Become a Better Leader With These Tips

Dave Kerpen, CEO, Likeable Local, NY Times Best-Selling Author & Keynote Speaker, wrote in a popular LinkedIn post,

"Being likeable will help you in your job, business, relationships, and life. I interviewed dozens of successful business leaders for my last book, to determine what made them so likeable and their companies so successful. All of the concepts are simple, and yet, perhaps in the name of revenues or the bottom line, we often lose sight of the simple things - things that not only make us human, but can actually help us become more successful. Below are the eleven most important principles to integrate to become a better leader:"

1. Listening
2. Storytelling
3. Passion
4. Team Playing
5. Surprise & Delight
6. Responsiveness
7. Simplicity
8. Authenticity / Transparency
9. Adaptability
10. Gratefulness
11. Likeable Business

To lean more about these principles visit - 11 Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader  by Dave Kerpen.

Hire Quality provides business leaders with Executive Coaching, Executive Recruiting and Talent Management services. Call us to discuss your needs,. 705.734.2698

Prepare to Make Tough Decisions

Decision making skills are one of the key success factors for senior executives. You  may assume that as managers progress through organizations these skills are honed for the day when they are in a senior decision making position.  Often, a new leader finds that in taking over the helm, they feel least prepared to make the tough decisions necessary to guide their business through a difficult situation.

Tim Bowler, BBC News Reporter, writing in CEO Guru about taking decisions, answers the question, "What makes a good leader?".

"In essence, a chief executive will need to know what their mission is and why their company exists, they will need to have a vision for where their firm should go, and know how progress towards that goal will be measured. Many bosses say that most important part of their job is in dealing with a handful of really important issues, and taking tough decisions which may upset others."

 The process that an executive uses to make decisions can be greatly influenced by their leadership style. Most top CEO's will use a consultative approach, but who they choose to consult with, whether they use a small circle of inner managers, external organizations, or approach the grassroots of their employee base, will depend upon the type of issue, the time involved, and their leadership style.

The more experience one has, the more likely the executive is to easily recognize the best consultative process for the situation. The intent is to balance factors with others, who may have additional information, what option is strongest for the business. The executive however, must not loose sight of the companies true vision, and remember that the opinions of others may be clouded with different biases.

"While no decision is easy, if a CEO does not make the right choices then ultimately they may find things being taken out of their hands - as shareholders pressure the company management board to replace them," concludes Tim.

Source: CEO Guru - Taking decisions can be tough at the top | Tom Bowler | BBC News

HireQuality provides Recruitment, Talent Management, and Management Coaching services to meet your organizations needs. Call us at 416.413.1177 or visit our website for more information.

Do You Have an Employee Recognition Program or a Culture of Recognition?

According to the CEO Institute, business leaders identified employee engagement and staff recruitment among their top concerns last year. Acquiring and retaining talent gives organizations the strategic competitive advantage they're looking for in this highly competitive economy.

In this months issues of Talent Management magazine, Derek Irvine, VP of Client Strategy for Globoforce, writes about Globoforce's 2012 Survey of Employee Recognition programs.

The Survey found that companies with a strategic employee recognition program in place, had a 23% lower turn-over rate than companies with no programs. Data also showed that the most successful employee recognition programs were aligned with corporate objectives and were peer-to-peer based. Budget was a factor, but Derek points out, "cash is not the currency of employee recognition, and it generally leads to entitlement rather than motivation."

A strategic employee recognition program can contribute to the positive culture of an organization. It can engage employees, and when employees are enabled to achieve goals they are less likely to leave. The Towers Watson Report calls this the power of threes. Companies successful at engaging, enabling and energizing employees have 3 times higher operating margins that those with low engagement.

Derek sums up, "Giving all employees the empowerment and ability to recognize and reward their colleagues for company values is the difference between a recognition program and a culture of recognition."

HireQuality provides Recruitment, Talent Management, and Management Coaching services to meet your organizations needs. Call us at 416.413.1177 or visit our website for more information.

source: Recognition to the Rescue, Derek Irvine, VP of Client Strategy, Globoforce, [Talent Management, May 2013]

How to gain role clarity and lead from any position

“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” — Francois Gautier, French writer and journalist.

In the March issue of Ivey Business Journal, a publication from The Western Business School, the connection between our role as leaders and our personal identity is explored. Can you still bring passion to your leadership style while checking your emotional attachment to your role? The authors offer 5 ways to practice the idea of Wise Leadership.

I invite you to read the full article and give the concept some thought.

5 Ways to Practice Wise Leadership in Your Role

1. Perform the Role without Emotional Attachment
2. Lead or mentor others to lead, with enthusiasm and clarity
3. Be a great team  player
4. Be authentic in any role
5. Seek role clarity continually and mindfully

source:Ivey Business Journal: March 2013
P.Kaipa, N.Radjou, S.Khizrana

In the context of a business, role clarity means knowing that your role as leader is just that—a role, not your identity. Today you are a director in one company, tomorrow you could be a vice president in another company, and a year later, you could be an entrepreneur. These are merely work roles you play to contribute to the development of your organization and yourself. They also could be very different from who you actually are. This is why role clarity is so critically important: It enables you to perform a chosen role effectively and display behaviors corresponding to that role with enthusiasm, and without losing the sense of your core identity or “the real you” that is behind any given role.

Being merely smart is not sufficient to deal effectively with the complexity of 21st-century business realities. Leaders need to become wise. Leaders who are highly intelligent but not yet wise—those whom we call “smart leaders”—tend to judge and attach a meaning to their role because they view roles through the different glasses they wear. Roles are actions or activities assigned to, or expected of, a person in different contexts (like wearing sunglasses, reading glasses, or driving glasses at different times). Core identity is a person’s conception and expression of one’s values and beliefs and, more accurately, oneself. The distinction between role and identity is important, since leaders sometimes mistake their work role (effective performance of tasks) for their core identity (who they are), which can keep them from seeing clearly and making wise decisions. It’s akin to finding one’s home to be very dark, forgetting that one is wearing dark sunglasses.

In this article, I will try to help leaders understand the crucial difference between role and identity and how they can apply that understanding to be an effective leader.

Read the full article on the Ivey Business Journal website

How to Scale Your Leadership Style

As your business grows or you take on a more senior position, you'll start thinking about leadership style and what would work best for your organization.  Brad Smith, President and CEO of Intuit, discusses the importance of creating a vision people will run towards, and recommends focusing on three E's; Energize, Educate, and Empower. I thought the idea of measuring empowerment success, "not by what happened in the meeting, but how capable the team is able to execute without them after they leave the room" worth remembering.

Source: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130416161816-1940438-how-to-scale-your-leadership-style?trk=mp-reader-card

How to Scale Your Leadership Style
Brad Smith
President & Chief Executive Officer, Intuit

"I was recently asked how I think about scaling leadership. To answer the question, I first need to share my view of leadership, which is grounded in the belief that it is not a leader’s job to put greatness into people. But rather, it is our job to acknowledge the greatness that already exists and create opportunities and an environment for that greatness to come out.

So as your organization grows in size and complexity, how do you move from being a personal trainer where it's one-on-one training for a small team of employees, to someone who can have an impact across a large group of people and advance the capability of the entire group? From my experience, this requires three techniques:

Your ability to create focus. A leader should strive to paint an inspiring vision. Most people don't want to run from something, but rather they seek to run to something. As individuals, we want to be a part of something greater than themselves. A leader should paint this inspiring vision, and then articulate the priorities to help people know how to make progress against that vision.

Your interactions should produce the three E’s. The second thing I believe underpins scaling leadership is your interaction model. My view is the outcomes a scalable leader should create in every interaction is the three E's:

1. Energize: You should leave people with their hearts beating faster. This does not mean always being a cheerleader. In fact, constructive feedback and course adjustments can be equally stimulating if they are delivered in the form of coaching, versus judging. Seek to energize in every interaction.
2. Educate: Leave every encounter with the team having learned at least one thing they didn’t know (or had not realized) before you met with them. You should also seek to learn at least one thing you didn’t know as well. Scalable leaders use every opportunity to learn and to teach.
3. Empower: Scalable leaders measure success, not by what happened in the meeting, but how capable the team is able to execute without them after they leave the room. Did you build capability during the interaction?

The secret to the three E's is principles-based decision making. Bring your coaching to the level of guiding principles. That way, the next time a team faces a similar situation they can refer to the principles as guidelines, and will have a better sense of what to do.

How you invest your time. The third and final piece to scalable leadership is how you choose to invest your time. As leaders, the resources we leverage include time, people, and dollars. We can often find more people and more dollars, but we can never manufacture more time. It is so critical to be very discerning about where you’ll invest your time for two reasons. It is your most scarce resource, so getting the maximum ROI is essential. It is also the strongest signal you can send to a team around what you deem to be the most important.

So to scale your leadership as your organization grows, create focus through an inspiring vision. Be clear about your interaction model and the three E's. And keep a close eye on how you spend your time."

Source: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130416161816-1940438-how-to-scale-your-leadership-style?trk=mp-reader-card

About Hire Quality Hire Quality partners with clients to build high performance teams by recruiting and selecting new talent and by upgrading current staff through training and development. For more information go to www.hirequality.ca or call 705.734.2698