Leadership Briefs

Attributes:
Characteristics or qualities or properties. Attributes of the leader fall into three categories: mental, physical, and emotional.

By Sean Silverthorne, Harvard Business

Like many top teaching institutions, Harvard Business School invests heavily in training faculty to become dynamic classroom presenters. Observing the best of them at work is like watching a master actor take command of the theater. HBS professors rarely stand still, often sprinting from student to student to tease out insights on a case study. Their hands fly over a half-dozen blackboards that raise and lower for emphasis. There may be a podium in the room, but the teacher is not behind it for long. Leaving the podium behind, getting physically nearer your audience is one key to making sure you’re being listened to. In particular, you want to get within 12 feet of at least some of your audience, and the closer, the better. Why 12 feet? It’s biology. To read the complete article, please click here.

“The successful man is the average man, focused.”
Source Unknown

With industries contracting and jobless rates among manufacturing workers skyrocketing, community colleges have become the new home of retraining programs.
By William J. Holstein Strategy+Business
To read the complete article, please click here.

Stay Positive. You can listen to the cynics and doubters and believe that success is impossible or you can know that with faith and an optimistic attitude all things are possible. Jon Gordon

Delegation is often hard for new managers to learn, says communication consultant Helen Wilkie of MHW Communications. She says new managers are accustomed to being “doers” and are uncomfortable telling other people what to do. Sometimes they think it’s quicker (and better) to do things themselves. Also, because they might be uncomfortable in their new role of manager, they may feel good when they accomplish tasks they already know how to do. All of these reasons grow from the same source, Wilkie says—a lack of confidence.

New managers have to push out of their comfort zones, says Wilkie. Employees expect to get direction from their supervisors and to develop new skills through taking on more tasks. The more work a supervisor teaches employees to do, the more time and opportunity that supervisor has to broaden his or her own career scope.

Culture: The long-term complex phenomenon that can be affected by strategic leaders. Culture represents the shared expectations and self-image of the organization. The mature values that create “tradition”, the play out of “climate” or “the feel of the organization” over time, and the deep, unwritten code that frames “how we do things around here” contribute to the culture. Organizational culture is a system of shared values, assumptions, beliefs, and norms that unite the members of the organization. Individual leaders cannot easily create or change culture.

Corporate culture: The set of important assumptions that members of the company share. It is a system of shared values about what is important and beliefs about how the company works. These common assumptions influence the ways the company operates.

“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
—Charles Du Bos

A team, like a ship, needs the right balance to reach its destination. When you’re recruiting people to work toward a common goal, pick the right variety of styles:

1. Achievers. Look for people who are results-oriented. They like to solve problems, explore opportunities, and implement processes.

2. Intelligence gatherers. These are folks who excel at asking questions, collecting data, and generating creative ideas.

3. Analyzers. You want people who are skilled at defining problems, who know what succeeded and failed in the past (and why), and who can set criteria to evaluate your progress and results.

4. Leaders. You can’t do it all yourself. Enlist people who understand priorities. They should be able to evaluate the information your efforts produce, and make decisions based on the right data.