Saturday, October 3, 2015

Leadership from the Beginning

Your First Leadership Job – How Catalyst Leaders Bring out The Best in Others – Tracy M. Byham, PhD. and Richard S. Wellins, PhD. – (Wiley)

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.