Leadership Briefs

Quick reads on leadership that are relevant to the ideas of centered leadership and high performance leadership:

New Management Training Could Lead To Improved Worker Health

By learning how to be more supportive of family and personal lives, leaders engage and support their teams in ways that lead to better productivity and lower turnover. Sound good?

“Managing in a more supportive way that recognizes how important flexibility is to today’s work force is a win-win economic proposition that benefits employers, workers and families,” Kossek said. “Employees no longer leave their family needs at the company doorstep.”

Question To Know How You Are Smart
Practical Tactics from Neuro Discoveries with Dr. Ellen Weber

Explores how we are all intelligent (and gifted) in different ways and beyond that, Dr. Weber offers some great questions for developing the areas of intelligence you'd like to grow. Useful and fascinating. For example,

"3. Do you frequent musical performances, compose new lyrics, play background music to sustain creativity, or notice music’s keen influence on yourself or others? Music changes moods and shifts brain waves so that those who are musically intelligent find innovative cadence for several areas of their lives."

>> http://www.brainleadersandlearners.com/2-footed-question/general/how-are-you-smart/

Check out these leadership connections and then ask yourself:

What are your gifts? Which intelligences do you star at and which could use more development?
What can you do to make better use of your multiple intelligences?
As a leader, how do you show your people that you truly care about them?
How can you increase your emotional intelligence to make more room for compassion in your life?

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Perfect Relationships

Is your partner perfect? Are you? I've made enough mistakes in my life and in my relationships to know that the search for perfection is illusive at best and at worst, frustrating. There are no perfect people out there waiting for us, to fall in love with us, to fix us, to bring us what we need, to fulfill our dreams. But that's OK. In fact, that's wonderful. We don't need a perfect person in order to create love. Love creates the perfect person. -- Douglas Brent Smith

Brace Yourself On The Edge

Do you pride yourself in being cutting edge? Do you try new techniques, stay creative, build innovation instead of comfort? Good for you. And if you said no, allow me to encourage you to push the edge a bit more. Get out of your comfort zone. The really big goals makes us just bit uncomfortable. We might even sweat. Push the edge, even knowing that sometimes when you push the edge you get pushed back. People might object to the radical new approach. They might take exception to your changes. Push the edge anyway. Leading often means going where no one else has gone. All the way to the edge. Pack a lunch, it could take a while, but do stay with it. -- Doug Smith

Strategic and Communication Skills

Supervisors often bring strong technical skills to the job. When they have worked in technical jobs prior to becoming a supervisor, they were often the best at what they do. They know the ground level part of their business well enough to solve problems and deal with day to day issues. Leading is all that and more. High performance leadership requires attention to detail AND a constant view of the big picture: where is your team, your market, and your customer base headed? What does the future hold? Strong supervisors learn to add strategic and communication skills to their technical ability. What are you doing today to develop your sense of the big picture? -- Douglas Brent Smith

No Hiding The Truth

What happens when someone tries to hide the truth? It pops up, unexpected, full-blown and often unforgiving. There is no hiding the truth. The truth always bubbles to the top. Pushing down what we regard as worth hiding, even when it's clearly true, simply delays the inevitable. The truth comes out, and then whoever attempted to hide it looks doubly suspicious and unreliable. Also, when we try to hide the truth we suddenly limit our possibilities. What can we say? What should we suppress? Where are we headed? Who can know and who cannot know? Did we tell the wrong person already? Maybe we should just keep quiet... Truth we try to hide becomes our tallest wall. It's a weight we carry around wondering when we can let it go. It's a wall that prevents us from seeing the beauty that belongs in all truth, even the truth that troubles us. What secret truth are you carrying around? Isn't it time to let that go? -- Douglas Brent Smith Front Range Leadership: ...

Win The Game

It would be nice to win the game. But, do you ever feel like you're in a game that keeps shifting the rules and making it easy to make progress but impossible to win? You've probably noticed lots of game elements creeping into service. Points, incentives, expiring coupons followed by new expiring coupons, leader-boards...on an on a relentless attack on service comes from playing a game designed -- you guessed it -- to maximize profit. If the customer is happy, fine, but the point is to make money. Not to put too fine a point on it but that's a lousy point. What if there could be something better? What if customer service excellence became playing a game where the customer always wins and that makes you happy? You don't have to. "give away the store" to achieve a winning game for all of the players. Just stop stacking the rules against customers and watch how much more they will want to do business with you. -- doug smith

Call Fewer Meetings

Do you have too many meetings? Many leaders do. Staff meetings, committee meetings, team meetings, project meetings, all-company meetings...the list goes on. Most of us can think of many meetings that were simply wastes of our time. Time is too important to waste is bad meetings. Do the people in your meeting want to be there? If not, maybe it's not a meeting that you need. Maybe there's another way to communicate your message. Maybe the work that is waiting is too important to wait. We can like the feeling of having a meeting. It feels like we're doing something. But if we're not -- if we are delaying real work, maybe we don't need that meeting after all. What scheduled meeting could you eliminate this week? Wouldn't it be nice to have that time to be...well, happy and more productive? -- Doug Smithy

Stay Curious Because...

Four types / Four strengths Since about three-quarters of the world sees things differently than you, doesn't it make sense to stay curious about their views? Three-quarters? Where does that come from? If you've ever taken a personality quiz, chances are that it plotted your personality in one of four types. Some use colors, some use words, some even use animals, but you get the picture. At one fairly simple level we subdivide into one of four types. If you fit one of the types, that means that three other types are different. Three-quarters of the world. While it might seem like a simplification, time after time it holds true. And whether it's three-quarters or some other portion, it does make sense that there are different types and different views out there. Without staying curious we miss the possibilities. When our minds are always made up -- based on our own sketchy and incomplete view of the universe -- we can miss massive opportunities. We can stay bli...

Are You Married to that Problem?

Has a problem got you where you live? Are you married to it? I don't mean that your problem is your actual spouse. Geez. Get over that and build your relationship if you think that's the problem. (yeah, me too). What I do mean is that sometimes we tend to fall in love with a problem. It starts to get comfortable. It becomes the way things are. It cozies up to us all friendly-like and acts like it belongs and before we know it we almost (I did say ALMOST) enjoy having it around. We take comfort in the familiar. It's that sense of recognition that shuts off that troublesome need to think. But that's not what we want. That's not who we are. We can do better. It's hard to solve a problem you're in love with. So take a good hard, analytical look at that problem. Maybe it's NOT something you want to live with. Maybe it IS something that you want to solve. Why not get started solving that problem today? -- Douglas Brent Smith Learn more about ou...

Creating Alignment

What is the connection between your actions and goals? How do your goals connect to your overall mission and purpose? Do you have a sense that what you do matters and gets you closer to accomplishing what is most important to you? High performance leaders align their actions to their goals and their goals to their mission. It's how they get things done that matter. It's the filter of success. Does that task that someone is asking you to do contribute to your purpose? Then do it. If it doesn't, negotiate another path, another step, perhaps another set of hands to get it done. Our time is too valuable to spend it on anything that does not contribute to our happiness, and our happiness is largely dependent on doing what matters most to us and that contributes to the well-being of others. We can run, we can hide, but without that alignment of action, goals, and mission how will we ever reach our potential? Alignment creates that guidance that w...

Do Your Best With Time

Here's another guest entry from my good friend and fraternity brother David Spiegel. If you know anything about the East Coast you'll get a sense for how his day went. If you ever struggle with managing time, some of this may sound familiar. As Dave says, we can't really manage time -- it's what we do with it that matters. Now, let's hear what Dave has to share: In a week where I have dedicated myself to regaining control over my time , I have come to realize that I am trying to accomplish something impossible. Time is time. Every day has exactly 1440 minutes to it and no matter what we do,we can not create any more of it. So instead of creating more time we spend our energy trying to make better use of those precious minutes each day.We attempt to manage time. Well guess what. We have no control over time. Time itself can not be managed. We can not speed it up or slow it down. Do you know why a watched pot never boils? It's a time thing...

High Performance Leadership

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