Face to face Leadership

Look Your Leader in the Face aka Face to Face Leadership

City of Everett training 11/14/13

Carson Tavenner

 

Important to sit down one-to-one with each employee. And look at yourself.

 

Know Your Goal/Purpose

Understand where you are, where you want to go. Base this around goals. Understand the difference & solutions, and move yourself there. Define management and leadership.

Management: the work of ensuring efficient use of resources to accomplish a goal. Produces product.

Root concept of management is maneggiare (Latin hand, horse handler). Horses were crucial to getting the work done, just like having a good manager is crucial to getting work done.

Leadership: bringing people together to achieve a common purpose. Some do both. Not all. Those who fail lack education or opportunity to lead. Are leaders born or made? No conclusion. Produces followers.

 

Key Skills

·         Listening, speaking, writing, reading (aka communication). Receive as well as you send.

·         Giving feedback.

·         Time management, critical thinking, decision making.

·         Organization, delegation, strategy.

·         Team building, coaching, motivation, inspiration, vision. Larger picture skills. Team shares vision.

o   Communicate vision well so others understand, can follow.

§  Balance skills & character to lead well.

 

Character Traits

·         Fundamentally, exhibit positive behavior. Rather than talk about behavior you don’t like. This creates a positive work culture. Don’t want to be too much of anything, though. Be friendly without being a friend, example*. Do what’s necessary: give feedback, delegate. Balance.

*See also Henry V.

 

4 LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP

 

·         1. Self-Leadership

Responsibility: self. Development time mgmt. & organization.

Don’t leave key skills behind as you ascend the ladder. Time management and organization are the two skills to be engaged in self-leadership (or followership, the first step to leadership).

a.       Followership – learning how to lead yourself when you have no one else to be leading.

                                                               i.      Find purpose from leader, group. Know where you are.

Challenges:

o   Know your purpose. Know where you are. Where you want to be.

§  Whole leader approach:

·         Skills & Character

§  Understand the differences & solutions

§  Move yourself there.

§  Identify next steps for personal improvement

§  Consider time management as a first step

 

Time Management

Visualization: Organize priorities, accept the time stream, and anticipate the leader’s work – step back, look upriver to strategize, direct, inform employees to fish opportunities out of stream.

Structural: Seconds, minutes, hours, days/weeks, months/years. A great leader can flexibly move from one layer of time structure to another. Firefighters have to switch from hours/days to min/sec in a flash.

 

Prioritization

Schedule day in 15-minute increments.

High criticality and short-term trumps low criticality and long-term. Obvious.

The choice comes between low criticality/short-term vs. high-criticality & long-term. Face these decisions, move forward.

 

The responsibility to self-lead never goes away.

 

·         2. Face-to-Face

Responsibility: immediate team.

Skills development: listening, feedback (does not need to include consequences…yet)

Challenges:

·         Know the shared purpose of the team. May be different than your perspective. A great leader can help individuals achieve their self-leadership goals at the same time.

o   For next staff meeting: What is our purpose? What can we each do and do for each other to get there? Write it on cards. No one gets in trouble for communicating in a way that’s unselfish, helps the team. “Vegas rules.” Complaints welcome. Gossip not.

·         People are the source of all challenges. They’re also the source of all good.

·         Purpose – less obvious; easy to overlook.

o   It is the responsibility of the employee to align the group purpose with his or her individual purposes. We make them see that they need to do it.

o   Are there budding leaders on your team?  80% will do OK/succeed, 10% will trip, 10% will exceed, sail over the bar. Our job is to encourage them.

§  And to know their job descriptions. This is critical.

·         The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni). Each layers leads to problems above:

o   Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results.

·         Team Lifecycle: Forming (acceptance, conflict avoidant, learning, directed), Storming (competition, debates, tolerance & patience, leader is open), Norming (unified goals, teamwork, leader in transition), Performing (low external supervision, leader is participating, high efficiency, low conflict –hard to achieve). Easy to get stuck in a norming storming loop. Performing doesn’t last long, due to promotions.

·         Communication –try this test: can you repeat back what was said in a voice that asks whether we heard correctly?

o   Flexibility of style is key to being a great leader. We all have our style, flex ours to the speaker.

§  Reserved (thinking) to open (feeling) + direct to indirect. Reserved/direct = military

·         Self-assess style and try to adjust, be flexible.

·         Indirect people can seem silly, direct people can seem rude…to each other. If they understand each other, we get a better assessment of the situation, what affects the decision.

·         Chart assessment to each team member; we may not get along with those with different styles. Need to adjust.

·         Situational Leadership – Individual connection to an employee. From a new employee, how the relationship matures: from telling to selling (how they fit in) to participating to delegating. We may need to trust more if we’re micro-managing. If not, we need to tell him the problem.

·         Preparation is Critical to Good Feedback – does bad behavior happen a few months after the annual review. Notice this. Also notice whether they over-perform before the review only.  Always good to give proper feedback to a specific problem as quickly as possible. See checklist. Prepare. End with “please explain.”

o   Stick to behaviors, not attitudes. “What I saw/heard. Can you explain?” Stop without interjecting feelings.

o   When bring 2 people together, get perspective first from each first.

o   Establish a pattern of giving feedback for both positive and negative behavior.

o   Note “non-verbals:” facial expression, body language, position, vocal inflection. These communicate in spades. Eyebrow position, lip position, head tilt, crossed arms; these things are often not considered when others present themselves. We ask: “did you intend to have that effect? No? Let’s work that out,” by pointing it out when it happens. Can work itself out. Fix bad behavior. Not bad attitude. Person will fix attitude naturally. You may just not like that person. Be friendly, not friends. Value them, don’t love them.

§  Disrespectful communication can affect work. Maybe you don’t get along with that person, but does it hurt the work or environment? It can hold the team back, be divisive.

§  Email can get us in trouble because it lacks this huge way of communicating, all the connotations…

o   Last Words on Feedback – keep employee and subordinate needs in mind. Session is not for the supervisor. What is in their best interest? It may drive employee to realize life goal, their best job is yet to come. Every employee wants to do his job right. Openly discuss opinions about what that means.

·         Dealing with irate individuals:

o   Demonstrate appropriate volume, rate, and word choice.

o   Nonverbals: calm, strong, neutral, unyielding, feet pointed towards them.

o   Give direct value statements—confirm their reception. Repeat back, ask them to repeat back.

o   Question the helpfulness of high volume, fast rate, poor word choice, strained muscles, and elevated heart rate.

o   Inform them of the long term impacts on their employability.

·         Uncooperative employees in teamwork: teamwork is part of their job description (or should be); what does cooperation look like? Sound like? Show them! Affects employability.

·         Not Forgetting “Where You Came From”

o   Investing time with previous teams to keep learning from them.

o   Encouraging them to explore their own horizons

o   Loyalty – can compromise integrity.

·         Creating a Positive Workspace – is the side benefit.

 

·         3. Indirect

Responsibility: supervisors

Skills development: delegating, coaching

Challenges: Practice where you can, in or out of workplace.

Small, temporary projects led by your subordinates – failure & not doing it are not punished in any way. Just coached. Failure = learning.

a.       Added benefit: mentors your promising subordinates in face-to-face leadership before going full-time.

b.      Maybe this is your current situation as a supervisee?

 

·         4. Executive

Responsibility: organization

Skills development: strategy, long-range planning

Practice by making a long-range plan with your team.

 

Integration: Listening & Feedback

Heart-to-Heart Communication – Everything filters from: your heart to your mind to your mouth to their ear to their mind to their heart. And back. An intense game of “telephone” between just two people.

·         Use a “filters & biases detector:” You can’t change someone’s filters and biases. Only how you present yourself. And try not to be offended. This takes the power out of the passive aggressiveness.

External affects influence communication: age, dress, gender perceptions, environment (noise), equipment, etc. On a webinar, look at the camera, not them. Important to remember.

People don’t care what you know until they know that you care. And they know when you listen to them.

 

Moral Development

If we proactively engage this question, we will be honest & trustworthy with each other.

Three Stages of Moral Development:

·         We do the right thing because we can avoid punishment for doing the wrong thing.

a.       From childhood (don’t take cookies from the cookie jar).

b.      Maybe employees need to be moved from this level to the next.

·         Do what’s right to belong/have identity.

a.       Giving money to charity, participating in a non-profit to help the community. Gives us value. Self-actualization. Most stay here.

·         Do what’s right even when there’s punishment.

a.       Never expect employees to go here. Some do this in little ways.

·         Have to decide between:

a.       Loyalty & honesty

b.      Timeliness and dedication – get it done, doesn’t have to be perfect…or does it??

·         Point is not to get the right answer, but understand how and why the choice gets made. You become a better leader by going through this. Character building.

 

Integration: Skills & Character

 

Skills:

·         Time mgmt., organization, listening, feedback, etc.

·         Be sure to cultivate and recognize those that are under-utilized—yours, others.

·         Others relevant to situation? Strategy, motivation (they know they can do it), communication at levels appropriate for audience, delegating, critical thinking, knowing how to inspire people (they learn they can do it)…Motivation beyond money & threats. Leading by example incorporates a character trait.

 

Practical Applications

·         List some leadership goals.

·         Practical next steps?

·         What did learning today change perspective on real issues we deal with each day?

·         When will you achieve one of these practical steps? How will you measure it?

 

There are things going on in even the hardest, cruelest employee – if we can get at and help with them, we will be a hero.

 

Toastmasters = highly recommended.