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The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership: Enable Others to Act
Foster collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships, and strengthen others by increasing their self determination and developing their confidence.
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The Value of Socially Constructed Environments
Socially constructed environments apply a collective intelligence to problems.
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Organizational Learning
Organizational learning morphed into competency training, which measured employees against goals but did not encourage them to go beyond their job description.
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The Power of Culture
A company culture can encourage individuals to dissent, and feel their voice is heard.
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Be Your Whole Self
Blending in at work is tempting, but it is better in the long run to be yourself.
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Engage Your Employee
It’s important to let employees have a voice in your decision-making.
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Be a Part of the Solution
Sometimes, leaders need to take a step back. Pam Laycock explains the benefits of putting employees in charge of problem solving.
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Working Through Influence
In the absence of positional authority, everyone at W.L. Gore has to sell their ideas and work through influence.
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Mindsets and Methods
To make the most of opportunities we need to know both how to think and what to do—mindsets and methods.
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Scaling Trust
To scale trust, model it. For example, a leader published the results of his 360-degree feedback. For people to trust each other they must have confidence in themselves. Adobe eliminated reviews in favor of constant feed forward, and let managers distribute bonuses.
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Leaders Build Excellence in Others
It might sound like a cliche, says Monhla Hlahla, but the heart of leadership is seeing the best in others and bringing them alongside you.
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Admit You Need Help
Leaders should connect the dots between intentions and actions. A plumber doesn’t care about your house; he only wants to know where the leak is. A CEO needn’t talk about his or her organizations; they need only say to employees, “I have a problem. Can you help me?”
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How to Increase Collaboration and Innovation: Differentiate between Fact and Truth
“Incestuous amplification” occurs when aggressive people shut off others who are less confident.
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The Multiplier Effect
Leaders can be multipliers or diminishers. Liz Wiseman tells of a woman who moved from a micromanaging boss to one who offered her a grand challenge. The change in leadership resulted in a dramatic increase in her capability.
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Asking the Right Questions
Liz Wiseman tells how she got her young children to go to bed by asking them what to do, instead of telling them. The approach works well for leaders. Don’t tell your people. Ask the questions and let them find the answers.
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Success at Execution is About Enabling Others
Success as a manager means being great at execution, but execution doesn’t mean doing it all yourself.
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Be a Belief Magnet and a Belief Maker
People who are belief magnets and belief makers draw other people close to them.
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Give Your People the Authority to Make Decisions
People on the front lines know what the problems are, but don’t have the authority to fix them. Organizations can delegate that authority when the front line people have technical competence and understand the organization.
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How to Behave to Empower Your Team
When workshop participants were asked what good could happen if didn’t know anything about leading a new business, they said they’d have to trust their people, be curious, and listen. That's good leadership.
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Create an Environment for Leadership Development—Not a Program
Developing leaders is a natural concept—like breathing air. We under-appreciate the environment and overvalue programs. Eliminate programs and focus on the environment.
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Empowerment to Emancipation
We are naturally empowered; to be alive is to have power. Empowerment becomes emancipation when leaders give people decision-making authority that allows them to express their natural empowerment.
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The Most Important Role of a Leader: Give Control and Create Leaders
The role of a leader is to move people up the “ladder of control,” from “tell me” to “I did it.” To make people think, question their intent at all levels of the ladder.
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How a Senior Leader Can Facilitate Change to Get Alignment
There are always ten things that are not going well that you can’t see. Ask five people to build the business from scratch.
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On Becoming A Great Leader: Ask the Right Questions
Leadership is not about having answers.
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Enabling Success: Empowering People and Teams
True success is not about individual accomplishments. Instead, as Andy Mulholland shares, success is about team achievements and helping those around you do well.
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Ban the Hierarchy: Moving from 'I' to 'We'
Banning the hierarchy means there are no charts with up and down arrows.
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Gaining Engagement through Autonomy
People don’t engage through management or incentives; they engage through self direction.
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Becoming a More Effective Delegator
Marshall Goldsmith describes techniques for effective delegating.
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The Person Who Sweeps the Floor Chooses the Broom
Instead of procedures, set goals. Then let people "choose their own broom."
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The Three E's of Empowerment
Whether in response to a hardship or as part of an organizational philosophy, empowering employees builds ownership and makes them unstoppable.
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The Three Actions of Empowerment
Empowerment helps everyone—leaders, individuals, and teams. Learn what it takes to help others to grow and succeed.
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Empowerment Rules
Empowerment doesn't happen simply because leaders tell employees they're empowered. Leaders must mandate empowerment.
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Shared Leadership
How to create shared responsibility teams.
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Allow your People to Take Risks
It's important to let your people take risks, even when you're not sure they're right.
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Stay Close to Your Core Values
One of the principal reasons for Southwest's success is, they know who they are.
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Developing Trust
Paul Stebbins tells a personal story of trust when he was 16 years old.
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Allowing Employees to Express Themselves
Employees were given permission to be themselves—to grow and develop and exercise their passion, to care about each other and the planet—in addition to performing their job.
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Do-It-Yourself Leadership Development
In these challenging economic times, the concept of do-it-yourself leadership development as proposed by Andrew Simon’s company is a highly appropriate solution for the task of training an organization’s future managers.
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Adaptive Leadership: Letting Go
Being the hero can be addictive. As Lisa Vos, shares, however, as a leader it’s much better to let go of the need for everyone to be dependent on you and instead adopt an adaptive style of leadership.
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Empowering Decision-Making
To decentralize decisions to people closest to the problem requires that they have information from above that provides context.
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Teamwork: Build Individual Confidence First
Great leaders spend all of their time building confidence in others.
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Solidifying Your Team: Shift Accountability
Simon Sinek suggests that using “I intend” could have positive consequences for a company.
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Love the Crisis: Your Greatest Opportunity to Shine
Noah Blumenthal tells a story of a semi-professional cyclist who lost his leg in a car accident and how he embraced and learned to love his crisis and how it encouraged him to get back to cycling faster than doctors thought possible.
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Smash the Silos: Use Assumptions to Your Advantage
Noah Blumenthal shares a story about finding and sticking to your mantra.
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Manipulating Status
By leveling the status of all individuals at a meeting, senior-ranking individuals no longer have the power their position affords. As a result, all individuals’ talent, participation, and engagement increases.
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Leaders Drive Change
Risk-taking is challenging by nature, because of the consequences it can bring. Rob James explains how to motivate employees to take risks and how to effectively manage those risks so that, even if failure occurs, employees won’t shy away from the next risk.
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Overcoming Fear: Techniques to Drive Performance
Vince Poscente outlines a four part technique to overcome fear when pitching a sale.
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How to Deal with Non-Performing Employees
Great managers set themselves apart from bad managers when they know how to deal with nonperformers. They act quickly, without spite or anger – because they genuinely care for the person.
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How to Inspire Others to Inspire Others
Leadership is the ability to inspire. Inspiration comes through trust and empowerment — empowering people to make decisions based on trust, and then empowering their own people. This distributes leadership throughout the organization and allows it to go faster.
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How to Empower Others
Teenagers need to make mistakes to learn. The same is true in business. One tactic he used was to attend meetings and say nothing. It took several weeks, but it worked. Managers learned to make decisions, and then how to influence others to implement those decisions.
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Empower to Go Faster
When Steve Strout played chess as a child, his dad taught him to think ahead five moves. He teaches that approach to everyone, at all levels. It allows the team to go faster — to learn faster, decide faster, recover faster. But you can only go as fast as the person in the front.
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People Are Not Assets, People Are Your Company's Value
John Grant dislikes the phrase, “People are our greatest asset” because it treats people as commodities.