Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Leaderships 101

Today, I have learned leaderships stuff from some BFM podcast. So, I would like to sum up what I have listen from the podcasts.

The first podcast is from Kenneth Kwan. He is a High Performance Team Strategist in Deep Impact who has spoken to thousands of leaders and professionals in 10 countries. People are the key assets in any organisation, but how do you move them towards having a good performance?

Some leaders are soft and tough. Both have their own ways of management.

However, a good leader in any organization will:
1. Become proactive coach, help your employees develop the right skills.
2.Make sure pay attention to new employees. Give them guidance and coaching, Spend time with them. Don't get them in and leave them alone, it doesn't work. Don't let them hang around with the bad apples in the office.
3.Explain the roles and responsibility with the team very clearly. Demonstrate how their day to day task is actually impact on the overall well-being of the company. Make them feel part of the team. Give them immediate feedback.

High performing team--Consistently overcome the daily fire fighting mentality. Thousand of things screaming at them at single day but yet they are able to be laser beam focus, they know what are the objectives and they constantly stir themselves towards that direction, while still handling thousand of things that cream their attention.

In order to build a high performing team, proactiveness start from yourself.

Fire-fighting mentality-- If u go to any org, u would hear people said there are thousands of things on my plate and this never ends and it keeps adding on. And the question is what their boss really want them to do at the end of the day? People feel so disenchanted and feel so many things , but as they do dozen, doesn't make them feel like they are making a progress, and that is just terrible!

This is due to the fact that people don't know how to multi-task and don't know how to prioritise.

Team building play a role when people doesn't know people very well, and you want to bring them closer, get people very proactive. You want the person to said: 'If change were to happen, it must start with me first. I can do things to make progress!'

Eg: When account dept mess things up, people often blame the company names, but not just account. We play different functions but we are in one organization.The sense of collaboration need to be cultivated. Every person know what are doing , not in your own silo, working on your plate, but to engage what other teams are doing.

1. Clarity. 
Articulate clearly what are their business goals, not just the dept, but to individual level.
sometimes, doing lots of activities does not mean your progress. It just mean you have lots of activities.
Clarity of purpose.what exactly are they in the business.
eg: every dept exist for different purposes.HR, exist for serving the people, sometimes may get busy or too caught up with policy, and forget their role. They should help company to grow people.

2. Trust. 
How to build trust?
Trust build on character and competent.
Character is moral intent, this is what we stand for. If you believe sth , you act in a way that is consistent with your characters and you have very high moral values, people tend to believe and trust you because of what you stand for.
Competent. You have to be really good of what you do.Because if you don;t , people will just doubt your ability to handle things.
Both elements are important and they cannot exist without each others.
If you have character and don't have competent, you would said I am a nice guys you know, but I don't know whether I can work with you.
If you have competent and no characters, people said this guy is good but I don't trust him.

It starts from small things, responsibility that has been assigned to you.

3.Open communication
 Different from western. Focus on the issue, not the person.
Share their ideas without holding back. Important, because each person when share ideas, decision become very robust. because you get different ideas.Leaders have to mine for different opinions.
When people talk, they own an idea.
To make people who don't talk during meeting to talk: Pre meeting session, to warm them up, when in large group, they will feel intimidating. Let's argue and talk about it.


4. Accountability
How they constantly account for their action.
They meet on regular basis. They talks about what have we done in a week. Watever we are doing right now, and start making plan for next week to achieve goals. what are we doing to move closer.
write goal, but not follow up, leave it.
Follow through is important. it is a discipline of execution.
we are not interested you to setting great goal, but we interested on you to have the discipline to meet it every single weeks.

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