nuke57
10-14-2004, 12:17 PM
Too often I find that managers and executives have not paid sufficient attention to their leadership skills. I admit that much written material and academic instruction is provided by people who have never tested in the workplace what it is they profess. Mostly they tell us what to do but not how to do it. To help in this arena, I will provide a bit of what I successfully practiced for many years.
Superior leadership is a strategy to inspire people to do more, dream more and learn more. We all know that people are our most important asset and that the best ones are self-motivated self-starters. But they are probably only 5% or so naturally occurring.
What you might not know is that there is a strategy for making the vast majority of employees self-motivated self-starters who are highly committed and highly productive, up to 300% more so than if poorly motivated. This strategy can be taught to prospective and newly hired managers, be quality controlled, and serve as your standard for excellence in leadership.
Values are the centerpiece of this strategy because employees respect actions which reflect high standards of all the good values like industry, fairness, forthrightness, compassion, honesty, etc while they disrespect actions reflecting low or negative standards. Actions reflecting high standards strongly influence employees toward emulating those standards, but the same emulation occurs for actions reflecting low standards. This is called following. Fortunately, self-motivated self-starters don't follow and thus their performance does not go up and down because of following the latest leadership. This is why the strategy creates these people.
Listening is the most important leadership skill of this strategy because people cannot be motivated or committed to something if they can't "put in their own two cents", when they want and how they want, or if they can't understand and be in on the decision process for things which affect them. Of such things is TRUST built.
So what should bosses do?? It starts with providing employees regular opportunities, one-on-one and in groups, to express their complaints, suggestions and questions. These must be answered fully and in a timely fashion, no hipshooting please. All of the boss' actions in so doing must meet the highest standards of common values like honesty, respect, fairness, forthrightness, industriousness, admission of error, knowledge, quality, and the like. As the boss corrects the complaints, the boss' leadership toward higher standards improves because people generally only complain about things which reflect low standards, your leadership. Turning these low standards into high standards constitutes superior leadership.
These actions will have many effects on employees. As their complaints are respectfully addressed, they will begin to believe that their bosses care about them. They will start to believe that they are valued team members. They will learn how to fix things using the highest standards for all values. They will learn how best to treat their customers, each other and their work. They will start to use their own brains and actions to solve workplace problems, to innovate and to work more effectively, all because the boss is showing such high regard and respect for them. Productivity will rise and keep rising. Creativity, motivation and commitment will do likewise, but only so long as their complaints, suggestions and questions continue to be addressed regularly, respectfully and completely. Why even make a complaint or a suggestion if no action will be taken? Why not just "leave your brain at the door"?
There is much more to a superior leadership strategy (including how specifically to create self-motivated self-starters) because there are many other ways in which employees react to the leadership messages present in the workplace. Each of these ways must be taken into consideration in effecting a superior leadership strategy. If you take the time to figure out how you react to bosses and listen to your people, you will probably discover all that I found. Managing people is great fun, but you must work at it and don't forget that you are human too.
Ben Simonton
Simonton Associates
http://www.bensimonton.com (http://www.bensimonton.com/)
Superior leadership is a strategy to inspire people to do more, dream more and learn more. We all know that people are our most important asset and that the best ones are self-motivated self-starters. But they are probably only 5% or so naturally occurring.
What you might not know is that there is a strategy for making the vast majority of employees self-motivated self-starters who are highly committed and highly productive, up to 300% more so than if poorly motivated. This strategy can be taught to prospective and newly hired managers, be quality controlled, and serve as your standard for excellence in leadership.
Values are the centerpiece of this strategy because employees respect actions which reflect high standards of all the good values like industry, fairness, forthrightness, compassion, honesty, etc while they disrespect actions reflecting low or negative standards. Actions reflecting high standards strongly influence employees toward emulating those standards, but the same emulation occurs for actions reflecting low standards. This is called following. Fortunately, self-motivated self-starters don't follow and thus their performance does not go up and down because of following the latest leadership. This is why the strategy creates these people.
Listening is the most important leadership skill of this strategy because people cannot be motivated or committed to something if they can't "put in their own two cents", when they want and how they want, or if they can't understand and be in on the decision process for things which affect them. Of such things is TRUST built.
So what should bosses do?? It starts with providing employees regular opportunities, one-on-one and in groups, to express their complaints, suggestions and questions. These must be answered fully and in a timely fashion, no hipshooting please. All of the boss' actions in so doing must meet the highest standards of common values like honesty, respect, fairness, forthrightness, industriousness, admission of error, knowledge, quality, and the like. As the boss corrects the complaints, the boss' leadership toward higher standards improves because people generally only complain about things which reflect low standards, your leadership. Turning these low standards into high standards constitutes superior leadership.
These actions will have many effects on employees. As their complaints are respectfully addressed, they will begin to believe that their bosses care about them. They will start to believe that they are valued team members. They will learn how to fix things using the highest standards for all values. They will learn how best to treat their customers, each other and their work. They will start to use their own brains and actions to solve workplace problems, to innovate and to work more effectively, all because the boss is showing such high regard and respect for them. Productivity will rise and keep rising. Creativity, motivation and commitment will do likewise, but only so long as their complaints, suggestions and questions continue to be addressed regularly, respectfully and completely. Why even make a complaint or a suggestion if no action will be taken? Why not just "leave your brain at the door"?
There is much more to a superior leadership strategy (including how specifically to create self-motivated self-starters) because there are many other ways in which employees react to the leadership messages present in the workplace. Each of these ways must be taken into consideration in effecting a superior leadership strategy. If you take the time to figure out how you react to bosses and listen to your people, you will probably discover all that I found. Managing people is great fun, but you must work at it and don't forget that you are human too.
Ben Simonton
Simonton Associates
http://www.bensimonton.com (http://www.bensimonton.com/)