Trust: Gain Motivation and Lose Anxiety
Trust is fundamental to all relationships. Without it, the foundation of collaboration is quicksand. Here are some examples where trust plays a familiar role, and other illustrations where the challenge is murky. A surgeon I know has an explosive temper. It gets him into a lot of trouble – in his office, in the operating theatre, in his marriage, with his kids. In a medical procedure, skills and tasks are interdependent and require trust that your partners are doing their part while you are doing yours. The yelling that the surgeon does creates an atmosphere of fear, clouding the split second decisions everyone makes as they move through procedures. Imagine how easy it would be to make mistakes? Imagine what his home life is like? A 16-year old with a new drivers license was employed to stay at her next-door neighbor’s house for a weekend to watch the couple’s three [...]
A culture of trust needs transparency
Leaders, Everyone wants to be part of a workplace culture that puts a premium on delivering the real truth. Lies and secrets break trust, while honesty and transparency build trust. If trust somehow exists without transparency, this so-called trust is nothing more than an illusion because it is based on what is not real. Transparency is an essential ingredient for creating and maintaining trust. Trust is the foundation of any successful relationship, both personal and professional, and when it is broken, it is extremely hard to repair. When it comes to building solid workplace relationships, trust takes center stage. When trust is created, it leads to a heightened sense of security and better staff engagement and performance. Transparent leadership is the key to fostering a culture of trust between leaders and their workforce. Being transparent is a powerful thing, if you can trust yourself and be trusted by others. Let’s take a quick look [...]
Caution: Ego Traps
Leaders, Complacent superiority is your biggest clue that you are in an ego trap. The ego loves to feel superior. It loves judging, and looking down on others. It loves being right, and knowing more about everything and everyone. Leaders who operate with their ego on the front burner can rub people the wrong way. However, your ego is not your enemy. The real problem is when you leave the ego unchecked. Ego sabotages our being engaged, happy and productive at every turn. If we let it. According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, two in five CEOs fail in their first 18 months of leading an organization, and one-third of chief executives from Fortune 500 companies do not make it past three years because of derailing behaviors. Research shows that egotism runs rampant in the business world: More than one third of bad decisions result from [...]
Executives derail
Leaders, Derailment happens. It is normal. It is human. And it comes with consequences for the organization as well as yourself. Research suggests that more than 60% of senior leaders and executives derail at some point of time in their career. Also, the greatest majority of these leaders, belong to the group of 20% in the workforce, who generate 80% of the company’s value. Just identifying those managers in the recruiting process does not do the job. It is all about selecting them, educating them to increase their awareness and actively manage their derailing tendencies. While basically everyone can derail, derailing characteristics are magnified through the lens of leadership. At the individual contributor level, impact will often be contained to the individual’s immediate function. At upper leadership levels, they reverberate throughout the organization and affect people and the organization at large. Again, awareness matters. Let’s explore the definition, causes [...]
Leadership 4.0: Are you ready?
Today’s business world is rather exponential than linear. Speed is increasing. Many changes are of disruptive nature. Things can be true, and at the same time they can be false. What is illegal in one country could be legal in another country of the global village. There is not only one solution to a problem but a multitude of possible solutions with no clear favorite inclusive of the fact that some solutions might even contradict each other. Things which you thought were secure can now change without warning. In short: We live in a VUCA world. The difficult thing for leaders is that leadership in a VUCA world has not yet been developed. Even worse, most of today’s leaders have been trained – at universities, business schools, on the job, by their mentors etc. – on leadership models, theories and instruments that stem from a disappearing world. What was [...]
New work needs empowerment
Leaders, Do you need to control everything in your business? Are your people excessively reliant on you asking your permission for every tiny detail? How do you empower your people? Do you give them credit consistently? Leadership of today is quite different from that of Caesar, Plato, the Wilhelminian time, or the post-war period. Today's leaders utilize power-sharing, trust, team-building, and empowerment. It is important to think through what empowerment means and how best to employ it so your organization can harness its strength. Empowerment sounds great, but leadership is principally about the human dimension so nothing is always simple. What is (psychological) empowerment? Empowerment is made up of four aspects: a sense of real meaning in one’s work, a sense of making an impact through the contribution you make at work, feeling competent about your capacity to do your work, and a sense you have freedom to make choices [...]