mortgages by buying older homes that retained or appreciated in value.

    Keeping costs low is a priority in the millionaire household, except with what the book described as “do it yourself” projects. Most millionaires captured in the study did not cut their own grass and if something broke in their house, they didn’t fix it, they called an expert.

    At first glance, this doesn’t seem like a managing cost approach. However, upon further inspection, it is not a matter of keeping costs down, it is a matter how your time is best spent because time is money. If the cost equation involves devotion of ones time, especially for someone who has learned how to generate revenue (as most millionaires have) through their time, best to outsource those non-essential tasks to someone who can do them more effectively. Which actually saves money.

    What does this have to do with leadership? Maybe leaders could learn a thing or two from the millionaire mindset. One thing I find that is a frequent area for tactical leadership coaching of what is really personal leadership (instead of actually leading others) and that is the issue of time management.  It is difficult to lead and guide the work of others if, as a leader, we have difficulty managing our own work and time.

    We’ve devoted several blog posts over the years to this topic that you can view here:

    Personal Leadership on Purpose

    A New Take on Time Management

    5 Ways to Find Your Productivity Sweet Spot

    Saying ‘No” to Something is Saying ‘Yes” to Something Else

    Schedules Communicate Priorities

    But what can you take from all of these, and what do we work with clients on helping them manage their time better? What does the millionaire mindset teach us? It’s pretty simple:

    • Define Your Purpose see the mission statement and goal setting links in this post.
    • Vet how you spend your time by that purpose. A helpful way to do this is by looking at Covey’s approach- is it urgent/not urgent, important/not important. The goal is to be in the green on this grid- or in Quadrant II by spending your time on tasks that are important, but not yet urgent. It’s simply being proactive. Notice that many of these items in Quadrant II deal with developing others – values clarification, relationship building, empowerment.

    Image source: https://www.franklincovey.com/blog/manage-your-time-and-energy-effectively/

  • All Leaders Need to Develop Others

    All Leaders Need to Develop Others

    Tactical leadership coaching should be customized based on the person being coached and his or her development needs. You waste your time trying to focus on areas that are not critical to the person’s success or aren’t about maximizing strengths or minimizing weaknesses when you cover the same topics for the same person regardless of the situation. This is why assessment and feedback seeking is so important, and it is also why, oftentimes, one-on-one coaching is more value-added than group training.

    All that being said, though, a leaders’ primary role is to make more leaders. It doesn’t matter what industry a person is in, what skill sets they possess, or what job title they hold.

    I’ve found that the Situational Leadership approach developed by Hersey and Blanchard provides an excellent framework for helping leaders think through people development and implement behavioral-based methods for developing others. The clutch of this approach is that you don’t develop everyone the same way. One-size does not fit all, or in other words, the most unfair thing in the world to do is to treat unequals as equals.

    The approach (as illustrated here) is grounded in two dimensions of the person being developed:

    1. Their competence level (I like to call this their “skill”)
    2. Their commitment level (I like to call this their “will”)

    (See more on skill vs. will)

    Based on the combination of a person’s skill and will level, a leader then responds based on leading that person with a combination of a directive and/or supportive style to drive results.

    Although a fairly simple model (compared to others out there), an example might help to illustrate how this approach would be applied.

    Let’s say you have just hired a new college grad. He is an energetic, “eager beaver” so to speak. He’s ready to save the world, and he is ready to do it through your company and his job. High commitment or will. However, he lacks training on your company’s processes, does not have an understanding of your industry and lacks some level of confidence in dealing with others, whether co-workers or customers. Low competence or skill. He needs to develop his skills in order to be successful or his will/commitment will end up going out the window.

    Based on looking at the model below, which style would this leader employ to develop his new employee? He would begin by being very directive with the employee. But what does being directive mean? What behaviors would the leader exhibit?

    The leader would be best served by “providing specific direction (what to do, how to do it and when) and closely monitoring task performance” (italics mine) from Leadership and the One Minute ManagerThis means training the employee thoroughly, meeting with him regular to monitor the accomplishment of tasks and providing very frequent feedback. 

    For new hires, having a training and development plan complete with tasks and measurements for those tasks is a great complement to directive leadership style that is usually needed at this stage in an employees’ tenure.

    But you don’t do this forever. An employee should move through the progression of their competence and commitment level where both are high if the directive approach is implement correctly and timely. A leader employing the Situational Leadership approach, if done correctly, should help with this progression of growth and development and should know when to adapt their style based on the person’s skill and will level to help them continue to grow. Keep being directive forever and you will kill a person’s will too.

    As a leader, how do you adapt your style to develop people?

    If you want to learn more about Situation Leadership and how it is applied, take a look at Leadership and the One Minute Manager as well as the other One Minute Manager booksAll are short and very easy to read and follow. You can skip the scholarly journals on the theory and go straight to the application of it in about a 30 minute read with these books.

    situational-leadership1

     

    Image source: http://www.12manage.com/images/picture_blanchard_situational_leadership.gif

  • The Top 10, Wait 9, Leadership Coaching Needs

    The Top 10, Wait 9, Leadership Coaching Needs

    What would you guess to be the Top 10 most common topics covered in leadership coaching? Maybe we can get Letterman to do a Top 10 list on leadership coaching needs (oh, what humor we could probably find, it wouldn’t take much creativity), but in all seriousness, by reviewing many, many 360° leadership evaluations and coaching individuals on maximizing and improving their performance, here is my list- and I could only get to nine:

    1. Developing Others
    2. Time Management
    3. Delegation
    4. Thinking Strategically
    5. Managing Upwards
    6. Communication
    7. Planning/Organizing
    8. Managing Conflict
    9. Empowering/Motivating Others

    I’d love to hear what would be in your Top 10 list of your needs for improvement as a leader, or better yet, what areas you think the person who leads you or manages you needs! Maybe by comparing my list to yours, we can get to 10. And better yet, send them to me in David Letterman style! How would he phrase them?  Email me your list or post it to our Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter Feed.

    Over the next several weeks, we’ll be writing on ways to address these common areas. We’ll phrase them in your Letterman style and add to our list based on your feedback. If we use one of your submissions, we’ll send you a $25 Visa Gift Card. Submit away!