Positive Leadership: Honesty and Integrity

Honesty is telling telling the truth — in other words, conforming our words to reality.

Integrity is conforming reality to our words — in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations.

This requires an integrated character, a oneness, primarily with self but also with life.

One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present. When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.

Positive Leadership: Honesty and Integrity

Positive Leadership: Leading in a Crisis

When you are leading in a time-pressured, make-or-break situation, you might wonder if you should take charge and command action or take the time to enable the innovation of others. You can do both. 

Here are three things to do in a crisis that are both directive and empowering:

Set a vision that instills both realism and hope. Assess the current situation and how it’s likely to evolve. At the same time, articulate the possibility of succeeding against all odds.

Bring people in. Set clear boundaries for who is on and off the core team, but invite in helpful collaborators as well. People may have to work in fluid, shifting arrangements, rotating in and out of teams as the demands of the situation evolve.

Engage. Dive in and start doing the work. Lead a disciplined, coordinated execution while also encouraging innovation through experimentation and learning along the way.

Positive Leadership: Leading in a Crisis

Positive Leadership: Why Do We Argue?

Why do we argue? To out-reason our opponents, prove them wrong, and, most of all, to win! ... Right? Philosopher Professor Daniel H. Cohen of Colby College, Maine shows how our most common form of argument -- a war in which one person must win and the other must lose -- misses out on the real benefits of engaging in active disagreement.

Positive Leadership: Why Do We Argue?

Positive Leadership: Coming Up With Innovative Ideas

Zipcar founder Robin Chase shares how she comes up with her ideas, and explains the importance of starting with a "minimum viable product" when launching a business.

Positive Leadership: Coming Up With Innovative Ideas

Positive Leadership: Good Leaders Build Trust First

Most leaders today emphasise their competence, strength, and credentials, but none of that matters if people don’t trust you. Win people over with warmth. Here’s how:

Use the right tone. Speak with lower pitch and volume. Aim for a tone that suggests that you’re levelling with people and being completely honest.

Validate feelings. If you show your employees that you hold roughly the same worldview they do, you demonstrate not only empathy but, in their eyes, common sense. If you want colleagues to listen and agree with you, first agree with them.

Smile—and mean it. Smiling is contagious. When people see you beaming, they’ll likely smile too. But a polite grin fools no one. To project warmth, you have to genuinely feel it.

Positive Leadership: Good Leaders Build Trust First

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership: Change

Positive Leadership: Change

Positive Leadership: How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them

Why do people tell lies in the workplace?

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., an international keynote speaker specialising in leadership and nonverbal communication, explains why people tell lies, how to spot the non-verbal cues of a liar, and strategies for dealing with liars. 

The Mastery in Communication Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business hosted Goman for a lecture on her book "The Truth About Lies in the Workplace: How to Spot Liars and How to Dealwith Them." 

Positive Leadership: How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them

Positive Leadership: Better Governance

From left: Secretary of State George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan and Walter Annenberg on the golf course 

Former Nixon and Reagan cabinet member George Shultz offers compelling analyses on the topics of governance, the economy, energy, drugs, diplomacy, and nuclear security. In this how-to guide, Shultz charts a path to a better future for the United States and the rest of the world.

In Part 3 of an 8 part series, George Shultz asks what's wrong with governance today and discusses how we can fix this essential process. "If you are able to confront problems effectively and take advantage of opportunities fairly, you will be able to govern. So the issue of governance is an appropriate starting point for this exploration of how to achieve a better future."

For more information visit: http://www.hooverpress.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1593

Positive Leadership: Better Governance

Positive Leadership: Avoiding Presentation Mistakes

There are three common mistakes people make when giving presentations.

1. Lack of preparation. Preparation is the key to success but so many people don’t prepare properly. Sometimes it’s due to an inability to overcome the fear factor but it’s crucial you manage this - preparation is key to success.

2. Worrying too much about yourself. Your presentation is not about you – it’s about the audience. When people worry too much about themselves they forget to make the audience the hero.

3. Rushing through. Don’t speed through your presentation. Slow down, take your time and keep it simple.

To avoid mistakes when presenting it’s worth using visualisation to overcome any fears. You can do this by visualising yourself giving a really good presentation and what you want it to look like. Then, take the time to think what the audience needs and is hoping for. Finally, less is more – slow down and remember to pause in between each thought. The slower you are the more the audience will remember.

For people who are prone to making mistakes the key is not to get too anxious. All you have to do is be as good as you can be – you can’t do more than that. Nobody is perfect but getting too wound up and nervous will make you more likely to make mistakes. If you do make an error or two, then that’s ok. People like to see a human being giving a presentation – it makes it real. Make sure you rehearse so that your message is clear but remember, it’s not the end of the world if you do make a mistake on the day.

Positive Leadership: Avoiding Presentation Mistakes

Positive Leadership: High Performance Leadership

Daniel Goleman and George Kohlrieser discuss 'High Performance Leadership':

Positive Leadership: High Performance Leadership

Positive Leadership: Vision Without Execution Is Hallucination

When you're clear in your company purpose--your "why," as leadership author Simon Sinek puts it--your strategic direction becomes self-evident.

Positive Leadership: Vision Without Execution Is Hallucination

Positive Leadership: Yet!

Suppose your boss pulls you aside and tells you: “You don’t have the right skills for the project.”

Then suppose a different situation, where your boss tells you: “You don’t have the right skills for the project, yet” or “You don’t yet have the connections to make this deal happen.”

The word yet makes all the difference in the world. In the first example, you feel like a failure. In the examples with “yet,” you feel like you may not be ready now, but you could be in the future.

Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor who’s researched the idea of a “growth mindset,”elaborates:

By [using the word "yet"] we give people a time perspective. It creates the idea of learning over time. It puts the other person on that learning curve and says, “Well, maybe you’re not at the finish line but you’re on that learning curve and let’s go further.” It’s such a growth mindset word.

Positive Leadership: Yet!

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership: Stand Out!

Don't be afraid to standout from the rest! That is what leadership is all about.

Positive Leadership: Stand Out!

Positive Leadership: Attracting Talent

Talented people used to want high salaries and stable career paths, but now they want work with purpose. 

Here’s how your company can offer candidates meaningful and attractive roles:

Get serious about impact. Determine the positive impact your organisation seeks to make in the world. You don’t have to be a social enterprise to do good.

Tell that story well. Call it marketing or storytelling, but make sure you're communicating how much you care about your mission and how you're working toward it.

Design roles for their future, not just yours. Many people see a job as one of many stepping-stones they'll visit over the course of a career. Focus on making your stone as attractive and inviting as possible. Decent pay, rewarding perks, and large doses of autonomy demonstrate that you take professional development seriously.

Positive Leadership: Attracting Talent

Positive Leadership: Women Should be as Ambitious as Men

Tory Burch says women entrepreneurs should find their passion and be just as ambitious as men. She founded the Tory Burch fashion label in 2004. Her clothing line is now carried in more than 800 stores worldwide. She also heads the Tory Burch Foundation, which offers mentorship opportunities to women entrepreneurs and provides micro-loans to women-owned businesses.

Positive Leadership: Women Should be as Ambitious as Men

Positive Leadership: Developing the Right Behaviours

Get it right on the inside and you will get it right on the outside. That’s good advice that is rarely followed by today’s leaders. Instead there seems to be a focus on just getting it right on the outside. This can work, but it’s probably leaving your followers feeling a little empty at best—or distrusting at worst.

When leaders focus only on their behaviours and outside appearances, they are presenting a thin veneer of leadership that can work for a short while, but which eventually breaks down—especially under pressure.

Wondering how you can get it right on the inside instead of working so hard to act in a prescribed way on the outside? Here are some ways to get started. These are based on answers to such questions as, “Who was your best boss?” and “What made them so special?”

See people as assets to develop instead of liabilities to manage. Good leadership begins with a fundamental belief in people and the value that they can bring to a company. Where do you stand on this? Do you focus on people’s strengths and how to maximize them, or do you tend to focus on weaknesses and how to correct them? How does that impact your leadership behaviours?

Assume the best. People have good days and bad days. They make mistakes, exhibit poor judgment, and sometimes let you down. How do you react to these situations? What is the story that you are telling yourself about their actions? Are you assuming they had good intentions and just fell short, or does this just go to show that you were right about them all along? Your resulting leadership behaviour will be very different depending on your mindset.

See yourself as a leader instead of as an evaluator. Part of leadership is matching skill sets to the overall goals of the organisation. The ability to discern talent and apply it effectively is an important quality. But don’t make that the sole focus of your leadership. Instead, go beyond getting the right people in the right positions and actively work to help them succeed in their roles. See their success as a partnership between you and them. When people sense that you are on their side, helping them to succeed, they act and perform very differently than if they feel that you are primarily judging and evaluating them.

Beliefs and attitudes drive your behaviours. In today’s open and connected world, you have to be genuine and authentic. Leaders who get it right on the inside naturally display genuine behaviours on the outside that people respond to. Take a look at your leadership beliefs. Work on the inside first.

Positive Leadership: Developing the Right Behaviours

Positive Leadership: Admitting Your Mistakes

One key to successful innovation often goes overlooked: the ability to admit when you're wrong. As a leader, owning your mistakes is your greatest opportunity to learn and grow. Admitting fault in the right way can make your company stronger and your employees much more comfortable with failure. That freedom allows for greater creativity and quicker solutions when people make mistakes.

Practice these five tips to help you own your mistakes in a way that strengthens your company:

1. Take ownership.

As the leader, you are responsible for what goes on at your company, so you need to own the problem and the solution. Never make excuses. That doesn't strike confidence in a leader.

Commend employees who take ownership of their mistakes as well. By showing respect and support for them, you create a culture that addresses mistakes without blame. Taking responsibility when things don't work is more conducive to growth.

2. Be sincere.

When you deliver an apology, your audience will be looking for signs of a canned or stiff delivery, and they'll take them as signs that you don't mean what you're saying. To win them over, simply be yourself. That honesty -- in your words and your delivery -- will show that you actually mean it.

3. Show what you've learned.

A good apology explains what happened and why. Start with why you made your original decision and the logic that led to that choice. Next, explain what you learned about why it didn't work and how that new information will inform how you move forward. If you haven't worked out the lesson yet, then you're not ready to deliver the apology.

With any mistake, no matter how small, there is a way to prevent it from happening again. Even if the mistake was simple -- like not thinking through an idea -- you can improve your thought process so it doesn't happen next time. Sharing your lessons will also show your employees how to think about mistakes and move forward.

4. Make proactive changes.

Talk is cheap, so people need to see that you will actually follow through. When you outline your plan for change, mention a step you've already taken toward those ends; the more specific the better. For example, you might mention a new process you initiated to improve communication or a new approach you're taking in product development. As long as you can explain how you're rectifying what went wrong and own it, then you'll come across as a person in a position of strength.

5. End on a high note.

When you talk about a mistake, acknowledge anyone who might have been harmed in the process. Sometimes, the harm is overt, like in the case of BP's oil spill, but often it's more subtle, as when employees invest hope and time in a project that fails. If anyone has been harmed, show empathy, but always bring it back to what you learned and how you plan to use this experience as an opportunity to grow. You want to end with a message of hope in every situation.

Positive Leadership: Admitting Your Mistakes

Positive Leadership: The Benefits of Having a Business Coach

As leaders we all need confidants. We need someone we can go to outside our organisation and outside of our regular sphere of influence to get unbiased feedback and opinions. There are a lot of people you can go to for wisdom and advice, but with an ICF coach you will always feel like the coach’s ideas and feedback are genuinely unbiased. The only thing the coach cares about is your success. As a result, your coach will become a very trusted confidant.

For further information on our coaching services please contact graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership: The Benefits of Having a Business Coach

Positive Leadership: Handling a Turnaround

When a company is in crisis— facing bankruptcy or a disruptive competitor— it needs to act fast. 

But it’s also important to stop and speak with the people who are doing the day-to-day work of moving the organisation in a new direction. 

Here’s how to use conversation to help orchestrate a successful turnaround:

Talk straight. Be honest and authentic, especially when it comes to sharing bad news or addressing difficult topics.

Make talk happen. Stressful times can cause people to keep to themselves. Promote interactivity and encourage debate. Forego one-way communication channels (like memos) and choose mediums that allow for back-and-forth discussion instead.

Let everyone talk. Include people at all levels in the conversation. This will increase engagement among those who must carry out the turnaround work.

Positive Leadership: Handling a Turnaround

Positive Leadership: Being the Best You Can Possibly Be

Imagine being the best you could possibly be!

How often have you seen the line “creating an environment where staff can achieve their full potential”? It’s a great aspiration, that’s for sure, but what does it really mean and can it ever be possible? Well, we are all born with an innate capacity to learn, a sort of learning instinct, a playful spirit of enquiry and curiosity about who we are and how the world works, and this should never be underestimated, but as we progress through life blocks and barriers arise which limit and obscure the potential that lies within us. We are bruised by often brutal experiences in both work and education and we start to limit ourselves and the service we offer others in ways that are both conscious and unconscious.

So, how can we start to win this inner game? Back in 1975 Timothy Gallwey in his wonderful book The Inner Game of Tennis put forward in the form of an equation the simple but fascinating proposition that

POTENTIAL – INTERFERENCE = PERFORMANCE

This proposition challenges us to change our focus and our thinking. Rather than trying to push performance or naval-gaze at potential, it invites us instead to focus on the interference that inhibits the former and blocks the latter. Remove the interference and the other two can flow together. This can be a personal quest, a valuable piece of self-discovery, but it can also be the basis for an approach to leadership: liberating leadership which aims to set potential free by focussing on interference and which uses empathy, compassion and passion to move towards a more fully engaged workplace and learning environment.

There are four fundamental types of interference that block personal performance:

Low inspiration,

Self-limiting beliefs,

Deficit relationships,

Pain language.

Let us look briefly at each of these and share some ideas about how to win the inner game and the role of the liberating leader.

1. Low inspiration:  How often are we actively inspired? Inspired in a way that gives us life, fresh energy, enthusiasm, vigour and positivity? Inspired in a way that enables us to inspire others, perhaps? It can be a rare thing and certainly a quality of being that is hard to summon at will. Well, maybe Andy Murray’s historic success at SW19 in June was an example of collective inspiration. The FTSE 100 share index went up 1.1% the very next day after his Wimbledon Championship victory – as it always does after a great sporting success ( the ‘bulls’ have their day…). So, here are some steps you can take to combat low inspiration:

Find things that actively inspire you,

Visit them frequently,

Carry them with you all day long.

Developing a scrapbook of inspiration has never been easier with pictures, video clips, music and articles available to everyone on the internet. Start building your inspiration scrapbook today!

A liberating leader will look to tune-in to the things which inspire individuals, teams and even organisations. They will also openly share the things which inspire them.  In their approach to business planning and achieving change they will focus heavily on the inspiration that lies behind the initiative. They know that we are inspired by a dream not a plan and will look to make the ‘dream’ or vision a clear part of their dialogue around goals and performance.

2. Self-limiting beliefs: The beliefs we are looking at here are the things we tell ourselves about ourselves, our inner dialogue about what we can and cannot do and crucially what we are good at and what we are bad at. We all have a combination of supporting beliefs, based on our core values and successes, and limiting beliefs stemming from the outcomes and consequences we have experienced and also importantly the messages, often much repeated, given to us by significant players in our lives (parents, teachers, bosses, friends, partners, the media, community leaders, and so on).

Winning the inner game involves raising self-awareness regarding these limiting beliefs and challenging their origins, basis and validity. It involves challenging the troll under the bridge that says to our potential ‘you cannot cross’. This is not “you’ll believe a man can fly”-type stuff. For example, no matter how strong my beliefs it would clearly be a delusion to think that in my middle-years I could ever become an astronaut. These are beliefs about things within the sphere of the individual’s reality.

Stemming from a steadfast faith in human potential a liberating leader will work with individuals to raise awareness of self-limiting beliefs and release potential through coaching, great feedback, developing relationships and demonstrating personal commitment.

3. Deficit relationships:  Avoiding or transforming deficit relationships is a key way of keeping the flow of potential going. They seem friendly enough, these corridor conversations or chats over coffee, but they actually latch onto your negativity, double the feeling and take you lower. The catharsis is false, as the emotions are intensified rather than purged. These relationships are often cynical, deflating and uncaring. There is no winner, just a sharing of interference that makes doing challenging work/study more onerous than ever.

A liberating leader will look to set the tone in terms of creating relationships based on empathy, compassion and passion. These relationships are energising, inspiring and fulfilling and go beyond the difficulties of today. They are based on trust, respect, warmth and a desire to understand the emotional needs of others.

4. Pain language: The language we use, the language we choose to use, has a powerful impact on how we feel about ourselves and our performance. Our outer dialogue has a very strong influence over our inner dialogue and can become a source of interference. Pain language like I can’t… I have to… and it’s never going to happen… feeds through into our thoughts, beliefs and even values. They can create or reinforce self-limiting beliefs. Monitoring this dialogue, this choice of explanatory style, and moving from pain to power language will have a transformative effect. Moving from “I can’t” to “I choose not to” or from “I have to” to “I want to” is both empowering and enriching. It links demonstrably with the other three points covered so far.

A liberating leader will aim to lead with a narrative and a way of interacting that is all about power language. She or he will set out to model power language for colleagues in all directions, not just the immediate team, and will develop relationships on this basis.

So, just imagine…  Imagine these four transformations:

From low inspiration to carrying inspiration with you,

From self-limiting beliefs to empowering beliefs,

From deficit relationships to liberating relationships,

From pain to power language.

Imagine the interference this would reduce and imagine the potential it would release, and imagine working with a liberating leader committed to these principles.

When working with staff a liberating leader knows –

That we are inspired by a dream not a plan,

The importance of removing interference so that people can thrive, and

The value of creating organisations that people enjoy.

Positive Leadership: Being the Best You Can Possibly Be

Positive Leadership: Belief

Positive Leadership: Belief

Positive Leadership: Becoming More Global

Most companies recognise the benefit of having leaders with international experience, but few offer the developmental opportunities to gain it. It’s up to you to take responsibility for improving your cross-cultural awareness.

Here’s how:

Strengthen relationships. Cultivate the contacts and friends you already have across national and cultural boundaries. Offer to assist them with something; what follows may help give you insight into unfamiliar environments.

Start locally. Social media has opened up new opportunities to connect from home. LinkedIn’s network statistics function, for instance, shows you the geographic reach of your network and where it’s growing fastest. Reach out to people in regions you want to learn more about.

Go. International travel is vitally important. When working abroad, make sure you leave the hotel — and stay an extra day or two to visit museums or attend cultural events.

Positive Leadership: Becoming More Global