Being a more effective leader

Ever notice that the higher up you go in the organization, your success does not depend on your brilliant knowledge of something.  Rather a higher priority is placed on how you select and develop people around you.

If you're set on progressing your career, you've go to commit yourself to a course of personal development.

5 Key insights from famous Executive Coach Marshall Goldsmith include:

 1.  Don't fall into the superstition trap

  2.  Technical chops aren't enough for leaders

  3.  Your effectiveness as a leader is based on others perception of you

  4.  Listening to what other people say is the most important skill for a leader to develop

  5.  You need to pick and choose your areas of improvement

You can read more about this from an article in Business Insider, Aug 2016
 Read more  here 

Hope you enjoy it.

     Steve Brody

I do not want to be your boss!!

"I don't want to tell you what to do or what not to do. I don't want to be your mother either. I'm not your teacher, your best friend or your guru. I care deeply about you. I care enough that I expect you to realize your potential and experience a sense of real accomplishment in all you achieve. I want your days to be purposeful and as such, fulfilling. I want you to want to work hard for what matters most. I want you to experience more life."

The above is an interesting statement from a business associate, leader, and Executive Coach I know .   This statement is fundamentally about being your leader.... not your traffic cop or school teacher.   From Phil Liebman at ALPS Leadership.  

Have you ever felt some of these same thoughts regarding your Executive Team?  Does it feel good or would you rather be spending your time doing more important things?   This is a basic concept in leadership.....having your team be responsible and doing the right things without you having to micromanage the firm.  

Leadership can be learned....definitely,  but not without a lot of work,  desire to excel,  challenge to yourself,  and deliberate practice on a regular basis.   Not rocket science but hard stuff.... according to well known author James Kouzes  in a recent book called Learning Leadership.  

Kouzes claims you need to understand five  fundamentals

  1.  Believe that you can
  2.  Desire to excel
  3.  Challenge Yourself
  4.  Engage support
  5.  Practice deliberately

He includes numerous pragmatic tips for any  leader to ponder and then develop as practice.  Suggest that you review his material.

Hope you find it valuable

    Steve Brody

Innovation starts with your heart....not your head!!

This is a story about Innovation and how to motivate a group of employees to generate a creative response to a difficult performance situation.  You may have encountered a similar challenge within your organization or group.  

A CEO  had taken up his new post at Lakeland Hospital. Shortly thereafter, he had called a meeting to review patient satisfaction scores. U.S. hospitals have to report this data to the federal government, and if they fall below certain thresholds, they pay a penalty in reduced reimbursement rates. Given that, the CEO was distressed to learn that when it came to patient satisfaction, Lakeland was a laggard — with scores between the 25^th and 50^th percentile. How could this be?

His senior team told him it wasn’t for lack of trying. Lakeland tracked the things that drove patient satisfaction — response times to call lights, pain management, the quality of the food, the effectiveness of patient communication, and so on. 

The CEO wondered how could they reinvent the customer experience?  

An idea struck him.....what would happen if the employees brought their hearts to work?  

We’re going to raise our scores by touching the hearts of our patients — by making sure they know not only how well we care for them, but how much we care about them. We’re going to learn to be more loving. To do that, he said, I want to challenge you to bring your heart to work in new and creative ways.

i.e.    “Every time you interact with a patient, tell them who you are, what you’re there to do, and then share a heartfelt why. For example, ‘I’m Tom, I’m here to change your dressings, ‘cause we want you home in time for your granddaughter’s wedding.’”  There was no script....he asked each person to be creative & personal.  

First, success required that everyone, every day, opened their hearts to those they were caring for. One person with a bad attitude could undo the heartfelt efforts of a dozen colleagues. Not surprisingly, front line employees and their managers started to become less tolerant of colleagues with crappy attitudes. In the end, more than a few of the curmudgeons were asked to leave.

And second, though the focus of the CEO’s initiative wasn’t on call-light response times, pain management, or discharge planning, patient scores on all these conventional metrics started to climb as the heart-to-heart message took hold. The lesson: love someone better, and they’ll extend you grace on all the less important things.

Before long, Lakeland was reverberating with stories about heartfelt connections.  The numbers and performance started to rise.....and over 6000 stories were shared with the team of specific examples of what was working now.   Within 90 days they were at the 95th percentile on satisfaction scores. 

"The best innovations — both socially and economically — come from the pursuit of ideals that are noble and timeless: joy, wisdom, beauty, truth, equality, community, sustainability and, most of all, love. These are the things we live for, and the innovations that really make a difference are the ones that are life-enhancing. And that’s why the heart of innovation is a desire to re-enchant the world."  

 Here is a Link to the actual  article   

  Hope you find it valuable.......Steve Brody  

     A story by Gary Hamel, visiting Professor at the London Business School, Co-founder of The Management Innovation Exchange.  

 

   source:   HBR.org   Jun 2015  

Why constant learners embrace the 5 hour rule

Ben Franklin's five hour rule reflects the very simple idea that over time, the smartest and most successful people are the ones who are constant and deliberate learners.  

This could easily be reflected in your organization and with your leadership team.  After all, how do you help your leaders to learn and grow?  

Underlying the answer to this question is a success strategy for life that we can all use, and increasingly must use.

Throughout Ben Franklin's adult life, he consistently invested roughly an hour per day in deliberate learning. I call this Franklin's five-hour rule: one hour a day on every weekday.

Franklin's learning time consisted of:

• Waking up early to read and write
• Setting personal growth goals (i.e., virtues list) and tracking the results
• Creating a club for "like-minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community"
• Turning his ideas into experiments
• Having morning and evening reflection questions

You can read more from this Inc magazine article  

Hope you find it valuable.......  Steve Brody 

You can't ask customers what they want!!

This statement seems like a real challenge.  We have all been told to pay attention to the customer and find out what they desire.  But according to these remarks....often the customer has trouble imagining or identifying to you what the BIG desire would be.  As stated, your role in the firm is to keep close to the customer.....watch their behavior.....implement various tests in order to find out empirically what they want.  Not easy, but it can be done.

You can't ask customers want they want

... not if your goal is to find a breakthrough. Because your customers have trouble imagining a breakthrough.

You ought to know what their problems are, what they believe, what stories they tell themselves. But it rarely pays to ask your customers to do your design work for you.

So, if you can't ask, you can assert. You can look for clues, you can treat different people differently, and you can make a leap. You can say, "assuming you're the kind of person I made this for, here's what I made."

The risk here is that many times, you'll be wrong.

But if you're not okay with that, you're never going to create a breakthrough

   Seth Godin blog  Jun 2016  

Hope you find this valuable......Steve Brody  

4 Quick Start-up Tips by Richard Branson

The CEO of Virgin Atlantic, Richard Branson, has successfully moved into several new areas of business.   From music....to airlines....and more.

Here is an article from Virgin regarding turning your passion into a business.....or a new development.   The  4 tips include:

  1.  Clue up

  2.  Start a side project

  3.  Quick funding

  4.  Be brave  


You can read the full article  here

Hope you enjoy it.


Read my new book, now on Amazon.com  What Happens After the Sale


        Steve Brody  

To Change Culture......Change the Habits

We often talk about the need to change.  In our firms....in our teams...in ourselves....in our families.  But why does it continue to be so hard?

A recent article puts focus on one of the most successful change programs and maybe these lessons should be modeled in our firms.   Here are some of the key items as used by the 12 step programs:

 -  Replace old habits with new habits

-  Peer support & pressure help make a difference

-  Using a sponsor helps generate commitment

-  Create communities without hierarchy

-  Pay attention to the company you keep

-  Practice continual introspection

-  Changes in practice may represent a breakthrough

-  Focus on small wins

-  The Goal is progress not perfection


These are from a Harvard Business Review article called  "Managing Change One Day at a Time."

You can read more  here 

Hope you enjoy it.

      Steve Brody


Read my new book, now on Amazon.com  What Happens After the Sale 

7 Caustic Management Behaviors to Avoid

You have heard it before.....but maybe this is a good time to review again.  People leave your firm because of bad management not necessarily because you are a bad company.

Want to lose your best people?  Then do these 7 Bad Behaviors.
Want to keep your best people?  Then do not do these 7 Bad things.

1.  Not keeping your promises
2.  Ignoring poor performance
3.  Having irregular meetings
4.  Dismissing opinions or ideas of others
5.  Micro Managing others
6.  Display arrogance
7.  Not delegating effectively

Read more of the article  here   

Hope you find it helpful.

      Steve Brody



   Read my new book:  What Happens after the Sale   now on Amazon.com