Owning a Formula-1 vehicle doesn’t make you a racing driver. And having an Executive title doesn’t make you a leader. Leadership is not caught or inherited.

The quandary for many people in leadership positions is suspecting you need this development but thinking it is weakness to acknowledge. The opposite is true – it takes courage and self awareness to recognize and act on this.

Our instant gratification society thinks “if I get a leadership role I will do what leaders do, then I’ll be a great leader”. However the opposite is true!

Leadership begins in the mind with vision, purpose and commitment. It begins with a state of  being, a consciousness in the present. Only from there can you begin doing what leaders do, so that you get the influence a leader has.

Business and departments are overwhelmingly managed by titled followers rather than leaders who communicate a compelling vision and path forward. Symptoms include decisions deferred, plans not actioned, inertia, blame, excuses, denial, manipulation.

So when was the mob ever right?

Leadership is not a certain style or set of steps. But it is characterized by certain traits, which can be developed. These traits can be measured using the Integrity and Values Profile, which is then used to move leaders forward through coaching.

Leaders are Initiators

The highest leverage activity you can do is develop your capacity and skills to lead. Leadership is a lonely path, the hardest step leading yourself. I have walked this path also. But if you have this desire, it is up to you to initiate the first step to realizing your potential. Don’t wait for others. Act now.

Call us today for an exploratory chat about taking the next step into your future.

A new level of thinking around recruitment is vital to ensure your hiring dollar is working hard.

1. 1.       Does the person handling your recruiting grasp the strategy behind each role?
2. Does your recruiter really know the talents and motivations required for excellence in the role?
3. When we know it is attitude that makes or breaks a hire, is it worth risking this investment to gut instinct?

Your business’ attitude and standards around recruitment is closely linked to your return on hiring investment.

Keys for Superior Recruitment

1. Aligning roles with Board strategy
2. Defining which skills, knowledge and experience are negotiable and non-negotiable
3. Identifying the ‘hard-wired’ talents that will enable excellent performance in the role
4. Measuring attitudes  in short-listed candidates that give an inside view into how they will act under pressure

Liz brings over 20 years’ exceptional track record identifying, developing and retaining talent in a sales environment. As a business owner she understands what financial risk and productivity means. Liz’s 100% success rate for lasting placements in 4 years’ niche IT recruitment demonstrates her skills and insights in the process.

Checklist for Recruitment Excellence

• Outsource some of the recruitment process
• Ensure your role descriptions target the ideal candidate’s motivations and talents
• Make your advertisements targeted – requires solid marketing and writing skills
• Don’t rely solely on technology for applicant screening
• Thorough verbal Reference checks
• Measure attitude before you make a bad hire – ‘gut feeling’ can be costly
• Differentiate your company in the hiring experience – it’s free marketing

Noone is perfect. Recruitment is about assessing risk and getting the most important things right.

An internal Human Resource recruiter has a vastly different set of motivations and skills than a quality Recruitment Consultant. The specialist Recruiter’s pace, drive and focus is on a different plane. Competitive organizations use both, either outsourcing parts or the entire process.

A December article in the Wall Street Journal reports on what books a group of business leaders make their must-read lists.

What I always find interesting is the way the mob of budding business leaders flock to popular titles. Not long back it was Blue Ocean Strategy: great analysis but did it do much to change my life? Most of my life developing and leading business I’ve been drawn to surprising titles that simply resonated. These have been my intellectual mainstay. I could never get interested in pop topics, including the books I purchased after hearing an inspiring speaker!

Instead, my hungry young business mind needed food for developing and understanding what makes people tick. I found myself powerfully drawn to unknowns that jumped off the shelf – Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, Doug Hall’s Jump Start Your Brain,  John Douglas’ Mind Hunter (the author of FBI Profiling),  and Principles of NLP &  NLP for Managers (what was it, it sounded interesting?) Not forgetting Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

My thinking has always been, it you want to stay ahead of the crowd, seek what inspires you, not what is touted by the marketing machine.

What is it that the Business Leaders featured in the Wall Street Journal are drawn to in their ‘must-read’ lists? Their favourites are not even business books but often philosophical – or spark formulative thinking. Don’t be fooled by the genre; a child’s book can infuse profound lessons that provide a guiding light throughout life.

What would a leader want to read? Include what moulds values, vision and deep insight into people. A few of the titles I chose include First Break All the Rules (Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman) , Thinking in Pictures (Temple Grandin), The Gift of Dyslexia (Ronald Davis), and Banker to the Poor (Mohammed Yusef).

Do you want your company or business environment to be led by the kind of people Jeffrey Pfeffer, organizational behaviour professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business, describes?…

“What is amazing is not just that people are greedy and prone to engage in ethically questionable activities; the big lesson is how people can reach unimaginable positions of power and essentially be (a) incompetent, and (b) not willing to do even the most mundane and trivial parts of their job.”

…Or prefer to live from “a beautiful parable for recent work in behavioral economics on various mechanisms for tying one’s own hands in the face of temptation” – compliments of Frog and Toad.

Powerful leadership begins in the mind, and it matters what philosophies provide the guiding light.

A Term Gaining More Attention today is ‘Emotional Intelligence’

“All learning has an emotional base” – Plato

Emotional Intelligence – or ‘EI’ – is described as “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships”.[1] It describes abilities distinct from, but complementary to, academic intelligence, the purely cognitive capacities measured by IQ.

1.  500 Corporations, government agencies and nonprofit organizations have independently concluded that EI is critical to excellence in almost any job.
2. A recent survey of a Training and Development Study found that 80% of companies are promoting EI in their employees — through training, development, performance evaluations and hiring practices.
3. Human factors in the workplace are increasingly important as the pace of change and the knowledge explosion accelerate.
4. Several decades worth of research studies identify team building, adapting to change, being a change catalyst and leveraging diversity as critically important in today’s competitive environment.
5. The days of life-long employment and meritocracy are fading. Today, internal qualities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability are increasingly required.
6. A national survey of employers revealed that, for entry-level workers, specific technical skills are less important than the ability to learn on the job. Next in importance were: listening and oral communication, adaptability and creative responses to setbacks and obstacles, personal management, confidence, motivation, initiative and pride in one’s accomplishments.
7. A similar study of corporations’ requirements for in-coming MBAs identified the three most desired capabilities as communication skills, interpersonal skills and initiative.
8. Harvard Business School identified empathy, perspective taking, rapport and cooperation as the most desirable qualities in their applicants.
9. The 12 key job capabilities are all based on self-mastery, initiative, trustworthiness, self-confidence, and achievement drive.
10. The 13 key relationship skills include: empathy, political awareness, leveraging diversity, team capabilities, and leadership.

None of the above bold attributes are IQ or technical-skill based.

Daniel Goleman, who in 1995 popularized several decades of Emotional Intelligence research, found that 80% of success comes from Emotional Intelligence. The context is, your IQ sets your capacity for career to a certain level, but once there (eg a CEO) you are among equal competition. Your opportunity or limitation for success is then due 80% to your skills in “the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”[2].  For leadership that is almost everything.

The business case is compelling: companies that invest in developing their leaders’ emotional intelligence, position themselves to maximum competitive advantage. Just as rain follows accumulation of water vapour in clouds, profits ‘rain’ down from intensified Emotional Intelligence.

A leader’s ability to perceive, control and evaluate emotions cannot be extracted or transferred from technical prowess. Emotional Intelligence is a new set of skills, and being transformational, is most effectively developed through coaching.

If 2011 fell short of your goals or you want a new level of outcomes in 2012, this Key is for you.

Through 2011 I exercised an attitude of gratitude. It was also a tough year, not an ideal place to start from, but… actually the hard place is exactly the right place to practice gratitude.

I began with writing daily statements of gratitude, and reflecting on my blessings – material, emotional and spiritual resources. This transformed my energy and resilience levels. Gratitude is the mother of creativity and my creativity had taken a deep dive over several very difficult years.

So I focussed on what I had, not on what was missing, and gave thanks for abundance. My consciousness shifted to limitless supply from my Source and I began experiencing this as a perfect benevolent Father of infinite wisdom and resource. My part was to ask, and give thanks in confidence of resources being there at the right time.  That proved true for the entire year. Some business leaders already understand that what I was experiencing was faith, the language of the fourth dimension. Like it or not, life is of more than what you see.

The next challenge was turning my silent conversations and reflections into verbal expression. The fact I felt resistance to verbalizing told me this was intrinsic to creating a new future.

Have you felt the crushing diminishment from your partner’s cutting words? Or felt the life-giving breath of  hope and belief verbalized? “Life and death lie in the power of the tongue”, particularly when reinforced by repetition or emotion. It’s serious stuff to your bottom line.

Since you are responsible for your success, you must first take responsibility of your self talk. That can be quite nasty.  A regular stream of devaluing, critical thoughts towards anyone is a red alert for creating the most dangerous environment to a Sales team.

Here is where you insert gratitude. As you acknowledge, praise and give thanks for anything good – present, past and future – everyone’s sense of wellbeing rises.

Gratitude is the birthplace of hope, which is inexplicably tied with creativity.

Creativity with vision is the hotbed of Sales excellence.

The key to creating your new Sales success begins in the leader’s heart and mind. The commitments, claims and assumptions you make are directly prophetic to the outcome. To change the tide of 2011 and create a new future means consciously clarifying, envisioning and stroking new dreams and desires. Support this with verbalizing generously and you actually bring the future forward through the weight of words and intent you speak.

An update on a skit I jotted in Christmas ’08 amongst heavy, dense traffic – the Year of ‘Sex in the City’

Two young people trudging and tired…..a tanned young man and his sweet and heavily pregnant young wife. Joseph rocks up to hotel after hotel. The village is packed to the rafters, but this baby isn’t going to wait for The Mirage. …Not even a Backpackers; down to the final refusal…Joe waves his plastic currency, “but I have a card, what about my Frequent Camel points? My father saved these for us – and we travelled all this by Virgin Camel Freight.”

The sympathetic hotel manager rubs his smart goatie, “We are full, not a bed left….but I know an abandoned chook shed down the road. It’s not fit for humans but if it’s a roof you need, it is a roof (Mary holds her stomach in discomfort). You will have to shoo the pigeons, or don’t look up. I have heard stray animals also shelter there but isn’t life like a box of chocolates. (wets his finger and feels the air)…its not too cold. You don’t look like you’re glammed up for a big night out anyway”.

….After the birth some shepherds arrived, unusual to leave their sheep. Some local village folk are gathered behind them….oohs and aaahs at the wrinkled baby… They’re not sure what’s happening but something feels good.

By and by a caravan of grand Magi arrive: the dream-sayers and government-makers of old Babylon. With knowing looks they pay homage as if in a grand temple, their superlative gifts at odds with this straw-dust floor. It’s a bit weird that these seasoned sages humble themselves so.

Someone holds up the baby, revealing his crinkled newborn face, “You’re saying this is the Star of David? This is the king prophesied to save us from this Roman dictatorship? Do you know they are still refusing us welfare, there is no maternity leave, and we are excluded from the public baths! My parents pay so much tax, there’s going to be nothing left for me!…(he remembers the topic)… This baby couldn’t raise an elbow in an Irish Bar! This is no king!”

The Magi stroke their long beards, bowing low on their prayer mats 7 times. One declares, “Don’t be fooled, this is remarkable. For this babe the stars rearranged the skies, we’ve been beckoned by one across an entire continent….. (quizzically shakes head)…. His appearance is an everyday baby born to nobodies in a dirty barn with lowly animals (grunts, baa’s) ….and he is Jewish.”

A smartly dressed servant of the Magi’s pipes up, “The journey has taken so long I’ve had to trade camels along the way, check out this one’s shiny nose ring. Our journey has been so vast my pec’s have built up by getting up and down for prayers 5 times daily…on the upside my wife will love my new look” (takes his time flexing and admires his new forearms).

The oldest looking Magi summarizes the situation, “This is a remarkable event, beyond our mystic books and teachings. All our lives we’ve studied the scrolls of ancient wisdom yet without finding prophecy of the star that has beckoned us across an entire continent… We must consult their holy book”.

I trust your Christmas will be infused with meaning and unexpected joy. Merry Christmas everyone!

Is it your previous experiences, motivation to lead, educational background…or something else?

“The top reason for a leader’s failure is the inability or unwillingness to build relationships and a team environment”, according to global survey data released by Right Management.

A recent survey of 1,439 CEO’s and HR professionals from 707 companies globally explored leadership effectiveness and development across regions and cultures.

“What emerges from the survey analysis is that leadership success is increasingly dependent on getting along with others in the organization as well as with one’s own team. A leader must be able to connect, build relationships and be flexible enough to adapt to the corporate culture” (my italics), reported the article.

“Predictor of Leadership Success
(Frequency cited by respondents)

1. Fit with company values and culture
2. 68% Interpersonal skills 66%
3. Motivation to lead 62%
4. Previous experiences 57%
5. Lack of derailers 21%
6. Educational background 11%
7. Other 4%”

Are you surprised that all of these predictors line up with scales that measure emotional intelligence?

Ask yourself:

Personally – are you motivated?  adaptable? self aware? You have to want this.
And interpersonally – can you read others? do you know how to get along? are you a good team player? can you be a leader? You have to be motivated to do this.

All these depend on your emotional intelligence. You see, it takes a certain IQ to get to certain leadership levels. At school your IQ made a big difference because of the span of IQ levels. But once you reach that level of leadership, competition is tight because so has all your competition. So the only thing at that level that can make the difference for success is your emotional intelligence (EQ).

The good news

The good news is that the above qualities are learned competencies, e.g. staying calm under pressure, and how you listen is a key skill of empathy.

We all live by the habits we’ve learned long ago. What we have to do is practise these new habits till they become natural. It takes motivation and effort.

If you have a clear vision of what a bright future will look like and communicate that constantly, if your values align with company values and culture, and you build your interpersonal skills, then you have a good chance of successfully leading your team or company to that place.

The trick with personal leadership is… that I am not following, I lead my own thoughts, beliefs and feelings, the game and battles are mine, the creation is for me to dream, desire, adjust and persist with. I fall, fail, adjust and rise despite the circumstances and environment. It is me who determines my beliefs, I am at cause and I am frequently out of step with those I care about or who hold power.

I can take advice and look to the wise, but I don’t live someone else’s reflection or parrot another’s voice.  I live authentically in my own convictions and unique power to create and execute.  But not proudly as if infallible.  That defines my capacity to lead.

Yet I cannot achieve what I see without others.  My dreams are limited by my capacity to enrol others….others who must be afforded the same respect and space for their personal leadership. I am – and can become – only as great as the power I give others. It’s risky. But that’s leadership.

Can you believe this is easy? …in that when you are authentic with yourself and aligned with your vision, life is ease-y.

If your life isn’t eas-y, working with a skilled Coach accelerates you getting back on track and moving to a new level. We invite you to a complementary 20-minute exploratory chat.

Does your leadership team have what it takes to keep the vision alive, compelling and relevant as the organization changes shape?

In a May 2011 article in Gallup Management Journal, Tom Rieger warns of the dangers of internal barriers arising in organizations. Parochialism is the base step of the Bureaucracy Pyramid (Parochialism – Territorialism – Empire building). “With parochialism, the world is strictly contained within the walls of a particular function…business success becomes defined as simply completing the process that the function has created”.

Do your recognize these in your company?

• functional silos creating protective policies and rules
• defining success by focusing on only what happens in (a department’s) own little world
• losing sight of the ultimate outcome

Where this occurs, “reality, customers, and the marketplace become peripheral - if those within the parochial function notice them at all”.

Life in a small business involves wearing many hats but expansion means dividing responsibilities or creating a more narrow focus for specific departments. And the person in charge of a particular function is judged primarily on how well that function performs.

What happens when you lose sight of the vision and strategy

Departments begin to compete for resources, budget, IT initiatives, and headcount. So how do leaders of these functions survive in the face of all of those demands and not lose control? They create rules, standards, and policies to bring order to the growing chaos. Rules are like walls that provide boundaries within which people must operate.

When people operate within these walls, they lose sight of the most important thing: the overall mission or strategy. To them, everything revolves around what’s important to the department – their ability to complete their part of the process and check off that one box, regardless of whether or not it supports the larger strategic goals.

Process over outcomes – alarm!

As the pressure and complexity of structure increases, people tend to stop seeing things through the eyes of the customer and filter through their part of the process. Process begins taking precedence over outcomes. Success starts to be defined as completing their part of the job, regardless of the impact on others.  Creating engaged customers and business success are sacrificed to the success of their part of the job.

When you hear in the language, “my department” from “our company”, you can be sure your managers’ thinking has changed some time ago.  That should ring an alarm to the senior leadership. “My department”-thinking signals the organization has become a group of departments who are more in competition than focussed on outcomes aligned with the vision.

Dropping the vision is dropping the ball

Since a leader’s main role is to cause people to move in a particular direction, when the various functions are not collaborating and cooperating – or synergizing – to cause business success, the leadership team have dropped the ball.

If you want to see your people committed to “our company” instead of protecting their patch, then contact Liz today for a complimentary 20-minute consultation to discover what is the root cause and the achievable steps to return to a focussed, productive and profitable organization.

In his book, In Pursuit of Purpose,  Dr Myles Munroe, OBE – Business Consultant to governments, Fortune 500 companies and corporations and internationally best selling author – said:

“Purpose is the master of motivation and the mother of commitment. It is the source of enthusiasm and the womb of perseverance. Purpose gives birth to hope and instils the passion to act…without this vision we can only exist. We feel no passion for living neither do we have a reason to wake up in the morning”.

Why is it important for your people to have purpose at work? Because the key to personal fulfillment is purpose.  Without purpose there is no personal fulfillment in life because personal fulfillment depends upon our becoming what we were born to be and do.

Purpose must be felt by your people in their job and in the company.

If your people are not clear on the company’s purpose you are denying them of personal fulfillment.

Foggy or misplaced purpose will:

• Decrease their contribution
• Decrease their resilience in tough times
• Diminish their ‘fit’ with the company (yes your company has a ’soul’)
• Decrease their commitment
• Diminish their confidence (how can they believe in themselves if they don’t believe in the company, yet stay?)

This in turn:

• Decreases their focus on the task (productivity alert!)
• Increases the incidence of sick leave (finance alert!)
• Decreases how long they intend to stay (ROI alert!)

 There are wrong kinds of purpose. What doesn’t matter to employees is

• How rich the company becomes
• How powerful the company becomes
• How famous the company becomes
• How much the owners get for a company sale

 So, what does matter to your employees (ie motivate them to give their best)?

• To be able to achieve their potential

And why is achieving their potential such a driver to performance?

• Because achieving their potential is closely linked to personal fulfillment, and personal fulfillment is closely linked to purpose.

…See how it all relates?

My question to you:

WHY does your business exist?  WHAT  is your reason for being?  How does it make a difference to people’s lives? Is its purpose inspiring, compelling, and shared by all?

Even if your business is at the infant stage, you must be able to answer this. What you begin with, will reproduces itself. That’s a law of nature. And if your business is established and your people ‘stale’, that is the first question I will ask you.

 If the answer didn’t jump straight to mind, we guarantee your business has ‘lost profits’ sitting untapped in your people, and when times get tough, your best people don’t have enough reason to stay.

If you want to see your business shift from how it is now to how it could be, contact Liz today for a complimentary 20-minute consultation to discover what is stifling your profit potential most.