One of my all time
favorite leadership quotes comes from Tom Peters – “Leaders don’t create
followers they create more leaders.” I have found that to be the case when it
comes for the best leaders I have worked for and I try to live that in my own
leadership career, because let’s face it, leaders aren’t born, they are
developed and nurtured.
That’s where Tracy Byham
and Richard Wellins new book, Your First
Leadership Job – How Catalyst Leaders Bring out The Best in Others comes
in; just because you’ve managed to hang around long enough or been successful
enough to be awarded a leadership role that you know everything you need to
know to be a success. Think of Your First
Leadership Job as a handy road map for effective leaders.
I love the fact that Byham
and Wellins spend time focusing on what they call “interaction skills”. One of
the obvious failings of bad leaders I have experienced firsthand is an
inability to communicate clearly and effectively. If you can’t clearly define
and communicate goals, strategies and engage your team, how can you ever hope
to be an effective leader? This book provides out of the gate strong tools that
you can easily put in play right from the first day you take the lead.
Lead Inside the Box - How Smart Leaders Guide Their
Teams to Exceptional Results – Victor Prince and Mike Figliuolo – (Career
Press)
I
have started to compile a list of my least favorite, most over used business
words and phrases; you know the ones that if you here them used in a meeting or
on a conference call you cringe inwardly. At some point I will turn them into
an article, but for now let tell/warn you that one of the phrases near the top
of the list encourages you to “think outside the box”. While that now hackneyed
phrase supposedly extols the virtues of breaking down barriers, getting creative
and finding new ideas or solutions, it overlooks the all too real circumstances
when you’re stuck with what’s in the box.
Imagine
you are a leader, you need to improve your team’s results and help them to be
more effective and you don’t have the luxury of making an upgrade by swapping
out for better players, what do you do? Lead
Inside the Box - How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results – Victor Prince and Mike Figliuolo can
help you break out of an institutional, one size fits all approach to
performance improvement.
All
too often business likes to fall back on plug and play, best practices that may
not be practical given that no two individuals on your team are alike. Prince
and Figiuolo developed a Leadership Matrix that will help you help you team to
be more impactful and effective by identifying the right approach for each
individual without it becoming an overwhelming process. Keep in mind that
sometimes, the box isn’t so bad, it’s the approach that’s the problem.
H3
Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle – Brad Lomenick – (Nelson
Books)
In a rut. Burned out. Hit
the wall. Just plain stuck. There are probably a whole armload of words and
phrases that you can throw at that feeling of uncertainty about what’s next.
You may be ridiculously successful or you may be struggling mightily, but at
some point I think that every leader reaches that point where they don’t quite
know what direction to take.
For some it might be an
outright career change and for others it might be something a little different.
For Brad Lomenick the founder, architect, and president of Catalyst, one of the
most widely recognized and successful leadership forums in the world, the
answer to the “what’s next” question came in the form of a sabbatical. You may
be asking yourself; what, the hard charging leader of a wildly successful organization
who has personally trained thousands of next generation leaders simply walked
away from that organization to take a break? That’s exactly what Lomenick did.
And we get to benefit from
his self-confessed crisis in leadership as he took what is a very personal
journey to re-focus and recharge that resulted in the book; H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry.
Always Hustle. Along the way on his literal and figurative journey,
Lomenick reached out to his personal network of business and thought leaders the
likes of Jim Collins (Good to Great)
John C. Maxwell and Malcolm Gladwell (The
Tipping Point) to tap into their insights on leadership and to stoke his
passion for leadership.
Lomenick describes leadership
as habitual; defining 20 habits that he finds essential to effective
leadership. There is nothing here that can’t be integrated simply and easily
into your everyday life and approach to leadership. Lomenick taps into a who’s
who of leadership thought as he works his way through the book. While it may
not be practical for many leaders to simply take a sabbatical, Lomenick serves
up actionable steps that we can all put into play based on his journey through
this process.
