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Peak Performance Resources for Leaders by Leaders

Author: Andrew John Harrison Page 23 of 32

Leadership Advocate and Co-Founder of the Goldzone Group. I help leaders to master the new rules of leadership for the new economy. Over the past 30 years, I have visited more than 500 cities in 54 countries to explore, learn from, and help many of the world's leading companies, leaders, and luminaries in science, technology, health, finance, and entrepreneurship.

It’s All About the Vision

It is time for some Corporate Reinvention!

The most common reason why most corporations only achieve a fraction of the possible potential available to them is the lack of a worthwhile, meaningful, inspiring and compelling vision that magnetizes and motivates the entire organization.  Many of the vision statements hanging in the boardrooms are old, out of date, not well communicated and uninspiring.

This is especially true in times of economic recession.

Corporate Reinvention is about refocusing, reorganizing, reframing and redirecting your organization.  And the most important component of any organization is the VISION.  Next is aligning the people, marketing, systems, policies and procedures behind the vision.

How do you do that if your organization is in a crisis that is threatening its survival? Do you really have a choice?

Reasons to consider engaging in a Corporate Reinvention process:

  • You are not achieving your goals
  • The industry has changed, margins are down, competition is fierce
  • Economic crisis, sales are down, financing is scarce
  • Acquisition/merger with another organization requiring complete restructuring
  • Dramatic changes in your product or service due to technological developments
  • International expansion
  • Downsizing of the organization
  • Reorganization, sale or IPO
  • New CEO, board or senior management

An inspiring vision should infuse passion, engage the hearts, minds, bodies and souls of the people working within your organization, your clients, your suppliers and your shareholders.  Every person should know what the vision is and how their daily activities contribute to the vision.

<<its all about the VISION>>

Dance Away Your Fears

anjoudance

Leadership Dynamics Poll

[polldaddy poll=1354219]

Follow Your Music

followyourmusic

Our Most Precious Assets: People

In today’s competitive and fast paced world, our most precious assets are our people, our relationships and our time. Most executives and professionals are familiar with W. Edwards Deming’s concept of optimization and fine tuning a system to achieve the optimum output and results.

Few people apply the concept of optimization to their lives, people strategies, systems, policies, procedures, marketing and management practices.

Leading a team of people in today’s highly competitive, technologically sophisticated and connected world is very different from the command and control style prevalent in the preceding centuries.

Intangible assets such as people, know-how, systems and intellectual property are valued at many times more than tangible assets. Traditional management training and methods are severely lacking in “people knowledge” and an understanding of a world that is more and more intangible.

A new style of leadership is required for the new paradigm economy of today and the future.

Denial

Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person who is faced with a fact, feeling, situation or reality that is uncomfortable or painful to accept, repeatedly rejects it, despite overwhelming evidence.

Three different types of Denial are as follows:

  1. “Basic Denial” is when the person outright denies the reality of an unpleasant fact, feeling, situation or reality.
  2. “Minimization” is when a person admits the fact, but denies how serious it is.
  3. “Transference” is when a person admits the facts and seriousness, but denies any responsibility and transfers responsibility to someone else.

Financial Stress

I noted an interesting statistic today.  The most popular post on this BLOG relates to dealing with stress.  This has got me thinking… Since October 2008, what is on most people’s minds is the financial crisis and how this continuing crisis is going to impact our companies, our investments, our finances and our personal lives.

What does financial stress have to do with leadership?  Everything!  If you are feeling nervous, anxious or even outright terror at the thought of not making ends meet, the first person for you to lead is yourself.  It is very difficult to be creative, resourceful and confident when you are dealing with the various mind-numbing hormones we experience as fear.

So how do you lead yourself?

Often (but not always) our mind speculates as to what could happen and we conjure up images of the worst case scenario, which in most cases turns out to be worse than reality.

Leading yourself requires objectivity.  If you consider the worst case scenario versus the best case scenario, first figure out ways you can live with the worst case. Then from this place, you can calmly consider possible courses of action that you could take to avert the worst case.  And in most cases, reality tends to be somewhere in between the worst and the best case.

On the other hand, if you avoid the worst case, pretend it won’t happen (denial), and go on as if nothing is going to happen… you have a very good chance of going through the worst case scenario in reality!

So accepting the worst case allows you to let go of the fear and to think calmly of what can be done with the resources at hand.  Once you have a number of items that you can take action on immediately, a strange thing happens.  Fear turns to confidence… confusion is replaced with clarity.

Having a plan – any plan – is far better than no plan at all.  At least with a plan you have certainty of what you can do.  And if it does not work, you can at least be confident in the knowledge that you succeeded in finding out what does not work.  Then you can try another approach, and another… until you succeed. Accepting the worst case and then having a plan will reduce your stress, especially when you take action on your plan.

Another possibility is to look at the financial crisis as an opportunity. This will empower you to make changes that you would not otherwise make. Oftentimes, when things don’t flow, we have an opportunity to examine why they are not flowing.  Whereas, when the money is easily flowing, we would continue on unchanged and not question what we are doing.

So the financial crisis is an ideal opportunity to re-examine what is flowing and what isn’t so we can make different choices.

Over the next few days and weeks we will write more about stress, the financial crisis and how to cope with it.  Stay tuned.

Lack of Love

Lack of love as a child leads to feelings of inadequacy.  This leads to sensitivity to rejection as an adult.

The Key Is Sincerity

“The key to a leader’s impact is sincerity. Before he can inspire with emotion he must be swayed by it himself. Before he can move their tears his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe.”

– Winston Churchill

The Seven Leadership Saboteurs

There are a lot of things that can cause a leader to fail.  None of them are as deadly as what they do to themselves!  The following is a list of saboteurs that apply equally to leaders and followers:

  1. fear, doubt & disbelief
  2. criticism (and the inner-critic)
  3. anger (under-expressed & over-expressed)
  4. invalidating behavior & communication (most of us are so used to this, we don’t even notice it)
  5. triggers, reactions & moods (we all know people who react to small things and are moody)
  6. greed & jealousy (yikes)
  7. black holes, denial and the emotional roller coaster (no matter how much you give, it is never enough)

Who wants to follow a leader who is afraid, doubts the task at hand is possible and disbelieves the team’s ability to get the job done?  On the other hand, who wants to lead people like that?  The truth is no one in their right mind would “want to.” However, the reality is that as a leader, we end up having to lead people exactly like that!

The key is to learn how to succeed as a leader regardless of the quality or state of the people we are leading.

In future posts we will discuss in more detail how to handle difficult people…

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