Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
PERSONAL COACHING Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
Too often, business people, pressed for time and stressed by having to stand in front of an audience or a sales prospect, take short cuts or simply "wing it." The "wing it" expression comes from the theater; where it alludes to an actor studying his part in the wings (the areas to either side of the stage) because he has been suddenly called on to replace another. First recorded in 1885, it eventually was extended to other kinds of improvisation based on unpreparedness.
Being prepared for the audience interaction is important. Knowing what action you want them to take based upon this interaction allows the presentor to focus. Having a strategy of what to ask, what to show and what to tell helps to move the audience to taking the desired action. Anticipating obstacles in the form of questions at the end of your presentation will allow you to plan how to handle potential "roadblocks" in accomplishing your presentation objective.
Crafting a presentation is a creative process....to become more than a "data dump." Before you even consider your slides, consider all the ideas you want to discuss, but treat them as words, not images. Start with your ideas and write them on paper, or on a computer screen, white-board or Post-it-notes. Then look at all of the ideas objectively and decide which ones you need and, most important, which ones you don't need. Do the "data dump" in your preparation, not in your presentation.
For example, effective listening strikes at the essence of two aspects of presentations:
Listen as you are asked questions (during or after your presentation). Make sure that you identify what your audience wants to know before you answer.
Read the reaction of your audience for non-verbal signals---consider it silent listening. See whether your answer is producing head nods. If not, amplify your answer.
In both cases, your goal is to make your audience feel that you are more interested in them than in yourself. Being a good listener is important, but that is only the first step: it is just as important to take a beat before pulling the answer trigger. Pause before you answer a question.
Researchers are finding that wearing a smile brings certain benefits, like slowing down the heart and reducing stress. This may even happen when people aren't aware they are forming a smile, according to a recent study. The work follows research that established that the act of smiling can make you feel happier.
A study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people who smiled after engaging in stress-inducing tasks showed a greater reduction in heart rate than people who maintained a neutral facial expression. The study, which involved 170 participants, got people to smile unknowingly by making them hold a pair of chopsticks in three different ways in their mouth. One way forced people to maintain a neutral expression, another prompted a polite smile, and a third resulted in a full smile that uses the muscles around the mouth and the eyes.
"We saw a steeper decline in heart rate and a faster physiological stress recovery when they were smiling," even though the participants weren't aware they were making facial expressions, says Sarah Pressman, co-author of the study and an assistant psychology professor at University of California, Irvine.
Studies have found that the intensity of a person's smile can help predict life satisfaction over time and even longevity. What's unclear is whether smiling reflects a person's overall happiness or if the act of smiling contributes to that happiness. Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale University, believes it is a bit of both.
"It's probably bidirectional," she says. "People who smile more tend to elicit more positive connections with other people," which in turn help make you happier and healthier.
And what effect do people who smile have on others?
Experts say there is a real positive impact. Marco Iacoboni, a lab director at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, says when people see a smile, so-called mirror neurons fire in their brain and evoke a similar neural response as if they were smiling themselves.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2013
We live in a world of permanent change...in which whatever job title you hold, your real job is in fact change. Yet, the majority of efforts to change organizations fail: between 50% and 75% of change initiatives fail.
Why do so many attempts at organizational change fall short?
Certainly not for lack of advice. These ideas matter and can prove most useful. This psychological perspective taken alone, however, can promote the belief that the success or failure of any given organizational change effort comes down to motivating individual members of the organization and that, correspondingly, a leader's primary job comes down to inspiring "the troops."
Such a belief can easily lead to unfortunate attributions whenever individuals don't change, namely marking individuals as the problem. The person receives the label "resistant," and perhaps the leader becomes stigmatized as "uninspiring." Altering the attribution and recasting the challenge of resistance can significantly improve the likelihood of success.
Change efforts fail for two reasons:
1. Leaders present vague and abstract change objectives: "Improve communication between caregivers and patients and their families" or "Increase profitability." Phrases like these mean different things to different people. They do not specify what to do or how to change.
2. Leaders underestimate the power of the work environment to precipitate or stall change. Many change efforts lack a coordinated or aligned approach to designing the work environment. One aspect of the environment tells people to make a change, while other aspects of the environment signal to people to continue to act as they always have.
"Leading Successful Change" by Gregory P. Shea, Ph.D., and Cassie A. Solomon will show how to identify not the behaviors you are seeking to change, but rather, those behaviors you want to see in place when your change is complete.
Transforming an organization isn't for the faint of heart. Doing so takes patience, discipline, even courage. But it can be done. It has been done successfully, time and again. And you can do it.
Our era is dominated by the reality that change is constant. We all need to get better at it--and sooner rather than later. You owe yourself and the people depending upon your leadership no less.
Lisa B. Marshall, a communication expert who helps organizations build stronger teams, manage conflict, create stronger more effective messages and deliver better presentations, has written "Smart Talk."
In today's rapidly changing landscape, global communication fluency is a must have leadership skill. Professionals from all positions in the workplace need to continually assess and re-tool their strategy for ongoing success and career development by learning the latest strategies.
How to have difficult conversations.
You have to tell one of your most productive employees that she dresses inappropriately and unprofessionally. Worse, her personal hygiene is sometimes less than desirable. How do you handle this difficult conversation?
Is it so hard to tell that same person that their twenty-pounds-too-small and twenty-years-too-young shirt is wildly inappropriate for the office?
Confronting another person is difficult. Perhaps, it's because these skills are rarely taught at home or school. And even people with excellent communication skills sometimes retreat when faced with stressful or sensitive communication issues. Yet, when you avoid communication, the vacuum gets filled with negative assumptions and ill will.
If you want to maintain your relationship with the other party, the goal is to encourage a change in behavior, and that means you need to deliver bad news thoughtfully, tactfully and respectfully. When preparing for a difficult conversation, it's critically important to think about the emotional and intellectual perspective of the other person. Compassion helps you to be open to the other person's perspective. Compassion is what reminds us that the other person is just doing the best they can with what they've got.
To manage a difficult conversation successfully, it's important to understand your own conflict management style as well as that of your conversation partner.
The book "Leadership Conversations" by Alan S. Berson and Richard G. Stieglitz challenges managers to become great leaders by holding effective conversations.
In developing others, you must engage in two kinds of critical conversations to create alignment and eliminate assumptions--both yours and theirs:
Baseline conversations set mutual expectations; define ground rules; provide metrics to evaluate performance; calcify boundaries; and establish alignment around strategies, objectives and tactics.
Feedback conversations maintain alignment, address changes and unexpected developments, and resolve issues in order to follow an effective path toward the agreed-on objectives.
You currently may avoid these conversations because they can be difficult, time-consuming, and uncomfortable--especially if not handled properly. Hold these conversations--nothing is more urgent. If you do not hold them, the actions you and your people take will be based on differing assumptions and will deliver less than optimum results.
Leaders are innately curious about how the world works--and that curiosity propels business, technological, and social progress by asking great questions.
A program manager encouraged his staff to be open and blunt with him, with each other, and with other organizations. One day he asked his coach, "My people don't suggest as many ideas as they once did. Sometimes I feel like they aren't telling me the whole story. Why"
The coach provided feedback: "Do you recall last week's staff meeting when you said the new approach that Ian suggested was the dumbest thing you had ever heard?"
The program manager responded, "yes, I said that--but even you thought it wasn't a viable option."
The coach continued, "As presented, his idea did seem unworkable. But judgments like that derail creativity. I was actually curious why an experienced engineer like Ian would think it was a good idea. If you had asked him, you might have uncovered the golden nugget behind his idea. Your more outspoken staff aren't affected by judgments, but mild-mannered ones like Ian become reluctant to suggest controversial ideas."
The reluctance had turned the program manager's conversations into one-side rituals instead of the vigorous discussions of bold strategies that he wanted to encourage.
Experts make decisions instantly because unconsciously they believe they know everything they need to know. Effective leaders see the fallacy in that thinking and escape from the "knowing trap" by keeping an open mind and asking questions to learn more.
The leader as coach can use these 10 coaching points to open up the creativity of the group conversation:
• Accept that the leader is not in control.
• Listen. Even though this skill is included in virtually every interpersonal skills course, most of us still have not mastered it.
• Pay attention to what is not being said, as well as to what you hear.
• Probe for information without conducting an inquisition.
• Help others create a clear goal for the conversation.
• Give everyone a complete picture of what is currently happening in regard to the goal.
• Provide an opportunity to generate a number of options for closing the gap between what’s happening now and what the group wants.
Corporate cultures and behaviors can hinder women's progress toward leadership positions.
"Given that men maintain critical mass in leadership positions, they control the evolution of their organizational structures and the pace at which women will be allowed into leadership," says "Not in the Club" author Janet Pucino. "Statistically women are the extreme exception at the executive level and in boardrooms. Only 16 percent of board positions are held by women and less than 4 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs."
Pucino cites other data on gender biases, women's experiences and human behaviors and concludes that, despite a prevalence of such findings, there's been virtually no impact on today's corporate structures, labor laws, governmental policies or business programs in the country's top business schools.
There is an abysmal lack of executive coaching and mentorship of emerging women leaders. Coaching and mentoring for women is a key success factor. If you ask male executives if they've mentored women during their careers, most would say they have not done so, but there aren't yet enough women executives to mentor other women. Women don't have the critical mass to do it alone. The solution is to engage a male executive coach to help you understand how male executives think and engineer the best work experiences in more diverse environments.
Career success is really all about having choices and making choices in your current work environment and throughout your career. The higher up you go, the more expectations you have placed on you. It becomes imperative to take control--you don't have to respond to everything. Working your choices through with your coach or mentor can bring clarity to your thought processes. Here is what one executive woman said about her coaching experience, "John has a unique style, a solid set of tools and an approach that will enable an individual to validate the direction they want to pursue both professionally & personally. You will benefit from the breadth, depth and diversity of his knowledge."
Why Gender Matters
The context of a woman's role within a culture directly correlates to how women are accepted and perceived in the workforce by that culture. These different perceptions lead to different inquiries and conclusions. For example, it is common for women executives to feel isolated because they are not socialized in the ways men are. As women move up the corporate ladder, this feeling of isolation occurs because women are held to different standards than men and are not always supported by the people they have brought along with them.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that differences between the sexes are more profound than anyone previously guessed. Right down to the cellular level males and females are different. The sex hormones estrogen in women and testosterone in men have a significant impact on behavior.
Men and women are not only markedly different in the hormones that drive them, but they are also different in the way they think. The brains of men and women are actually wired differently. When we add to this our unique personalities, our cultural upbringing, and the environment in which we live and work, we come to appreciate why the sexes view the world differently.
It is these differences that create interpersonal problems when we have the irrational belief all men, or all women, respond in a similar manner. The truth is that both men and women routinely approach a broad range of personal and business issues quite differently.
Men in business will expect women to behave like them, while women will expect a female counterpart to behave in a more feminine manner. It is a fine pink line that women in leadership roles walk. Men and women tend to respond differently—not better or worse, just differently. Yet women continue to be faulted for their feminine attributes.
As you can imagine, this gender gap can create all sorts of problems when neither side feels valued, inappropriately judged or misunderstood. The key to success will be to recognize that some ingrained behaviors can create natural “gender gaps." We know that the corporate world has vast room for improvement when it comes to incorporating women into top professional positions.
As you know, the culture at most companies has been shaped over centuries by male executives. You also know that the natural outcome of a male-dominated business is that it has the tendency to be conducted like a team sport. Today, more and more women are playing competitive sports, but it is only recently that they have begun to recognize the need to adapt some of these same skills to the workplace. Even then, women can find the rules of the game elusive; they don’t completely understand its approach to power, money, control, and status. Sometimes the elements are more subtle than that.
You know, and we know, that you are skilled and brighter than average. You work hard, you stay late, and yet others who are less dedicated are too often the ones who get recognized and rewarded.
This fact is sad but true: it will be exceptionally difficult to move ahead if you don’t appreciate the unwritten rules of the game. Keep in mind the truism: “Star players don’t become star players on the field. They are merely recognized there.” If you want to understand how someone succeeds, don’t just watch them accept the award. You have to observe their daily preparations closely.
To bridge gender gaps, successful women key into the rules of the game and actively study the culture of their organization. For starters, women must understand what is considered a win, what behaviors and goals will be rewarded, and what qualities are characteristic of a strong team player.
Gender-based differences play out in leadership nearly every day influencing how men and women communicate, act, react, problem-solve, make decisions and work together. One is no more effective than the other; but joined holistically within a balanced leadership team, can lead to a better business outcome.
