LeadingChangeWithoutAuthority

Today’s practical leadership tip is a little different. I asked Tiffany Childs, our marketing manager,  to provide her perspective of the performance review she “received” on Monday. Here is her commentary:

How many times have you been in a performance review, either as the reviewer or the one being reviewed, and felt unsatisfied at the end? Having a periodic review is a necessary part of working in any environment and so we’ve all most likely had our fair share of them, but it seems as though often managers are just going through the motions in these reviews.

I feel that is a shame because Read the rest of this entry »

I had a delightful discussion recently with the Director of a substantial medical center. She and her team had been “beaten up” by corporate when they received an admittedly abysmal 18% effectiveness rating in one of the 150 areas for which they are measured. Not surprisingly, it created a great deal of frustration on the team, and opened up quite a change management opportunity for the Director.

Being a staunch believer in the essence of Enlightened Leadership and Leadership Made Simple, she knew the solution to the problem lied within the creativity of the people involved. She also knew that creativity would never surface if they stayed in their frustrated state.

To get past that frustration, she encouraged them to shift their focus to what was working - not only in that specific area, but in other areas that might trigger insights for how to do this one differently.

Using that Forward Focus(TM) approach, the team came up with several ideas they could immediately implement to improve the situation. As they got positive results from those early actions, they were energized to find more creative ideas - which, of course, they had no problem generating!

They periodically got back together to build on their successes to continually improve that particular metric. It was an easy process - celebrating and analyzing successes and taking the resulting creative energy to come up with more improvement ideas.

By the time the August numbers came out, they had improved the metric from 18% to 90% effectiveness in just 4 months. What an amazing performance improvement. This is what leading for results - the easy way - looks like!

Our acknowledgment and congratulations to the team!

In what ways have you experienced leading for results the easy way? We would love to hear - your solutions and your challenges.

CRM Learning is close to introducing a new learning video based on Leadership Made Simple. We are excited about it and will have a trailer/preview on our site in the next couple of weeks.

If you have experience with using the Framework for Leadership(TM), you won’t be surprised by a statement made on the video by John Van Sky, Bioterrorism Preparedness Training Manager, Orange County(CA) Health Agency:

“I’m a clinical psychologist by training, and I’ve never seen anything take down the barriers for folks quicker than the Framework.”

Isn’t breaking down a variety of barriers one of the ongoing challenges we face in our team leader, supervisor, manager, executive, or even parent roles? Key to breaking down barriers is honoring people and teams for where they already are - BEFORE asking them to do even better. The Framework does that in spades if your intention is right!

How have you have used the essence of Leadership Made Simple to make a difference in your situation. Send us your comments.

To your continued success!

One of the most expensive mistakes we ever make as managers is
hiring the wrong people for a job, yet simple, affordable tools exist to
greatly improve the probability that we are hiring the right person.

Let me share a story, then give you a chance to experiment with just Read the rest of this entry »

Wayne Turmel hosts a podcast called The Cranky Middle Manager. He recently interviewed Ed Oakley about “Leadership Made Simple: Practical Solution to Your Greatest Management Challenges.”

Please listen to the podcast here.

The interview starts at about 5 minutes into Waynes discussion, and you can move the slider over to get to it faster.

Enjoy!

The Enlightened Leadership Team

Gary owns a courier service in Denver, Colorado. We met in Starbucks, and when he discovered what I do, he asked for some advice. His situation was that he had a delivery contractor who had a bad attitude along with some behavioral issues. On top of that difficult situation, Gary needed to lower the contractor’s compensation as a percentage of revenue, as the current situation was not profitable for the company.

My coaching to him was basically to use the essence of the Framework for Leadership. I’ll bet you’re thinking, “what a surprise!” The idea was to first set the context Read the rest of this entry »

I had an experience last month of how easy it is to judge
circumstances as good or bad - yet we might be totally wrong.
In our leadership roles, this quick judgment can limit our ability
to “hear” feedback and different perspectives. This lack of hearing
or really understanding someone can then have a huge impact
on the quality of our decisions.

Here is what happened. A group of friends, flying on different
airlines from Rome to get back to the States after a great vacation Read the rest of this entry »

We thought you might want to know that the first of three articles to appear in Materials Handling Management magazine by Ed Oakley has now been published.

The article is titled “Leading Change Without Authority,” and can be found online at:

Materials Handling Management magazine - May, 2007

This link will take you to the cover of the magazine. Just click on the article, “Leading Change Without Authority,” or turn to page 17 and 18.

Enjoy!

The Enlightened Leadership Team

ELS Leading Change without Authority learning program

I had an interesting insight about leadership and management
from playing a team tennis match last week. If you don’t care
for sports, you might want to skip this one.

As soon as we began to warm up, I realized the 20-something,
strong, tall man I was playing had a much stronger game than
mine. Nick hit the ball very hard, both groundstrokes and serves.
He had a very aggressive style. I realized I could not possibly
compete with him by trying to match his style, yet if I did not
consciously decide otherwise, that’s exactly what I would
probably try to do. My ego would naturally want to “outperform”
him at his own game. If I tried that, I realized I would have no
chance of winning.

In leadership, we must adjust what we do based on the
situations and people with whom we are working. If we always
manage the same way - regardless of the circumstances
or people - we are likely to make significant mistakes and
create problems rather than resolve them. We must do our
best to understand the situation, create our best strategy for
dealing with it, test our strategy and move forward with it
or change the strategy if it doesn’t work.

We must stay conscious! - aware of the situation.

In that tennis match, I recognized I couldn’t hit the ball nearly
as hard as he did, but I am pretty good at placing the ball on
the court close to where I want it - both with groundstrokes
and serves. So, as we warmed up, I planned my strategy
for playing Nick. I noticed that he had a tendency to hit some
of his backhands wide, deep or into the net. He missed very
few shots on his forehand side.

So I adjusted my game. I worked very hard to hit to his
backhand side - again nothing fancy, just get it back to that
side of the court. I also realized that I had the ability to be
more patient than Nick, and I could use that to my advantage.
He would try to end the point quickly with a great shot. But
he missed a lot of those kinds of shots. When he did, he
became frustrated. The more frustrated he got, the more patient
I got, because the strategy was working. The whole strategy
evolved to getting everything across the net to his backhand
side and let him make the mistakes. It worked more often than
not.

The only problem I have with this analogy is the competitive
perspective. We are NOT competing with our people, but
continually working to learn how to best collaborate with
them in our leadership roles so we can compete effectively
as an organization in the marketplace. We must learn to adjust
our approach to match the needs of the situation and the people with whom we are working.

As leaders, we need to understand the situation, adjust our
approach, test it to verify whether it is effective, change if it
is not effective, and continue if it is. If we stay locked into
preconceived notions about how it should work, we greatly
limit ourselves.

If I had tried to play my “normal” game, I would have
inadvertently played into his strengths more often.

As it was, I adjusted to fit the situation and I won the
match 6-1, 6-3. May you be conscious enough to adjust
your leadership approach to better fit the need!

How do you relate to this message?

Ed Oakley
Change Management Made Simple

Today I was acknowledging one of my mastermind group members, Theresa Szczurek, about an excellent article she had written about using Effective Questions - although she did not use that terminology - to manage change. I realized many of you might appreciate the ideas as well. With her permission, here it is:

Do you want your future to be a repeat of your past? NO! You want it to be better and different. The question is, “How do I create a future distinct from the past?” The answer requires Read the rest of this entry »