Leadership expert, Phillip Van Hooser shares a true story that shows just how costly it is for leaders who can't control their temper. Don't make this leadership mistake.
Showing posts with label Leaders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leaders. Show all posts
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
5 Characteristics of Quality Leaders
As companies around the world struggle to stay afloat, many are turning to their managers when making the tough decisions. A good manager is used to having to deal with these kinds of problems, but probably not on the same scale. Quality leadership can be hard to come by, but there are some things managers can practice daily at work to ensure that they are better, more effective leaders. What follows is a brief list of some of the characteristics of a quality leader.
Earn the Respect of Others
Good leaders don’t demand respect from others, they earn it through their actions and being consistent with these actions. Only a poor leader would demand respect from his workers through fear and intimidation tactics. The situation we now find ourselves in economically is scary enough; there is no reason to add insult to injury. Part of earning the respect of others is intertwined with other characteristics listed within this article.
Knowledgeable and Capable
A quality leader is both knowledgeable and capable of doing the work he asks of others himself. No one will listen to a supposed leader who has no idea what he is talking about. Good leaders demonstrate their knowledge through action, not words. Those who stand behind good leaders know that he is capable of doing any task that he ask a member of his team to do, because they have seen him roll up his sleeves and do the work himself in the past.
Fairness
Fairness is a quality that all good leaders possess. They are able to take the facts of a given situation and render a decision based on all necessary information. Good leaders take all sides into account and make a decision that will be most beneficial to all involved. If a punishment is necessary, it is fitting to the transgression.
Excellent Communication Skills
The best leaders can effectively communicate in all forms, whether it is written or verbal. A good says exactly what he means and leaves no wiggle room for interpretation or ambiguity. Directness with employees and team members is an absolute necessity in ensuring the success of a business, and good leaders make sure to be as precise as possible when it comes to communications.
High Expectations
Successful companies are headed up by successful leaders who have high expectations. This is not to say that their expectations are unreasonable by any means, but good leaders know what their people are capable of and expect them to maintain an optimal level of efficiency. This attribute benefits all parties involved and contributes to the success of all as well.
By-line:
This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of job websites. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com
Earn the Respect of Others
Good leaders don’t demand respect from others, they earn it through their actions and being consistent with these actions. Only a poor leader would demand respect from his workers through fear and intimidation tactics. The situation we now find ourselves in economically is scary enough; there is no reason to add insult to injury. Part of earning the respect of others is intertwined with other characteristics listed within this article.
Knowledgeable and Capable
A quality leader is both knowledgeable and capable of doing the work he asks of others himself. No one will listen to a supposed leader who has no idea what he is talking about. Good leaders demonstrate their knowledge through action, not words. Those who stand behind good leaders know that he is capable of doing any task that he ask a member of his team to do, because they have seen him roll up his sleeves and do the work himself in the past.
Fairness
Fairness is a quality that all good leaders possess. They are able to take the facts of a given situation and render a decision based on all necessary information. Good leaders take all sides into account and make a decision that will be most beneficial to all involved. If a punishment is necessary, it is fitting to the transgression.
Excellent Communication Skills
The best leaders can effectively communicate in all forms, whether it is written or verbal. A good says exactly what he means and leaves no wiggle room for interpretation or ambiguity. Directness with employees and team members is an absolute necessity in ensuring the success of a business, and good leaders make sure to be as precise as possible when it comes to communications.
High Expectations
Successful companies are headed up by successful leaders who have high expectations. This is not to say that their expectations are unreasonable by any means, but good leaders know what their people are capable of and expect them to maintain an optimal level of efficiency. This attribute benefits all parties involved and contributes to the success of all as well.
By-line:
This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of job websites. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Management: Leaders and responsibility
By Stefan Stern
January 23 2008
Harvard Business School celebrates its centenary this year. We can look forward to a series of grand events, much back-slapping and frequent blowing of its own trumpet. But how energetically will the great school salute the achievements of perhaps its most famous alumnus of all, George W. Bush (class of ’75)? It seems unlikely that the outgoing US president will be claimed as a poster boy for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) qualification any time soon.
Maybe this Bush administration merely represents an embarrassing hiccup in the otherwise increasingly deep and intimate relationship between commerce and elected leaders. The worlds of politics and business inevitably overlap, and collide. What President Dwight D. Eisenhower once labelled the “military-industrial complex”, we might rebrand as “politico-commercial”.
Even in this era of (more or less) free markets, trade takes place within the constraints of man-made regulation. Some politicians may remain uninterested in the business of wealth creation, and some business people may be left cold by the idiosyncrasies of democratic politics – but each side has to deal with the other.
The smartest actively seek cross-fertilisation. When JP Morgan, the US investment bank, snapped up the newly available former British prime minister Tony Blair earlier this month – to serve as an adviser for an estimated $5m a year – some of the sceptical noises that greeted the news were inspired by simple professional jealousy. Mr Blair had already turned down several offers from commercial organisations, his friends maintained. But he does plan to accept a few more. The ex-prime minister’s access to key figures and his understanding of how geo-political trends are likely to develop make him a highly valuable commodity.
Indeed, Mr Blair had long been attracted by the qualities, as he saw them, of successful business leaders. When he wanted to convince the sceptical British electorate in 1996 that his Labour party could be trusted to form a competent government, he turned to his growing body of friends in the business community for inspiration. Encouraged in particular by his contacts with BP, the oil company – a relationship that grew increasingly important as his time in office went on – Mr Blair conceived a series of “performance commitments” that he made to the British people. These commitments, five of them, were printed on a credit-card sized “pledge card”, and carried by Labour party candidates.
This was state-of-the-art performance management introduced to the scruffy world of party politics. The message was: do not bother reading our unwieldy, old-fashioned manifesto. Focus on these modest, practical and business-like proposals instead. Vote Labour – or your money back. And in the course of his 10 years in office, Mr Blair continued to seek the insights and experience of business leaders to lead enquiries, policy groups and task forces.
George Bush too, when he entered the White House in 2001, appeared determined to make the most of business expertise. His administration has been packed with former corporate executives. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, had been chief executive at Halliburton, the engineering and services company. His first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, had been CEO of Alcoa, the aluminium company, while Mr O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, had been CEO of CSX, a transport business. Mr Snow’s successor, Hank Paulson, was CEO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. President Bush’s first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had been CEO of the pharmaceutical company GD Searle between 1977 and 1985 – before it was bought by Monsanto. Not for nothing was this known as “the CEO administration”.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s key adviser, spoke with admiration of his boss’s business-like administrative skills. Gone was the chaos and aimless late-night chat of the Bill Clinton administration. In the Bush era, meetings would start and end on time. Ties would be worn. President Bush is said to be a great believer in Peter Drucker’s now rather dated idea of “management by objectives”, or MBO. “I had read Peter Drucker, but I’d never seen Drucker until I saw Bush in action,” Mr Rove once said in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, the political magazine. President Bush has also revealed how business school influenced his approach to the job. “Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world,” he wrote in his 1999 book A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House.
In October 2002, before his early departure from the administration, Mr O’Neill visited Harvard Business School. He told the assembled students that much was expected of them. “The world is desperate for the application of what you’re learning here,” he said. “Not only do you have the talent and the tools – you have the obligation.”
Today, the worlds of business and politics look towards each other with greater intensity than ever. The theme for this year’s meeting at Davos is “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. Business and political leaders will look to learn from each other. One session at Davos exemplifies this. It is called: “Rebuilding Brand America: Five Suggestions for the Future President.”
And yet both parties to this collaborative conversation should take care. Critics – perhaps we should properly say cynics – will be closely watching what they do. As Professor Henry Mintzberg (no friend of MBA orthodoxy) of Montreal’s McGill Univeristy has said: “Davos: where the people who spend 51 weeks a year creating all our problems take another week to see if they can fix them.”
If that sounds harsh, remember these words from President Eisenhower when he gave his farewell address on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought ... The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Stefan Stern is the FT’s Management columnist
January 23 2008
Harvard Business School celebrates its centenary this year. We can look forward to a series of grand events, much back-slapping and frequent blowing of its own trumpet. But how energetically will the great school salute the achievements of perhaps its most famous alumnus of all, George W. Bush (class of ’75)? It seems unlikely that the outgoing US president will be claimed as a poster boy for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) qualification any time soon.
Maybe this Bush administration merely represents an embarrassing hiccup in the otherwise increasingly deep and intimate relationship between commerce and elected leaders. The worlds of politics and business inevitably overlap, and collide. What President Dwight D. Eisenhower once labelled the “military-industrial complex”, we might rebrand as “politico-commercial”.
Even in this era of (more or less) free markets, trade takes place within the constraints of man-made regulation. Some politicians may remain uninterested in the business of wealth creation, and some business people may be left cold by the idiosyncrasies of democratic politics – but each side has to deal with the other.
The smartest actively seek cross-fertilisation. When JP Morgan, the US investment bank, snapped up the newly available former British prime minister Tony Blair earlier this month – to serve as an adviser for an estimated $5m a year – some of the sceptical noises that greeted the news were inspired by simple professional jealousy. Mr Blair had already turned down several offers from commercial organisations, his friends maintained. But he does plan to accept a few more. The ex-prime minister’s access to key figures and his understanding of how geo-political trends are likely to develop make him a highly valuable commodity.
Indeed, Mr Blair had long been attracted by the qualities, as he saw them, of successful business leaders. When he wanted to convince the sceptical British electorate in 1996 that his Labour party could be trusted to form a competent government, he turned to his growing body of friends in the business community for inspiration. Encouraged in particular by his contacts with BP, the oil company – a relationship that grew increasingly important as his time in office went on – Mr Blair conceived a series of “performance commitments” that he made to the British people. These commitments, five of them, were printed on a credit-card sized “pledge card”, and carried by Labour party candidates.
This was state-of-the-art performance management introduced to the scruffy world of party politics. The message was: do not bother reading our unwieldy, old-fashioned manifesto. Focus on these modest, practical and business-like proposals instead. Vote Labour – or your money back. And in the course of his 10 years in office, Mr Blair continued to seek the insights and experience of business leaders to lead enquiries, policy groups and task forces.
George Bush too, when he entered the White House in 2001, appeared determined to make the most of business expertise. His administration has been packed with former corporate executives. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, had been chief executive at Halliburton, the engineering and services company. His first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, had been CEO of Alcoa, the aluminium company, while Mr O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, had been CEO of CSX, a transport business. Mr Snow’s successor, Hank Paulson, was CEO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. President Bush’s first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had been CEO of the pharmaceutical company GD Searle between 1977 and 1985 – before it was bought by Monsanto. Not for nothing was this known as “the CEO administration”.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s key adviser, spoke with admiration of his boss’s business-like administrative skills. Gone was the chaos and aimless late-night chat of the Bill Clinton administration. In the Bush era, meetings would start and end on time. Ties would be worn. President Bush is said to be a great believer in Peter Drucker’s now rather dated idea of “management by objectives”, or MBO. “I had read Peter Drucker, but I’d never seen Drucker until I saw Bush in action,” Mr Rove once said in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, the political magazine. President Bush has also revealed how business school influenced his approach to the job. “Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world,” he wrote in his 1999 book A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House.
In October 2002, before his early departure from the administration, Mr O’Neill visited Harvard Business School. He told the assembled students that much was expected of them. “The world is desperate for the application of what you’re learning here,” he said. “Not only do you have the talent and the tools – you have the obligation.”
Today, the worlds of business and politics look towards each other with greater intensity than ever. The theme for this year’s meeting at Davos is “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. Business and political leaders will look to learn from each other. One session at Davos exemplifies this. It is called: “Rebuilding Brand America: Five Suggestions for the Future President.”
And yet both parties to this collaborative conversation should take care. Critics – perhaps we should properly say cynics – will be closely watching what they do. As Professor Henry Mintzberg (no friend of MBA orthodoxy) of Montreal’s McGill Univeristy has said: “Davos: where the people who spend 51 weeks a year creating all our problems take another week to see if they can fix them.”
If that sounds harsh, remember these words from President Eisenhower when he gave his farewell address on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought ... The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Stefan Stern is the FT’s Management columnist
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The Best Managers are Leaders Too
by John Wright
I was flying home several months ago from a management-leadership program I was teaching for a company in Phoenix, and I struck up a conversation with the gentleman next to me on the plane. During the conversation, I asked him if he considered his boss to be a good manager, and he said, "Yes, he is." I then asked him if he thought his boss was a good leader, and after thinking a moment, he said, "No, he isn't." This man was not alone in the way he thought. According to a survey by the marketing information company TSN, "Less than one-third of all supervisors and managers are perceived to be strong leaders." As a result, increasingly larger percentages of our workforce are disengaged. According to the survey, 40% of workers feel disconnected from their employers. Two out of every three workers do not identify with or feel motivated to drive their employer's business goals and objectives . 25% of employees are just "showing up to collect a paycheck". There is a tremendous opportunity for managers and supervisors to set themselves and their companies apart from their competition. So what does it take for a manager to be "perceived as a strong leader?" The 5 "C's" of Leadership: Character People will not follow someone for long if they can't trust them. Not long ago a well known CEO was "ousted" after a probe into a personal relationship with a female executive at the same firm. "The board concluded that the facts reflected poorly on his judgment and would impair his ability to lead the company…his actions were inconsistent with our code of conduct." Leaders have to be trustworthy to produce sustainable results. Caring The old cliché is true: "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." When Lou Holtz was coach at Notre Dame, the second question he used to ask every player before being selected to play after "Can I trust you?" was "Do you CARE about me, your teammates, and Notre Dame?" If a player had a selfish motive for being on the team and didn't care enough to put the team interests first, he didn't want that young man on the team. He also said if the young man didn't believe that he could trust the coach and feel cared about in return, he shouldn't want to be on the team. Leaders show they care about their team personally and professionally. Commitment There's a poster on the gym wall in Clint Eastwood's movie Pretty Baby that says "Winners do what losers won't do." Leaders are like that also. They DO things poor managers won't do. Arguably, one of the greatest business leaders of our time was Sam Walton. What was his number one rule for business success? COMMIT to your business. "Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don't know if you're born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it.". Confidence Leaders know where they are going and demonstrate by their words and actions that there is no doubt that they will arrive. Furthermore, they make you want to go with them. They instill confidence in you as well. They get you to believe in yourself and your team and to see yourself as winners before it actually occurs. In his book Reagan on Leadership, James Strock lists Ronald Reagan's accomplishments while in office and concludes "Above all, Reagan restored America's belief in itself." Communication Leaders have crystal clear compelling visions and communicate those visions repeatedly. In his book Leadership, the first principle Rudolph Giuliani shares is his insistence on his routine morning meeting. "I consider it the cornerstone to efficient functioning within any system...We accomplish a great deal during that first hour, in large part because the lines of communication were so clear." In addition to letting people also know clearly where they stand, leaders are also exceptional listeners. In his book Team Bush – Leadership Lessons from the Bush White House, author Donald Kettl discusses how President Bush "makes sure he listens" to his top advisors. The lesson? "Make sure you get unfiltered information. Top managers need all sorts of information, good and bad... especially bad. This is why it is crucial to have a mechanism in place that insures a steady stream of information from all quarters." Managers that develop these qualities will create an environment where their team will willingly do what they would not otherwise do. - (Business Know-How)
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