Individual Leadership: Don’t Forget Your Hidden Leaders

When you decouple the idea of leadership from position or title, you’ll see leaders emerge at all levels of your organization. This is the premise of my book The Hidden Leader. The ideas in it are as relevant as they were nearly a decade ago when the book was first published. Organizations need leaders at all levels to deliver for customers and drive results.

Leadership is about behavior, not where someone sits on the org chart. Look for those who:

·     Focus on results (instead of blindly following process)

·     Understand and act on your customer’s intent or purpose (not just stated needs)

·     Develop relationships across the organization (not just in their corner of the business.)

Find and develop these leaders. Encourage and cultivate these behaviors in everyone in your company, and you’ll be on your way to, as the subtitle of my book suggests, “discovering and developing greatness in your organization.”

Organizational Leadership: Creating High Standards

One of the most powerful things you will do as leader for your team and organization is to establish high standards. This is not merely about setting goals or creating metrics, which most companies have plenty of. It is about raising people’s expectations. When expectations are low, people easily brush off poor performance as normal. Instead, establish a baseline expectation of quality work and striving for improvement, where poor performance is an anomaly. This kind of cultural shift requires leaders to have a vision for what good and even great looks like and to consistently share these expectations. It’s up to you to inspire people to join you in the pursuit of excellence. Where are you going to raise the standards in your organization? 

Perspective: Subjectivity

To cultivate real empathy, you must respect someone else’s subjective experience. In other words, your co-worker, your neighbor, the person working out next to you at the gym, all experience the world differently based on their upbringing, their individual experiences, their education, and their personal challenges. Often our first response is to judge harshly, especially if their subjective experience ignites our own defenses or triggers a negative response.

There is a principle that crisis line call center workers embrace. It’s that whatever someone perceives as a crisis, is a crisis for them. And that’s what matters. When we don’t respect the subjective experience of others, emotionally charged conversations can easily overheat or get ugly. From politics to social media, from work to home - if you pay attention, you’ll see this everywhere. We could all benefit from showing greater respect for others subjective experience.

Replay: Cultivating Executive Presence

The last LinkedIn Live on Executive Presence was well received. You can find the replay here!

LinkedIn Live: The Pragmatics of Inclusive Leadership

We hear a lot about Inclusion as an important area of leadership competence. But too much of it is either vague or politicized. Neither of which helps leaders take the actions they need to create high performing teams.

Join me to find out specific behaviors and approaches to be an inclusive leader and harness the strengths of everyone in your organization.. Tuesday, October 15th at 10am EST.

Correction: Client Podcast on Candor

Last month I shared a client’s internal podcast on the topic of candor. While I had permission to share a link to that conversation, I mistakenly provided a link that gave access to their entire library of internal podcasts. Not my best work. Thank goodness for forgiveness and quickly correcting errors. Those who asked received corrected links to an mp4 file produced only for the conversation between me and Alan Crawford, the President of L3Harris Commercial Aviation.

If you missed it, it’s a great discussion about building a culture where people are comfortable sharing their perspectives and understand the importance and value of disagreement, different opinions and talking about the real issues a team faces.

You can find it here.