24
jun
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Three Keys to Unlock Your Influence

Posted by Coaching Skills, Communication Styles, Corporate Team Building Games, Experiential Learning Activities, HR Training, Human Resource Training, Leadership Games, Leadership Style Assessment, Negotiation Skills Training, Negotiation Styles, Supervisory Skills, Team Building Exercises, Teamwork GamesNo Comments

Recently, I’ve reflected on what most activates my ability to use my influence to bring about the results and solutions I seek. And while everything I teach and preach is about dialing-up one’s influence, I’ve found three overarching strategies or keys that most keenly unlock potential.

1. Keep the message simple.

I initially picked up the wrong message from Sr. O’Dea in my 11th grade British Literature class. The woman is wicked smart, and I was frequently brought to my knees by her vocabulary and capacity for literary analysis. As a result, each time I would craft an essay I spent as much time using a Thesaurus as I did honing my idea and building it into a persuasive case. I thought this would be my secret sauce for garnering respect. Until I learned better, it earned me some painful scowls and my first B’s.

Whether you want to inspire people from the podium or are faced with a bunch of scared employees looking to you to lead them out of a dark and messy time, the key is to distill what you want to get across into as few words as possible. Use language that is clear and evocative. And say what you’re saying again. In different ways. Each time appeal to where your audience is, give them time to feel the myriad emotions they are usually feeling, and lead them step-by-step down a coherent pathway towards where they want to go.

2. Get the right people on your team.

As the sole full-time employee in my business, who previously ran a department that just prior to her departure was gutted to only her, I’ve become a martyr–I mean rock star–at pulling big things off on my own. And that’s the trouble. I don’t want to pull something off. I want to explode the paradigm for what others and I think is possible. Quadruple the impact I make. Leave something bigger than my blood, sweat, and tears behind. I can never do that alone.

As an influencer, you always want to have sponsors and cheerleaders for your initiatives–people whose enthusiasm will be contagious. People whose critical eye will be lifesaving and ability to get you and your idea in front of the right people deal changing.

3. Role play in advance much more than you think you will have to.

During my acting days, I was always a pretty weak improviser but when I found my home with the Stolen Chair Theatre Company, a damn solid actor. A typical rehearsal period for one of our co-created  ensemble theatre pieces…6 months!

Role play should not simply be reserved for actors and speakers. Whether you seek to influence through the written or spoken word, don’t reserve your communication for showtime. Give yourself more opportunities than you can fathom needing to negotiate a mutually agreeable solution. Identify all of the possible objections and speak out loud what you will say to reset the conversation. The same goes for facilitating a potentially contentious meeting. Providing critical feedback to an emerging leader. Or entertaining questions from the media at one of your events. As Vince Lombardi is credited with saying, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”

When you think about the moments where you have most affected change–whether it was shepherding a critical project from germination to implementation, playing a role in spearheading or eliminating a workplace policy, or convincing a loved one to get that check-up that proved lifesaving–what have been your keys to harnessing your power?

And when you find yourself in both everyday and remarkable situations, are you clear on how to reapply these strategies in order to step up? Or do you find yourself going at them anew…and as a result, struggling to consistently be an influencer?

For a long-time I had an on again and off again relationship with my personal power. Unfortunately, I wasted a lot of time and self-flagellation on wondering why. And it wasn’t rocket science. I simply wasn’t giving myself the space to remember what was true. About me. While it’s important not to get in our way by staying stuck in old stories or casting the people in our professional and personal lives in reoccurring roles, we do want to be clear on what makes us tick as influencers. How we communicate best. Who we need in our corner. And how to rehearse so that when were are in it–irrespective of what it is–we are ready to shine.

Alexia Vernon

Alexia-Vernon1Branded a “Moxie Maven” by the White House for her unique and effective approach to women’s leadership development, Alexia Vernon is the Founder and Director of Influencer Academy, a 9-month program for female leaders seeking to cultivate their skills in public speaking, persuasion, negotiation, coaching, facilitation, and high impact interpersonal communication. A former women’s studies and public speaking professor, Alexia has contributed to media including CNN, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, Inc., Forbes, and Women’s Health. To learn more about Alexia and Influencer Academy, visit http://www.InfluencerAcademy.com.

Alexia and HRDQ-U are hosting a free webinar on July 8th at 2pm. Sign up for it now!

18
jun
0

Making Leadership Development Intentional, Not Incidental

Posted by Communication Styles, Corporate Team Building Games, Experiential Learning Activities, HR Training, Human Resource Training, Leadership Games, Leadership Style Assessment, Learning Style Assessment, Team Building Exercises, Teamwork GamesNo Comments

Earlier this week, Meena Surie Wilson, Anand Chandrasekar and HRDQ-U hosted a free webinar entitled, Learning from Experience: Making Leadership Development Intentional, Not Incidental. Wilson is a Senior Enterprise Associate at the Center for Creative Leadership® (CCL) and author of Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Today: Insights from Corporate India.  Chandrasekar is a Senior Researcher at Center for Creative Leadership. He combines the rigor of academia with a practical approach to research and then translates the resulting knowledge into solutions that provide sustained impact on individuals, businesses, and the world.

Over 315 people registered to listen to the webinar live. Some of the reviews were as follows:

“This course provided a lot of ideas for me to work on and was very good.”

“Excellent!  I have lots to think about. Thank you!”

“Great format; very easy to use and access.”

If you want to watch and learn, you may do so here.

Organizations can avoid the risks associated with inadequate leadership, and prepare leaders for uncertain future scenarios, in two ways. The first is by sharing past experiences with each other as a source of practical lessons about leading. The second is by planning for future experiences and lessons to learn to make themselves and others ready for becoming senior leaders. This structured approach to developing oneself and others is the best guarantee that your organization’s talent pipeline will be filled and flowing.

“It takes boldness to invest in programs of uncertain potentialities, but it is out of such support that some of the greatest discoveries have been made.” H. Smith Richardson, Sr., Center for Creative Leadership Founder

For more than four decades, the Center for Creative Leadership has leveraged the power of leadership to transform individuals, teams, entire organizations and societies to achieve what matters most to them — with results that are powerful, measurable, and enduring.

The agenda for the webinar was as follows:

  • Learning to learn from experiences is critical to becoming a top-level leader
  • Powerful research tells us which Experiences and Lessons are the most essential
  • Experience Explorer™ (EE) card deck contains Experiences and Lessons that matter the most

In more simple terms, it was to offer the participants a research based tool that they can use with your clients and to invite the audience to think about what a learning organization would look like, and how a learning organization can be co-created.

There are five universally important experiences. They are:

1. Bosses & superiors

Leader/s who are one or more levels above the manager and become a positive or negative role model, catalyst, coach, or teacher.

2. Turnaround/fix-it

Fixing a failing or under performing business operation; or implementing an organizational culture change. These troublesome assignments can arouse turbulent thoughts and feelings that have to be managed to meet the twin goals of improving productivity and profitability.

3. Increase in job scope

An increase in budget, number of people to manage, access to resources, and complexity of tasks; typically raises the manager’s responsibilities and visibility and involves a promotion.

4. Horizontal move

Transition or rotation to another function, business unit, organization, or industry sector; may not involve a promotion but calls for acquiring new expertise. Horizontal moves stimulate managers to experience different work and work cultures. These moves can be initiated by the organization or an individual.

 5. New initiative

Opportunity to develop or launch new products and services, adopt new technologies, craft a new policy or process, build a plant or unit from scratch, develop a new market, embark on a new line of business, or create a new business entity.

To make a contribution to our organization, we have to be successful in the world of work. World of work competencies are taught in MBA programs in business schools and in executive education programs. However, mastering lessons in the world of work is not enough to be an effective leader.

Experience Explorer Solution Set includes a facilitator’s guide and one deck of 99 cards. Experience Explorer™ equips a facilitator with a simple, energizing tool to help managers explore their most memorable workplace experiences and what they learned about leadership from those experiences.   This tool is based on proven research and offers the opportunity to accelerate leadership development – enhancing leaders’ ability to learn from experience at all levels. Experience Explorer™ is much more than a personal inventory of experiences and lessons. It emphasizes the specific types of experiences and dimensions of lessons identified by CCL research as common to leading in organizations.

Sign up today to make sure you don’t miss the next free webinar!

12
jun
1

Future Leadership Competencies: Identify & Assess Potential Leaders

Posted by Coaching Skills, Corporate Team Building Games, Customer Service Training Games, Experiential Learning Activities, HR Training, Human Resource Training, Leadership Games, Leadership Style Assessment, Learning Style Assessment, Negotiation Skills Training, Negotiation Styles, Supervisory Skills, Team Building Exercises, Teamwork GamesNo Comments

Identifying and assessing potential leaders can be difficult. We’ll help you understand key future leadership competencies and how to identify them. Creating a leadership pipeline requires that you identify employees at all levels of the organization who have high potential for future leadership roles, then develop them. So, what are the competencies and indicators of high potential for which you should watch? How can you identify and assess potential leaders?

Indicators of High Potential

Indicators of high potential are behaviors beyond the basic competencies for a position at any level.  Let’s start with competencies.

Here are a few ideas for what you should look for as indicators of high potential:

Business Acumen

As an employee climbs the management/leadership ladder, his view of the business must expand beyond his current job responsibilities to the larger picture.  So, besides doing his work proficiently, has the employee shown interest in the larger context of the business?

Does the employee look beyond his specified job responsibilities to better understand the larger business processes of which his work is a part?  Does the employee work to just get the job done, or does the employee look for ways to optimize the larger business process?

Teamwork

The ability to work with others in a team environment and optimize the work of the team rather than individual job performance.

How well has the employee worked as part of a team?  Has the employee stepped up to lead a team?  How well has the employee supported other team members?  When there was a tight deadline, was the employee willing to step in to help other team members?

What’s My Leadership Style?

This validated assessment quickly and accurately identifies a preference for one of four behavioral patterns based on measures of assertiveness and expressiveness: direct, spirited, considerate, or systematic.

Shop Now

Independent & Strategic Thinking

The ability to see the larger picture, beyond her own job responsibilities, and work toward improving business processes and results.

How good are the employee’s ideas?  Has the employee been able to find new and better, more efficient or more effective, work methods?  Has the employee been able to solve her own work-related problems, or is she totally dependent on her manager when something goes wrong?  Has the employee demonstrated that she can work with inconsistent, unclear, or contradictory ideas?  If the employee has worked on a cross-functional team, how impressed have people from other functions been with her ideas and contributions?

Self-Development

Self-development involves the ability to continue to learn and grow into larger roles.

Does the employee go above and beyond the demands of his role and responsibilities for the good of the organization? Has the employee demonstrated a commitment to his own learning and growth? Does the employee help marginal performers through setting an example and coaching? Does the employee ask “How can we?” rather than explaining why “We can’t”?

Integrity

Integrity is being real, honest, and trustworthy.

Does the employee take responsibility for her own errors or tend to blame others when something goes wrong?  Does the employee deliver what she promises?  Is the employee authentic- neither overstating nor understating her abilities and contributions?

The Importance of Communication Skills

Communications skills are important for leaders at all levels because if they cannot express their ideas clearly and succinctly, they will not gain the attention and understanding of their audience at any level. But the requirements for communications skills, both oral and written, will vary by level and be cumulative:

  • Individual contributors typically have to communicate with their managers and their work groups or teams.  Depending on their job role, they may also have to communicate with customers.
  • First-level managers must be able to communicate well with their work groups, with individual employees, and with their managers and their managers’ workgroups.
  • A senior manager may have to communicate with a larger group of employees. For example, an engineering manager may have to communicate with the entire population of engineers under his umbrella. A senior engineering manager may also have to communicate with the vice president of engineering and sometimes present proposals to the company’s executive committee.
  • A C-level officer will have to communicate with her entire organization, the CEO, his or her peers, and sometimes to the board of directors.
  • A CEO will have to communicate with the entire company population, with customers, with the board of directors, and sometimes with the press and stockholders.

Learning to Listen

Learning to Listen helps teams discover how to achieve immediate and lasting results through the art of effective listening.

Shop Now

What is Competency?

Competency refers to the ability to do something well. If your company uses a competency model for various positions, you want to first ensure that employees have the competencies they need to do their current jobs well. If they are not competent in their current jobs, they generally won’t be considered for higher-level positions in the organization.

Of course, future leadership competencies vary by job role and by level. The competencies you seek in a new college hire will be different from those you would expect in someone who is already at a senior management level. Similarly, the competencies required of a sales representative will be different from those for an engineer.

Not all competencies should carry equal weight in your deliberations.  Along with the general competencies for various job roles, you may want to focus on your company’s key competencies.  If your company focuses on great customer service, for example, you may want to focus on customer service-related competencies.  Similarly, if your company’s progress is focused on rapid innovation, this would suggest a greater emphasis on creativity and innovation competencies.

In considering who you want to place in your leadership pipeline, you also want to watch for indicators of high potential that go beyond basic leadership competencies and job requirements.

What Do You Do Next?

Once you have identified your high potential employees and placed them at the appropriate levels within your leadership pipeline, you next must develop them and test them.

While some of your high potentials may be ready right now for a promotion to the next rung of the corporate ladder, most will require development, through formal education, coaching, or experiential learning.  These development activities should include not just the development of leadership skills, but also the development of their business acumen and execution skills to prepare them for their next job.

As they develop the required skills, you need to test them- give them stretch assignments where you can judge whether they are ready for promotion.  Remember that even though they had demonstrated the required competencies and shown some indicators of high potential for higher-level positions, some of them won’t succeed at higher levels.  It is better to discover this before promoting them than after- as many companies have learned from hard experience, promoting the wrong person not only can destroy that person’s career, but it can also have a strong negative impact on the business.

About the Author

dan-tobinDan Tobin is a consultant, author, and speaker on leadership development strategies and programs. His latest book is Feeding Your Leadership Pipeline: How to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders published by ASTD and Berrett-Koehler.

©Daniel R. Tobin- All Rights Reserved

 

10
jun
0

How Global Leaders Think

Posted by Communication Styles, Experiential Learning Activities, HR Training, Human Resource Training, Leadership Games, Leadership Style AssessmentNo Comments

Today, Ann Herrmann-Nehdi and HRDQ-U hosted a free webinar entitled, How Global Leaders Think: Development Strategies from New Research. Herrmann-Nehdi is CEO of Herrmann International, the originators and trailblazers of Whole Brain® Thinking and the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®). She is the co-author of The Whole Brain Business Book–Second Edition which was just released.

Several hundred people registered to listen to the webinar live. If you want to watch and learn, you may do so here.

In a complex world, being a leader is about more than just what you think; it’s about how you think. A new comprehensive study into the thinking preferences and work elements of CEOs working across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and North and South America reveals a number of trends about the mental work activities of global leaders that you can use to inform your own development strategies.

We began with the question, “How do we develop leaders?”

There are three ways: Thinking Agility, Cognitive Agility and Innovation Thinking.

Next, there was an interactive poll.  The question was, “For you, what is the “ideal” leadership style?”

Nearly all the participants replied and their responses are listed below.

  1. Receptive, Enthusiastic, Expressive, Empathetic, Passionate (41%)
  1. Organized, Disciplined, Practical, Industrious, Persistent (11%)
  1. Analytical, Realistic, Intellectual, Objective, Knowledgeable (11%)global 2
  1. Holistic, Imaginative, Synthesizer, Curious, Flexible, Open (38%)

Author Carol S. Dweck said, “Even if you can learn new things,you cannot change how intelligent you are.” She also said, “No matter how intelligent you are, you can always improve-for some, to a large extent.”

They key to understanding global leaders is to remember that everyone processes information differently and that the brain craves patterns and will search endlessly to find them.

Next, we talked about Whole Brain Leadership and the Four Selves. Then we dug deeper and learned what our leadership styles were. For more on both of those topics, click here.

This interactive webinar took the participants inside the data, collected for the newly updated Whole Brain Business Book, and showed them how to apply the findings to build their leaders’ thinking agility to meet new business realities. Participants received a clear understanding of the common thinking and work preferences of global leaders, as well as an action plan for aligning their development strategies with the mental demands required to lead in a world of globalization, complexity and change.

Sign up today to make sure you don’t miss the next free webinar!

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