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Effective Leadership Skills
January 10, 2008 - On the Road to Effective Leadership
1. Build Your Self-Confidence
Think positive thoughts about yourself.
Write down your good points to boost your self-confidence.
Visualize a more effective/efficient you.
Follow a few easy victories with bigger challenges.
Deal creatively with the emotional turmoil associated with adversity.
2. Think Like A Leader
Pay attention to your intuition.
Becoming a big thinker is important for effective leadership.
Ask tough questions.
Use creative thinking to solve problems.
Enhance your ability to read people.
3. How About A More Charismatic You?
Charisma is almost universally recognized as a major leadership quality.
Although some successful leaders are not universally perceived as charismatic by many people, attempting to lead others without charisma puts you at a disadvantage.
Although popular opinion suggests that charisma is a mysterious inner quality possessed by a small number of captivating people you can develop many of the qualities associated with charisma.
The most effective and feasible methods of developing or enhancing your charisma including to express your feelings more assertively and becoming more enthusiastic, optimistic, and energetic.
4. Communicate Like A Leader
To influence others, use heavy-impact language.
Metaphors, analogies, and anecdotes can be powerful tools for inspiring group members.
The skillful use of nonverbal communication is a key part of communicating.
A comprehensive approach to communicating like a leader is to use a power-oriented language style.
To help protect a leadership image, avoid detractors such as junk words, vocalized pauses, insipid clichés, threadbare anecdotes, and turning too many nouns into verbs.
5. Develop Your Credibility
Achieve credibility by showing integrity.
Develop your own personal code to guide your daily decision-making.
Develop a consistency between words and deeds by “walking the talk.”
Project an image of trustworthiness by an honest appearance.
6. Develop A Tool Kit of Influence Tactics
Influence others by leading by example and displaying emotion.
Consulting with others is an effective way to get them to see your way of thinking.
Become a subject matter expert to enhance your ability to influence others.
Manipulating others can be dangerous, risky and self-defeating.
7. Become A Multicultural Leader
Develop your cultural sensitivity by observing and understanding cultural differences.
Appreciate the wide variety of people who fit under the diversity umbrella, such as recognizing that people differ from one another in dozens of tangible and intangible ways.
Recognize the differences in cultural attitudes and values in such dimensions as formality versus informality and attitudes toward time.
Establish a good strategy for motivating people from different cultures, including identifying their motivators.
8. Become A Visionary and Transformational Leader
Incorporate the values of the organization into your visionary and transformational leadership style.
Create effective vision statements by using such sources of information about the future and the hopes and dreams of the team members.
Present yourself as a strategic thinker by thinking and talking in terms of the big picture and by interpreting trends in the outside environment.
Set the direction for large-scale change by anticipating and sometimes creating a future for the enterprise or organizational unit.
The revolutionary thinker goes beyond suggesting useful, incremental changes.
Manage the type of change your transformations create through such means as helping people understand the need for change, gaining political support for change, and pointing out the financial benefits.
9. You Can Become A Motivational Force
Try to figure out what people really want and balance that with the needs of the organization.
Create goals that are motivational through such means as developing specific difficult goals that will later serve as the basis for accountability and performance measurement.
Be aware of motivational problems and evaluate whether the person has the training and self-confidence necessary to do the job.
Build a culture that motivates people, such as a climate whereby people get caught up in the excitement of performing well.
10. You Can Become A Team Leader
Foster a teamwork culture by establishing an atmosphere that emphasizes teamwork.
Encourage team members to treat each other like customers being pleasant toward each other.
Improve the changes that team members will trust each other and other leaders through such means as giving honest feed back to each other.
Terms and phrases that support teamwork include “the team” and “here’s what we accomplished”.
Characteristics of a winning team include enriched outcomes, team members dependent on each other, and increased member satisfaction.
Sensible methods of getting a team to spend time together include a community service activity.
11.Techniques for Enhancing Team Spirit
Prepare an effective vision for your outcomes by getting the group together in a problem-solving session.
Obtain input from all group members through such means as going around the table in a meeting to gather each team member’s suggestions.
Encourage group members to share ideas through such means as having an information-exchange portion of group meetings.
Reward contributions to team goals through praise and affirmation.
As a team leader, you should engage in tasks performed by the team because your role is that of a collaborator and facilitator, not an executive who delegates most of the work to the team.
12. The Task Side of Team Leadership
Assigning demanding tasks for the group is important because group members are likely to pull together and perform well.
Showing the group how it can obtain necessary resources is important because for group members to accomplish their goals, they need the right backing from the leader.
Assign task roles to group members such as ideator (idea generator) and market gatekeeper (collects information).
Minimize micromanagement to avoid being a pest and interfering with group members accomplishing their work.
13. Leaders Manage Conflict
Leaders need to be able to resolve conflict because unresolved conflict has so many negative consequences for members and the organization.
Confrontation and problem solving is a major method of resolving conflict that includes being assertive about the problem facing your, finding its causes, and developing approaches to reducing the conflict.
Developing options for mutual gain is a high-level method of resolving conflict (win-win) in which both parties satisfy an important demand or need.
Accept criticism constructively by standing outside yourself when criticized, and sometimes get the criticizer to help you.
14. Become An Empowering Leader
Empowerment is passing along decision-making authority and responsibility from the leader (you) to group members. People are empowered when they are able to more freely exercise whatever power they posses, such as using their own expertise and life experiences.
Leadership and management practices that lead to empowerment include using participative management, liberating people from bothersome rules, training people in the skills they need to be empowered, and using team structures.
15. Winning The Support of Group Members
Each group member should be made to feel important- all are equal.
If you express confidence in group members they are likely to live up to your expectations.
Treating the group like a family will lead to closely-knit group that is loyal to you and the organization.
Promote the contributions of your group throughout the organization so they will understand you are truly on their side.
Let bad ideas down gently through such means as being tactful and saying that you will keep an idea on file that might not be useful now.
If you touch base with group members before taking action the chances increase that you will receive their support.
Point out at least one praiseworthy aspect of each member’s performance.
16. Leading Others Through A Crisis
A directive and forceful leadership style works well during a crisis because people tend to be dependent on authority when facing big trouble.
The components of a crisis-management mode include staying cool under pressure, avoiding quick fix, and having one center of authority.
Place the crisis in a problem-solving mode through such steps as clarifying the problem, developing creative alternatives, and developing an action plan.
Keep team members focused on the task at hand during the crisis through such means as announcing any thread of good news.
Hidden opportunities can sometimes be found during a crisis.
Develop a turnaround strategy that helps the team move through a crisis.
Prepare in advance for a crisis through such methods as forming a crisis management team and building up cash reserves.
17. Turning Around Problem People
Combat manipulators through such direct methods as pointing out discrepancies between reality and what they are saying or implying.
Combat dissenters by making it clear that constructive criticism is welcome but that behavior is unacceptable.
Deal with the personality quirks of group members through such means as showing sympathy without submitting all their demands.
Negotiate with difficult people because you will need more than formal authority to work out a peaceful agreement.
Giving recognition and attention to needy people is important because they often create a disturbance to satisfy their frustrated needs for recognition and attention.
Getting too embroiled in the psyche of difficult people is hazardous because you might lose your objectivity in dealing with them, and it is draining.
18. Your Role As Coach and Facilitator
Give emotional support in relation to coaching through such means as encouraging the individual and making positive comments about the person’s demeanor.
Give constructive advice and bust barriers to round out your coaching effectiveness. A “barrier buster” helps a team member remove impediments to good performance that are beyond his or her control.
Gain a commitment to change by asking the person coached what he or she is going to be differently.
Establish realistic improvement goals by helping the team member to set goals that will stretch his or her capability but that are not most likely to result in failure and frustration.
Be an active listener by grasping both the facts of what is said and the feelings behind the word.
19. How To Mentor
The term “mentor” refers technically to a wise and trustworthy sage and advisor.
Mentors engage in many activities including helping with career advancement, sponsoring others for advancement and/or leadership, giving challenging assignments, encouraging problem solving, and providing emotional support.
The characteristics of an effective protégé include trustworthiness, taking responsibility for his or her own fate, and a desire to be a winner.
Effective mentors engage in such activities as showing concern for the development of group members, giving good advice, allowing others to struggle a little, and promoting the protégé’s reputation.
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