Leadership
Skills: Awaken the Leader In You:
10 easy steps to developing your leadership skills
As
a manager, you already know that your most important
asset is the other people
on your team. The better they perform, the more
success you will all enjoy together. So your role in
all of this is to find ways to inspire and encourage
them to be the best they can be. But, because people
are people, your job is definitely not a simple one.
As a participant in our Managing
People Workshop, you will learn the skills
to work with the strengths and weaknesses of each team
member, responding to their needs and releasing their
gifts in ways that will bring to all of you the success
for which you are working so hard.
Become an
Effective Leader
"The
miracle power that elevates the few is to be found in
their industry, application, and perseverance, under
the promptings of a brave determined spirit." -
Mark Twain
Many
motivational experts like to say that leaders are made,
not born. I would argue the exact opposite. I believe
we are all natural born leaders, but have been deprogrammed
along the way. As children, we were natural leaders
- curious and humble, always hungry and thirsty for
knowledge, with an incredibly vivid imagination; we
knew exactly what we wanted, were persistent and determined
in getting what we wanted, and had the ability to motivate,
inspire, and influence everyone around us to help us
in accomplishing our mission. So why is this so difficult
to do as adults? What happened?
As
children, over time, we got used to hearing, No, Don't,
and Can't. No! Don't do this. Don't do that. You can't
do this. You can't do that. No! Many of our parents
told us to keep quiet and not disturb the adults by
asking silly questions. This pattern continued into
high school with our teachers telling us what we could
do and couldn't do and what was possible. Then many
of us got hit with the big one institutionalized formal
education known as college or university. Unfortunately,
the traditional educational system doesn't teach students
how to become leaders; it teaches students how to become
polite order takers for the corporate world. Instead
of learning to become creative, independent, self-reliant,
and think for themselves, most people learn how to obey
and intelligently follow rules to keep the corporate
machine humming.
Developing
the Leader in you to live your highest life, then, requires
a process of unlearning by self-remembering and self-honoring.
Being an effective leader again will require you to
be brave and unlock the door to your inner attic, where
your childhood dreams lie, going inside to the heart.
Based on my over ten years research in the area of human
development and leadership, here are ten easy steps
you can take to awaken the Leader in you and rekindle
your passion for greatness.
1. Humility. Leadership starts with humility. To be
a highly successful leader, you must first humble yourself
like a little child and be willing to serve others.
Nobody wants to follow someone who is arrogant. Be humble
as a child, always curious, always hungry and thirsty
for knowledge. For what is excellence but knowledge
plus knowledge plus knowledge - always wanting to better
yourself, always improving, always growing.
When you are humble, you become genuinely interested
in people because you want to learn from them. And because
you want to learn and grow, you will be a far more effective
listener, which is the #1 leadership communication tool.
When people sense you are genuinely interested in them,
and listening to them, they will naturally be interested
in you and listen to what you have to say.
2. SWOT Yourself. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Although it's
a strategic management tool taught at Stanford and Harvard
Business Schools and used by large multinationals, it
can just as effectively be used in your own professional
development as a leader. This is a useful key to gain
access to self-knowledge, self-remembering, and self-honoring.
Start by listing all your Strengths including your accomplishments.
Then write down all your Weaknesses and what needs to
be improved. Make sure to include any doubts, anxieties,
fears, and worries that you may have. These are the
demons and dragons guarding the door to your inner attic.
By bringing them to conscious awareness you can begin
to slay them. Then proceed by listing all the Opportunities
you see available to you for using your strengths. Finally,
write down all the Threats or obstacles that are currently
blocking you or that you think you will encounter along
the way to achieving your dreams.
3. Follow Your Bliss. Regardless of how busy you are,
always take time to do what you love doing. Being an
alive and vital person vitalizes others. When you are
pursuing your passions, people around you cannot help
but feel impassioned by your presence. This will make
you a charismatic leader. Whatever it is that you enjoy
doing, be it writing, acting, painting, drawing, photography,
sports, reading, dancing, networking, or working on
entrepreneurial ventures, set aside time every week,
ideally two or three hours a day, to pursue these activities.
Believe me, you'll find the time. If you were to video
tape yourself for a day, you would be shocked to see
how much time goes to waste!
4.
Dream Big. If you want to be larger than life, you need
a dream that's larger than life. Small dreams won't
serve you or anyone else. It takes the same amount of
time to dream small than it does to dream big. So be
Big and be Bold! Write down your One Biggest Dream.
The one that excites you the most. Remember, don't be
small and realistic; be bold and unrealistic! Go for
the Gold, the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the Oscar, the highest
you can possibly achieve in your field. After you ve
written down your dream, list every single reason why
you CAN achieve your dream instead of worrying about
why you can't.
5.
Vision. Without a vision, we perish. If you can't see
yourself winning that award and feel the tears of triumph
streaming down your face, it's unlikely you will be
able to lead yourself or others to victory. Visualize
what it would be like accomplishing your dream. See
it, smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it in your gut.
6.
Perseverance. Victory belongs to those who want it the
most and stay in it the longest. Now that you have a
dream, make sure you take consistent action every day.
I recommend doing at least 5 things every day that will
move you closer to your dream.
7.
Honor Your Word. Every time you break your word, you
lose power. Successful leaders keep their word and their
promises. You can accumulate all the toys and riches
in the world, but you only have one reputation in life.
Your word is gold. Honor it.
8.
Get a Mentor. Find yourself a mentor. Preferably someone
who has already achieved a high degree of success in
your field. Don't be afraid to ask. You've got nothing
to lose. Mentors.ca is an excellent mentoring website
and a great resource for finding local mentoring programs.
They even have a free personal profile you can fill
out in order to potentially find you a suitable mentor.
In addition to mentors, take time to study autobiographies
of great leaders that you admire. Learn everything you
can from their lives and model some of their successful
behaviors.
9.
Be Yourself. Use your relationships with mentors and
your research on great leaders as models or reference
points to work from, but never copy or imitate them
like a parrot. Everyone has vastly different leadership
styles. History books are filled with leaders who are
soft-spoken, introverted, and quiet, all the way to
the other extreme of being out- spoken, extroverted,
and loud, and everything in between. A quiet and simple
Gandhi or a soft-spoken peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter,
who became president of the United States and won a
Nobel Peace Prize, have been just as effective world
leaders as a loud and flamboyant Churchill, or the tough
leadership style employed by The Iron Lady, Margaret
Thatcher.
I admire Hemingway as a writer. But if I copy Hemingway,
I'd be a second or third rate Hemingway, at best, instead
of a first rate Sharif. Be yourself, your best self,
always competing against yourself and bettering yourself,
and you will become a first rate YOU instead of a second
rate somebody else.
10. Give. Finally, be a giver. Leaders are givers. By
giving, you activate a universal law as sound as gravity
life gives to the giver, and takes from the taker. The
more you give, the more you get. If you want more love,
respect, support, and compassion, give love, give respect,
give support, and give compassion. Be a mentor to others.
Give back to your community. As a leader, the only way
to get what you want, is by helping enough people get
what they want first. As Sir Winston Churchill once
said, "We make a living by what we get, we make
a life by what we give."
By
Sharif Khan
"Leadership is Earned"
Leadership
Skills Quote:
“Leadership
can be thought of as a capacity to define oneself to
others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision
of the future.”
Edwin H. Friedman
Leadership
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Management:
2003 Update, Seventh Edition
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A
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Guide) -- 2000 Edition
by Project Management Institute
Marketing
Management
by Philip Kotler
Operations
Management for Competitive Advantage with Student-CD
by Richard B Chase, et al
Strategic
Management : Concepts and Cases (10th Edition)
by Fred David
Management
Information Systems, Eighth Edition
by Kenneth C. Laudon, Jane P. Laudon
Fundamentals
of Financial Management
by Eugene F. Brigham, Joel F. Houston
Management
(8th Edition)
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Operations
Management with Student DVD and Power Web
by William J Stevenson
Fundamentals
of Financial Management : Concise
by Eugene F. Brigham, Joel F. Houston
Financial
Management : Principles and Applications (10th Edition)
by Arthur J. Keown
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