Careertips@warriersonline.com

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Personal Leadership: One Key to Growing Any Organization !!

What did Winston Churchill, Lee Iacocca and Bill Gates have in common? Certainly they were great personal leaders who knew what they wanted and how to get it. However, they didn't succeed because they had great personal leadership qualities. They succeeded because they understood the importance of hiring managers who also possessed personal leadership skills.

These leaders built an environment in which leadership qualities flourished in all employees. As each employee reached new heights of achievement so did the organization, ensuring that the individuals and the organization outperformed the competition.

Leadership is an elusive trait. The typical CEO and senior management team have little formal training in effective leadership and base their style on trial and error. This style will not work. CEOs cannot lead others if they cannot effectively lead themselves. They must develop personal leadership in themselves and their management team.

Changing Attitudes toward Leadership

Anyone, whether CEO or supervisor, can develop personal leadership and make it a dynamic force in his or her life.
Changing attitudes is difficult. Each of us has two things in common, the present and the future. During our present, we program our future. The program we set today determines the results we get tomorrow. If we desire to create a future that is different from our present, we must change our actions and the way we think today.

We exhibit personal leadership when we take responsibility for leading ourselves to reach our personal vision by changing our lives so that we will reach new heights of achievement and lead a life that is positive and fulfilling.

The Most Important Leadership Attitudes

The key to developing personal leadership is to believe in yourself first. Once you know you can accomplish anything you desire, you are ready to tackle the world and generate great personal success.

Even those not in management positions must begin to think like a leader. Position is unrelated to responsibility. Everyone who exhibits effective personal leadership and believes in themselves can become a leader and a positive role model.

The key leadership attitudes are:

Be a great role model. Forget the old adage, "Do as I say, not as I do." Your actions, not your words, are the most important messages that you send to others.

Maintain a great attitude about people. Believe that your people are self directed and will work for personal growth and increased responsibility. Expect your staff to exhibit personal leadership and help them to continually grow to new levels.

Be personally motivated. Think of yourself as a thoroughbred that runs to win. You act to meet your personal needs and desires. Motivation is internal, not external.

Inspire people to build their internal motivation by building motivation in yourself and by challenging everyone to be the best.

Improve yourself even just 1% a month, a tiny amount. Through the miracle of compounding, you will double your effectiveness in less than 5 years. This powerful motivator gives you control over your life and can double your effectiveness several times over during your career.

Finally, work for yourself. Once you discover the great truth that your employer is paying you to work for yourself, you will realize that work is a blessing, not a burden. The better you hone your personal leadership skills, the more success you will bring to yourself.

Steps to Develop Personal Leadership

The following proven, simple but sometimes difficult to follow steps will help you develop more success though personal leadership. Develop the conviction and courage needed to accomplish change. You can make personal changes although these changes will take time and effort. Take these steps:

Write your goals down. Know yourself and your present condition so you can be realistic about where you are going. Writing your goals crystallizes your thoughts and forces you to be realistic and logical. You are able to build a solid foundation.

Develop an action plan. A large dream can be overwhelming so break your goals into manageable pieces and define the steps necessary to accomplish them. Then put the steps into a logical sequence.

Do the most important step of all: schedule your action steps. Make appointments with yourself to accomplish your action steps so that your busy life and the many competing demands on your time do not derail you. When you plan, you will take the steps necessary to create future success.

Track and measure results so you know where you are. Items you track and measure get accomplished. When you make steady progress, you are much less likely to experience personal doubts. As you track your success you can enjoy your accomplishments.

Summary

Personal leadership, whether at the CEO level or at the supervisory level, will bring you great personal rewards. You, as an effective personal leader, will develop a strong success attitude that gives you:

The freedom to choose your own path to success.

The confidence that you are following the life plan that is right for you.

The elimination of confusion and frustration that comes from trying to please others.

The challenge and excitement of developing all of your own potential.

Strong personal leadership also gives the organization a competitive advantage in today's compressed, highly competitive business cycle.

Effective CEOs take the attitude for themselves and their management team that "If you don't grow, you go." They understand that when they exhibit personal leadership as they strive to evolve the organization to the next level, they also provide a role model for their employees, who must accept and lead change.

In the resulting culture, employees meet their personal goals by helping the organization meet its goals. Personal growth translates into organizational success.

Robert Schuller provided us with a great personal vision statement that you can use in your 1% growth plan when he said, "Whatever you do today, do it better tomorrow."

By Tom Northup

Contributed by Lucy Doss

The Factors of Leadership Motivation

Leaders do nothing more important than get results. But you can't get results by yourself. You need others to help you do it. And the best way to have other people get results is not by ordering them but motivating them. Yet many leaders fail to motivate people to achieve results because those leaders misconstrue the concept and applications of motivation.

To understand motivation and apply it daily, let's understand its three critical pillars. Know these pillars and put them into action to greatly enhance your abilities to lead for results.

1. MOTIVATION IS PHYSICAL ACTION.

"Motivation" has common roots with "motor," "momentum," "motion," "mobile," etc. all words that denote movement, physical action. An essential feature of motivation is physical action. Motivation isn't about what people think or feel but what they physically do. When motivating people to get results, challenge them to take those actions that will realize those results.

I counsel leaders who must motivate individuals and teams to get results not to deliver presentations but "leadership talks." Presentations communicate information.. But when you want to motivate people, you must do more than simply communicate information. You must have them believe in you and take action to follow you. A key outcome of every leadership talk must be physical action, physical action that leads to results.

For instance, I worked with the newly-appointed director of a large marketing department who wanted the department to achieve sizable increases in the results. However, the employees were a demoralized bunch who had been clocking tons of overtime under her predecessor and were feeling angry that their efforts were not being recognized by senior management.

She could have tried to order them to get the increased results. Many leaders do that. But order- leadership founders in today's highly competitive, rapidly changing markets. Organizations are far more competitive when their employees instead of being ordered to go from point A to point B, want to go from point A to point B. So I suggested that she take a first step in getting the employees to increase results by motivating those employees to want to increase results. They would "want to" when they began to believe in her leadership. And the first step in enlisting that belief was for her to give a number of leadership talks to the employees.

One of her first talks that she planned was to the department employees in the company's auditorium.

She told me, "I want them to know that I appreciate the work they are doing and that I believe that they can get the results I'm asking of them. I want them to feel good about themselves."

"Believing is not enough," I said. "Feeling good is not enough. Motivation must take place. Physical action must take place. Don't give the talk until you know what precise action you are going to have happen."

She got the idea of having the CEO come into the room after the talk, shake each employee's hand, and tell each how much he appreciated their hard work physical action. She didn't stop there. After the CEO left, she challenged each employee to write down on a piece of paper three specific things that they needed from her to help them get the increases in results and then hand those pieces of paper to her personally - physical action.

Mind you, that leadership talk wasn't magic dust sprinkled on the employees to instantly motivate them. (To turn the department around so that it began achieving sizable increases in results, she had to give many leadership talks in the weeks and months ahead.) But it was a beginning. Most importantly, it was the right beginning.

2. MOTIVATION IS DRIVEN BY EMOTION.

Emotion and motion come from the same Latin root meaning "to move". When you want to move people to take action, engage their emotions. An act of motivation is an act of emotion. In any strategic management endeavor, you must make sure that the people have a strong emotional commitment to realizing it.

When I explained this to the chief marketing officer of a worldwide services company, he said, "Now I know why we're not growing! We senior leaders developed our marketing strategy in a bunker! He showed me his "strategy" document. It was some 40 pages long, single-spaced. The points it made were logical, consistent, and comprehensive. It made perfect sense. That was the trouble. It made perfect, intellectual sense to the senior leaders. But it did not make experiential sense to middle management who had to carry it out. They had about as much in-put into the strategy as the window washers at corporate headquarters. So they sabotaged it in many innovative ways. Only when the middle managers were motivated - were emotionally committed to carrying out the strategy - did that strategy have a real chance to succeed.

3. MOTIVATION IS NOT WHAT WE DO TO OTHERS. IT'S WHAT OTHERS DO TO THEMSELVES.

The English language does not accurately depict the psychological truth of motivation. The truth is that we cannot motivate anybody to do anything. The people we want to motivate can only motivate themselves. The motivator and the motivatee are always the same person. We as leaders communicate, they motivate. So our "motivating" others to get results really entails our creating an environment in which they motivate themselves to get those results.

For example: a commercial division leader almost faced a mutiny on his staff when in a planning session, he put next year's goals, numbers much higher than the previous year's, on the overhead. The staff all but had to be scrapped off the ceiling after they went ballistic. "We busted our tails to get these numbers last year. Now you want us to get much higher numbers? No way!"

He told me. "We can hit those numbers. I just have to get people motivated!"

I gave him my "motivator-and-motivatee-are-the-same-person!" pitch. I suggested that he create an environment in which they could motivate themselves. So he had them assess what activities got results and what didn't. They discovered that they spent more than 60 percent of their time on work that had nothing to do with getting results. He then had them develop a plan to eliminate the unnecessary work. Put in charge of their own destiny, they got motivated! They developed a great plan and started to get great results.

Over the long run, your career success does not depend on what schools you went to and what degrees you have. That success depends instead on your ability to motivate individuals and teams to get results. Motivation is like a high voltage cable lying at your feet. Use it the wrong way, and you'll get a serious shock. But apply motivation the right way by understanding and using the three pillars, plug the cable in, as it were, and it will serve you well in many powerful ways throughout your career.

Contributed by Lucy Doss