Articles tagged "Effective Leadership"
Culture Starts at the Top
This past week validated that regardless of what you say you want your company culture to be, what it actually IS is dependent upon you, the leader.
Drink a Cup of Coffee or Develop a Team Member?
I recently came across a 2018 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that noted companies with fewer than 100 employees, on average, spent only 12 minutes of dedicated training time per employee – during the employee’s entire tenure with them! As pathetic as that is, it’s even more depressing because it dropped from a whopping 13.4 minutes of dedicated training time per employee in 1995. The 2018 report also noted that companies with 100-500 employees invested less than 6 minutes of dedicated training time per employee.
Communicate Changes Before Implementing Changes
Managing change has become a never-ending but essential part of every leader’s job. It’s become ubiquitous. It’s something we, as the ‘recipients’ of change, are begrudgingly accepting more and more often, and it’s therefore something we, as leaders and often the ‘instigators’ of change, need to improve upon. Why? Because we’re still too often forcing our team members to ‘just deal with’ the never-ending changes instead of helping them absorb and adopt the changes.
It’s Not ‘Return to Work,’ It’s ‘Return to Us’
You have no doubt heard or read others proclaiming: “Stop saying: ‘Return to work’. We’ve been working this whole time! And, we’ve been working longer, harder, and in more challenging ways than ever before!” You know what? They’re right. If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that this past year, regardless of industry, profession, etc., we’ve all had to work harder and more creatively than ever before. So it’s simply wrong to now focus on how to ‘return to work.’ Instead, we need to focus on how to work productively and collegially again whether it’s in-person, in a hybrid format, or in a refined remote format.
Your Silence Speaks Volumes: Speak and Lead Proactively
How you communicate as a leader is critical. There’s nothing new in that. However, what I’m finding more frequently is that leaders aren’t appreciating how loudly their silence speaks to their teams and what their silence says about their leadership. Whether it’s a company president, director of regional sales, or a team lead, leaders are staying silent too often. Their silence is not motivated by a fear of crossing a line on political correctness. Their silence is instead driven by a fear of unintentionally influencing their team’s thoughts or behaviors, and potentially stifling their team’s ability to take on new challenges. So instead, they say and do nothing.
