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Articles Leadership, Management and Coaching Articles |
Leading Questions: Does your leadership style wear like a bad suit? As a 19-year-old entry level cook at Chicago's Ritz-Carlton, Sarah Stegner remembers concentrating on nothing but good, six nights a week. As she began to prove her skills, she moved from cleaning fish to being an assistant chef in charge of cold foods. Then came a promotion to sous chef, and finally to her current position as a dining room chef, a job she's held for nine years. With each promotion, her success began to depend not only on her cooking finesse, but also on her management skills. Stegner, now 35, learned those skills on the fly. How Effective is Your Leadership Style? Would your staff say that you are easy to work with? Would they call you picky, overly analytical? Do they accuse you of dropping the ball on occasion? Or, might they label you "bossy"? By the time we have been promoted several times as a manager, our leadership style has probably become rather consistent and fixed. After all, our style has worked so far and if people didn't like it, wouldn't they have said something? Most of us assume if we keep getting promoted, we must be doing something right. Not necessarily so. Assess Your Own Strengths as a Decision Maker To be an effective problem solver, you need the self-confidence to make decisions, and to feel comfortable with the risks involved in all decision-making. Doubt about your own abilities can interfere with your efforts to solve problems and to act as a leader who can guide a group of people toward sound decisions. It's all too easy to remember the mistakes we've made—such as the misjudgments that seem so obvious in hindsight—and to let them overshadow our successes. Be a Better Meeting Manager: No matter how challenging. belligerent, or negative the difficult person's behavior, don't take it personally. By identifying the seven difficult personalities and responding to each with openness and sound techniques, you can improve their dynamics and therefore run better meetings. Meetings are great opportunities to share information with your team, to build skills, to motivate, and to give your team a chance to sound off. But even the best planned meetings can be a total loss if difficult people are not handled in effective ways. Retaining Talent in a Competitive Market How do you keep your most talented sales people and sales managers committed, loyal and motivated? The question has frustrated and even bewildered a growing number of companies and organizations in the past year or two. Our work force and pool of resources of highly skilled, highly trained talent is shrinking. This is not a new problem. How can we best build the loyalty of these people to keep them motivated and committed to our company? How to Attract and Retain Top Talent: How do you attract, and then keep, your most talented people committed, loyal and motivated? The question has frustrated and even bewildered a growing number of companies in the past year or two. The work force and pool of resources of highly skilled, highly trained talent is shrinking. This is not a new problem, but it seems to be ever more critical. The question of attracting the brightest and best is a key issue for successful companies. Today with large signing bonuses and very attractive salaries and benefits, the more perplexing question is how to best build the loyalty of our talented people. The more talent we retain, the more talent we'll attract. A manager supervised eight engineers, each from a different country. In his native country, this manager learned a top-down, authoritarian leadership style. Several of the engineers complained about his dictatorial style. His boss asked me to coach him to become a more collaborative team leader. After his initial resistance, he listened to the feedback, modified his approach, built a successful team and eventually got a promotion. To quote him: "Your feedback helped me take a hard look at myself. I'll need a tune-up like this on a regular basis. It's too easy to slip back into old ways." A director at Lucent Technologies said: "Dr. Manning's coaching has helped me in virtually every phase of my job. From more effective presentations to a better understanding of people's working styles, I am a far more successful manager today than ever before. Coaching is also helping me and my management team achieve our goals and create a work environment that retains and attracts our staff." Contact us now: |
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