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As a search firm, when we’re engaged to find a functional leader for almost any role, it’s virtually guaranteed that collaboration will be a key necessary ingredient they need to see in a successful leadership hire. Can you call your leadership style collaborative? Maybe you should consider the question, “How do I coach on collaboration?”
- First and foremost as with all positive workplace behaviors, you must walk the talk. Employees mirror what you do in meetings and pay particular attention to how you act after meetings, in private when only your team is around. If you sound collaborative in a meeting, and then are spiteful or resentful in private, don’t expect much from your team. You may need coaching on integrity more than the team needs it on collaboration! Read more »
Archive for June, 2011:
Fostering Collaboration (third and final in series)
Strategy (two part series)
Setting strategy isn’t the same as leading strategy. Even the best strategist can falter when it comes to implementing and sustaining the right direction for the business. And it’s not just about the planning. It’s also about the doing.
According to the Center for Creative Leadership, statistics indicate that only from 4 to 7 percent of leaders exhibit strategic skills, a woefully inadequate amount given the demands of organizations in today’s environment, notes Kate Beatty, coauthor of Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization’s Enduring Success.
“Leaders today face tremendous pressure to make short-term numbers and show immediate wins,” Beatty says. “Operational leadership rules the day.”
But the pressure to meet short-term targets and solve functional problems is creating a leadership pipeline with limited strategic leadership capacity.
So, how do we lead in ways that position the business for the future while also meeting current demands? It requires developing the following three skills, according to Beatty.
Strategic thinking is grounded in a strong understanding of the complex relationship between the organization and its environment. Strategic thinkers take a broad view; ask probing questions; and identify connections, patterns and key issues. To boost the level of strategic thinking as you or your team work on a challenge, pose these questions: Read more »
Goals
Studies show that only about 4% of people actually sit down and write out their personal goals. Close to 80% of those people actually meet all are part of those goals. Why? Because writing them down is an act of commitment. It helps them own their goals. Taking the action of writing it down ensures that they’ll think about them more often as they’ve created a “personal contract” with themselves.
One effective process of goal setting is to follow the three “C”s. This process includes:
- CAPTURE – Sit down in a quiet place and invest some time on this step. Picture the goal waiting for you on the other side of a wide river that has many large boulders sticking out of the water. These rocks represent your stepping stones to your success. Determine clearly just how many stepping stones you will need in order to realistically meet your objective.
Once you have identified the stepping stones, you will need to take each stone one at a time and identify every single task that will be associated with the stepping stone. Make your list as long and as broad as necessary. Read more »
Make ‘em Laugh
Humor in the workplace is priceless. After all, employees around you are spending time with you away from their families or away from some of the things in life they’d rather be doing. Investing in the relationship with them using humor will help employees, peers and customers alike. Why? For two reasons:
- Humor helps build a productive environment. Any team that uses humor as a way to stay relaxed is building an environment of confidence and trust. Confidence comes from those around you seeing you as “one of them”. Humor helps to grow this confidence. Self deprecating humor, to a degree, is helpful for this confidence, too… especially from the leader. We are more approachable when humor is used and being approachable is an important step toward building trust.
- Humor helps to build rapport in relationships. Rapport is the connection it takes to work together. It’s the comfort level that comes about when teammates are communicating. Simply put, injecting humor in the workplace helps people feel more comfortable to share what’s on their mind and get ideas out there.
Fostering Collaboration (first in a series)
One of our objectives in taking on a new recruiting assignment, is to gain a clear understanding of the type of candidates our clients are looking for in the role we will be recruiting for. Out of the many “soft skills” that we most often hear requested, “collaboration” would be one of the top most often requested skills.
Merriam-Webster defines collaboration as “to work jointly with, cooperate with, or willingly assist another party”. This is a key soft skill in business. But, is collaboration seamlessly practiced in business relationships or developed in associates? Is it easily recognizable in employees, suppliers, customers, or job candidates? In this series of posts, we will take a look.
We’ve all met a few of the extremes on the scale of collaboration. One example is the deliberate over-promise/under-deliver type who practices a low level of integrity and a high level of appeasement. They tend to appease in business meetings by promising to cooperate or “work together on that”, when Read more »
