10 Key Skills Today’s Leaders Need To Succeed In 2013

Below is an article by Jill Geisler.  Jill talks about 10 key skills.  Other recent examples of "10's":

10 big rules of leadership

10 ways to market your business with foursquare

10 quotes of managers in my network

10 quotes that can change your life

10 tips for a successful phone interview

And this is only from my LinkedIn network in the last day.  While in most cases it takes a lot more than ten steps to ensure success, often it takes a lot less, if you have the right skills and people around you.  I discussed “The three elements of a great leader” after an article by Hiroshi Mitikani (http://leanimprovement.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-three-elements-of-great-leader.html), and “Inside the mind of a great manager” after an article by David Di Salvo (http://leanimprovement.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/inside-mind-of-great-manager.html)

The key for me in leadership is to, just as Jill says, create a strong strategy and vision, and live it.  Build a team around me with the necessary skills of implementing the strategy, but also to challenge the ways in which the strategy is implemented or even go as far as to highlight possible improvements and opportunities in the strategy.

A leader is generally in charge of a team, department, branch or whole company.  In any case it is most likely that the leader will have responsibilities and KPI’s that can only be met if the team meets theirs, no matter how skilled, intelligent and hard working the leader is.

There are many skills the leader needs to have to understand the people in the team, notice issues and act quickly.  One of which is decision making.  Someone has to be the one to decide which path to take, and if the leader hesitates, it will most likely create a feeling that there is uncertainty in the direction.

I like that Jill states emotional intelligence.  If you read my earlier post “Leadership and the three levels of intelligence”, you will know what my thoughts are in regards to EQ (Emotional Quotient), CQ (Change Quotient) & SQ (Social Quotient). (http://leanimprovement.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/leadership-and-three-levels-of.html). 

What do all the above come down to?  Communication; again Jill hits the nail on the head with this one.  If you are a poor communicator, you will struggle as a leader.  If you cannot listen and are not willing to take advise from your team, you set yourself up for failure.

Motivation is certainly another key element, and I have gone into much detail, referring to a book by Daniel Pink called “Drive” in a previous post entitled “Motivation and Rewards”:  http://leanimprovement.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/motivation-and-rewards-discussion-as.html

All in all Jill’s ten points further emphasise key criteria of successful leaders, and it’s well worth hanging on to remind ourselves from time to time on what is onvolved.

by Jill Geisler Published Dec. 6, 2012 6:53 am Updated Dec. 6, 2012 7:00 am

What sets the most successful managers apart from others? You might be an expert in your field, even the smartest person in the room — but that’s no guarantee of success. You need an array of skills that are particularly well-suited to times of change and challenge. Here are 10 I recommend.

1. Strategic Thinking
Don’t just immerse yourself in today’s tasks. Think big picture. Step back from the dance floor from time to time and take the balcony view (Hat tip for that great metaphor to the book, “Leadership on the Line.”) Review systems. Set priorities aligned with major goals. Learn new and scary things. Encourage innovation by backing good people who take smart risks.

2. Collaboration
Overcome the four barriers to collaboration I’ve written about before.

·         Distance: Stay on the radar with people you don’t see regularly.

·         Dominance: Change assumptions about the importance/subservience of certain roles in your organization.

·         Discomfort: Educate yourself and your staff about the work of others.

·         Dissonance: Check your demands and systems to make certain they aren’t undercutting collaboration.

Be a role model for effectively networking by showing the value of spanning old boundaries and busting old silos.

3. Emotional Intelligence
Your IQ alone can’t fuel the group’s success. Emotional intelligence is critical. Build your self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. Recognize that as a leader, you are contagious. Be a source of energy, empathy and earned trust, proving optimism and realism can co-exist. Understand that resilience is key to leadership, especially in stressful times. One of my favorites reads of the past year, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain,” lays out the neuroscience of resilience and underscores that we can consciously build our capacity.

4. Critical Thinking
Critical thinkers question conventional wisdom. They are vigilant about identifying and challenging assumptions that underlie actions or inaction. They are automatically wary of generalizations, inferences and unproven theories. Among their favorite questions is: “How do we know that?” They strive to independent thinkers, careful to check how their own biases might color their decisions. They do this automatically to speed up good decision-making, not to cause “paralysis by analysis.”

5. Communication
This one seems so simple, yet it comes up continually in my seminars as a deficit in organizations — and it’s managers who point out the problem! Bosses who don’t communicate effectively get in the way of their team’s effectiveness. Make it your goal to master every form of interpersonal communication and make it powerful: one-to-one, small group, full staff, email, social media, and of course, listening.

Become an expert on framing, storytelling and finding the master narrative in a situation. If you don’t, others will — and the others may be your internal critics or your external competitors.

6. Motivation
Telling people “You are lucky to have a job” in no way qualifies as motivation. Nor does fear, unless it is fear of letting a great boss down. Nor, interestingly, does throwing money at people. Pay them fairly, of course, but don’t stop there.Understand the key intrinsic motivators: competence, autonomy, purpose and growth. Determine the prescription for each of your employees.

7. Feedback
Commit to wearing what I call “feedback glasses” — new lenses through which you look at people and their work. Through these lenses, you are always on the alert for opportunities to deliver specific, helpful information to people about their performance and their value to the organization. Upgrade the quality of all of your interactions by using them as opportunities for customized, effective feedback. In my new book, “Work Happy: What Great Bosses Know,” I devote a chapter to feedback as the key to performance management, with a complete tool kit of options.

8. Tough Conversations
Don’t avoid tough talks. Learn to do them deftly, avoiding the many pitfalls they can present. Become an expert at addressing challenges and problems early and often. Don’t let problems fester or bullies prevail. Build trust as a leader so people recognize your good intentions even in the midst or wake of challenging conversations.

9. Coaching
Are you among the legions of managers who habitually fix the work of others? Are you the non-stop answer machine for people who are overly reliant on you for decisions? And at the end of the day, do you wonder why you’re frustrated and exhausted and employees aren’t getting better on your watch? You need to learn to coach their growth.

Coaching is an entirely different skill from fixing. It helps people learn to improve their work and make decisions for themselves. Don’t just take my word for it; a2012 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research says the most important tasks of effective managers are teaching skills that endure and fueling the motivation of employees.

10. Making Values Visible and Viral
Let people know what you stand for. Make those conversations a part of your daily work. Lose your fear of coming off as corny or holier than thou. Tap into the great reservoir of commitment and care that people bring to their work lives, but often fail to talk about unless they’re at some professional seminar (like ours), where it pours out. Why?  Because we make it safe to talk about values like integrity, diversity, community, and service. All we have to do is start those conversations, and they always take off organically. It should happen in the workplace, too. If you don’t inspire, who will?

Each of these is a skill you can learn. I know, because I teach them! And there’s nothing more rewarding than seeing careers improve as people grow from being okay managers to being great bosses who understand the key skills of leadership.

Original post:  http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/leadership-management/what-great-bosses-know/196814/10-key-skills-todays-leaders-need-to-succeed-in-2013/

Inside the Mind of a Great Manager

As a manager and leader I aspire to be the best I can be in both areas.  Too often however I find that we get caught up with the day to day operations in a way that lets us forget our basics and values. 

It is in these times that we need to take a breather, re-focus, re-evaluate and just remember what really matters, and what makes us who we are.  We cannot always be everyone’s friend, that's the reality. 

As much as I like to be close to everyone in our business, and especially to my team, there are times where decisions have to be made.  Decisions that affect others and the greater good of the business, decisions that influence areas which individuals may not understand or consider when pursuing a specific goal. 

Making decisions is something that we constantly face, and often we do not have much time to consider whether they are the right or wrong ones.  Often we will not find out until much later whether we have made the right decision, but at the end of the day, someone has to, and armed with intellectual knowledge as well as experience we are generally able to take the correct path, no matter how tough or unreasonable it may seem to others.

In saying all this, I came across the article below by David Di Salvo, posted on 25/9/2012.

Since each of us has had good and bad managers, it’s tempting to wonder if there’s a brain-based distinction between them.  At times I’ve worked with managers so appallingly unfit for their role that it seemed like there just had to be something missing upstairs — some crucial component of what makes a manager effective that these people just didn’t have.

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On rarer occasions, I’ve met managers who seemed genetically predestined for their jobs.  I asked one of those people once why he appeared so naturally in sync with managing people and projects, and he said, “I’ve never really thought about it, but I just like working with good people and helping to make things happen.”  His air of nonchalance didn’t surprise me, nor did the fact that he’d never given it much thought — I knew he was genuine in both regards.

In this, my concluding article to a series I began weeks ago, I’m going to describe what my research and observations reveal about what’s going on in the minds of great managers.

1.  Great managers don’t “do” management — they embody it.

This speaks to why I knew the manager I mentioned above was genuine when he said he hadn’t considered the question very much, and that the question itself didn’t really seem important to him.  The question I was asking him addressed the “function” of management, but for him management “function” wasn’t the point of his job.  He never saw it that way.  Instead, he embodied the functions of good management so thoroughly that separating himself from them and analyzing why he did this or that well never occurred to him as a good use of time.

2. Great managers limit their accessibility for only two reasons.

Great managers realize that a vital part of their job is to be accessible to their staff, and they always strive to uphold this role — with only two exceptions.  The first is if they must meet a deadline that is crucial, and taking any time away from doing so will result in disaster.  Note: this doesn’t describe every deadline. If a manager effectively manages his or her time, most deadlines still allow for windows of accessibility. But every so often one comes up that does not, and for the period of time necessary to meet it, an effective manager knows they have to “lock down” their schedule for a while.

The other exception is if an employee is abusing the manager’s accessibility because they are not able to accomplish what’s required of them.  When an employee is constantly in the manager’s doorway with a barrage of questions, and no answer is ever sufficient to light their path, then the manager knows another course of action is necessary. Maybe it’s training, maybe it’s reassignment – but whatever the case, more accessibility isn’t the answer; the employee is using it as an excuse.

3. Great managers never mistreat staff in group settings (or otherwise).

This one may sound like the typical “great managers don’t throw their employees under the bus,” but there’s more to it than just that.  Every sub-par manager I have met or worked with/for, has on at least one occasion caused a staff member embarrassment, shame or outright humiliation in front of others.  The reason is always the same — insecure managers derive a sense of control from showing people that no one is beyond being stomped on.  Sometimes this behavior comes completely out of nowhere (or so it seemed to the employee), because the manager felt they had to “send a message” on that particular day.  Bad managers have a muted sense of how much damage they’re doing each time they mistreat a staff member. They may even think that their willingness to be harsh in public is a sign of strength, when in fact it’s the ultimate sign of weakness.

4. Great managers celebrate great achievements and congratulate daily successes. 

When a team accomplishes something truly great, the manager of that team makes sure that the team has an opportunity to jointly celebrate.  Maybe it’s a team lunch, maybe it’s happy hour — whatever fits the team — but great managers don’t let opportunities like that go by without giving the team a chance to grow closer through their achievement.  Of course, not every team achievement reaches the level of “greatness,” but great managers are also always on the lookout for daily successes — and those are met with congratulations. Maybe it’s a congratulatory email with a cc: to another supervisor, or perhaps just a face-to-face show of appreciation.  The point is, great managers know that big achievements and daily successes are opportunities, and they don’t let them pass by unnoticed.

5. Great managers always refer back to their experience before making a decision.

Great managers became managers because they performed well enough to merit the attention of their supervisors and eventually were given responsibility for other employees.  As such, they know how messy a process getting promoted can be, and that they didn’t make it to their positions without suffering their fair share of mistakes.  Poor managers (even if they were once good employees) make decisions using formulaic, one-size-fits-all approaches.  They think that their role dictates that they supervise generically.  Great managers never make that mistake, but instead rely on their rich repository of personal experience–including mistakes and failures–whenever they make a decision that affects others.

6. Great managers don’t care about being known as “great” — they care about being known as great contributors. 

The late great Peter Drucker said, paraphrasing, the effective executive always asks him/herself, “What can I contribute?”  That’s essential to what makes the mind of a great manager different than that of just about anyone else in an organization.  Every day, they are looking for ways to contribute more of what they have to offer to make their teams better, make their projects better, and make the organization better.  And striving to contribute need not be a conscious, intentional process every day; rather, it becomes a normal part of how a great manager thinks.  Again, it’s not about “being” the role — it’s about embodying it.

7. Great managers willingly pass the baton.

You can always tell who the insecure managers are, because they’re the ones most unwilling to identify successors to their positions.  But great managers think about this very differently.  They don’t lack ambition, but they pursue their ambitions with a “back fill” mentality.  Someone on their team has what it takes to do the manager’s job, and great managers cultivate that talent because they want that person to move into their role when a new opportunity presents itself.  A poor manager, on the other hand, is an ambitious opportunist who really doesn’t care about nurturing a replacement — that’s “someone else’s problem.”

8. Great managers are already leaders, no matter their title.

Countless business books discuss the differences between management and leadership, but my observation has been that a great manager is already a leader — and doesn’t especially care what books say about the alleged differences.  Perhaps average managers (to say nothing of the bad ones) fall short of leadership material, but the great ones already embody the characteristics that make people highly respected leaders.  And if others in an organization are paying attention, the great manager will eventually achieve a true leadership role, and many will benefit from a wise decision to capitalize on greatness.

You can find David on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website, The Daily Brain.

You can find me on Twitter @goal1e, and more information on management and leadership coaching as well as cultural change through www.chaseperformance.com