I Never Want To Hear You Say ' I Can't Do It'

Legendary tennis coach Nick Bollettieri has coached ten world #1 tennis players including Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Jelena Jankovic, Mary Pierce, Jim Courier and many more. 

I Never Want To Hear You Say ' I Can't Do It'

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership refers to an emphasis on what elevates individuals and organisations (in addition to what challenges them), what goes right in organisations (in addition to what goes wrong), what is life-giving (in addition to what is problematic or life-depleting), what is experienced as good (in addition to what is objectionable), what is extraordinary (in addition to what is merely effective), and what is inspiring (in addition to what is difficult or arduous).

Positive Leadership

A Winner's Dream!

A Winner's Dream!

The Capacities of Great Leaders

1. Great leaders recognise strengths in us that we don't always yet fully see in ourselves.

2. Rather than simply trying to get more out of us, great leaders seek to understand and meet our needs, above all a compelling mission beyond our immediate self-interest, or theirs.

3. Great leaders take the time to clearly define what success looks like, and then empower and trust us to figure out the best way to achieve it.

4. The best of all leaders — a tiny fraction — have the capacity to embrace their own opposites, most notably vulnerability alongside strength, and confidence balanced by humility.

For more, see: http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/10/the-four-capacities-every-grea.html

The Capacities of Great Leaders

Excellence & Success

'There are many people, particularly in sports, who think that success and excellence are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Excellence is something that is lasting and dependable and largely within a person’s control. In contrast, success is perishable and is often outside our control. If you strive for excellence, you will probably be successful eventually. People who put excellence in the first place have the patience to end up with success. An additional burden for the victim of the success mentality is that he is threatened by the success of others and he resents real excellence. In contrast, the person that is fascinated by quality is excited when he sees it in others.'

Joe Paterno, Head Football Coach at Penn State University

Excellence & Success

Performance and Fulfillment

In business you need high performance. In life, you need a sense of fulfillment. In leadership you need both. 

Performance is external. Fulfillment is internal. Performance comes from achievment of something beyond yourself, whilst fulfillment emerges and grows from within - when your achievements are congruent with a consciously held purpose and the values that you choose to define your character.

                           

Performance requires rules and discipline to control some 'part' of your life. Fulfillment is the freedom to choose your response without manipulation.

Performance is to prove something. It requires finite measurement. Without proof, there would be no performance.

Fulfillment means you dont need to prove anything. Fulfillment is endless and unmeasurable. It flows from a sense of completeness. When your whole life environment feels fully integrated, you don't need more of anything.

Performance requires you to consume something - resources, time, your skills or energy. In order to achieve a certain performance you have to spend something. Fulfillment doesn’t need anything. It creates something good out of the current state, whatever that is. It is never expensive. It gives you something instead of taking something away.

Effective leadership flows from inside out, not from outside in. Effective leaders integrate performance and fulfillment, not choose between them. Success in business requires high performance. Success in life requires a sense of fulfillment.

In leadership, you need both together.

Performance and Fulfillment

Change the Process, Change the Result

"If we find success, it’s all about sustaining it.  And if we are struggling, it’s all about responding."  Trevor Moawad, Director of IMG Performance Institute, explains the main principle about adopting the correct attitude to affect the performance and being able to talk athletes into winning.

Change the Process, Change the Result

Projecting a Leadership Presence

To be a successful leader - to truly influence outcomes and inspire others - it is paramount that you project a leadership presence on a daily basis.  Leaders gain the confidence of others by showing that they are in control of themselves and their immediate environment.  Your leadership presence is not a facade that you create.  It is your actual belief in your abilities, which is expressed through your words, deeds, and behaviours.

Here are a few simple - though often overlooked - ways that you can project your leadership presence:

Dress the part.  While you do not need to spend a fortune to ensure that you are wearing the latest fashion, you do need to make sure that your outward appearance is neat and appropriate to the standards set by your company.  Looking as if you just rolled out of bed is no way to inspire the confidence of others.

Clean up your workspace.  Your immediate environment says a lot about you.  Take a look at your desk.  Does it project a sense of organisation and competence?  Or, does it scream dishevelled mess?  Even worse, does it communicate to your colleagues that you have just given up?

Slow down!  Constantly rushing from one meeting to another and arriving exasperated projects to others that you are not in control of your own schedule.  Being over-committed does not show others how important you are, it shows that you cannot competently keep up with your current demands.

Control those emotions.  Flying off the handle or breaking down in tears each time something does not go your way gives others the impression that you cannot be counted on during the difficult times - when leaders are needed the most.

As a leader, colleagues look to you to provide the example to which they aspire.  Start setting the best leadership example today by projecting a leadership presence and see just how influential you can become!

Projecting a Leadership Presence

Decision Making at GE

Leadership by fiat when done in moderation can drive change and set a course. 

“I think that if you run a big company, you’ve got to four or five times a year, just say, ‘Hey team, look, here’s where we’re going’. If you do it 10 times, nobody wants to work for you. If you do it zero times, you have anarchy.” 

Jeff Immelt, CEO, General Electric

Decision Making at GE

Decision Making in a Crisis

By taking your time, evaluating the facts clearly and keeping the bigger picture in mind small business owners can make good business decisions.

In the current environment many of the traditional rules of business seem to have been changed. Yet we still have to make decisions, often quickly. Here are some thoughts on how you can make effective decisions in this challenging environment:

1. Get as much information as you can

Unless a decision is a ‘snap' one, you have time to get more information. Use this. Information isn't just ‘facts' about market size etc. Often the most important information about a decision is how key individuals are going to react to it. Can you sound as many people out as possible? Sometimes, of course, you can't do so directly, but is there any way you can get a feel for how they are going to react?

2. Plan your decision

Making a decision is a process, not something that happens in a moment. Plan the information gathering; give yourself a space to decide and make a plan for implementation.

3. Don't make decisions quicker than you need to in order to appear ‘decisive'

Very often people are pressurising you into a making a quick decision, because a quick answer suits them, not you. So instead, buy time - you almost always have more time than you think, and (unless you drag your feet excessively) deals usually get better if you wait a bit.

4. Keep the big picture in mind

It's easy to get led astray by short-term considerations. Sit back and ask yourself what the decision is ‘in service of'. What are your key values and long-term aims?

5. Know and clearly state what the ‘deal breakers' are

The old sales distinction between ‘must haves' and ‘would like to haves' comes in very handy when considering the consequences of various courses of action.

6. Take time out to make a decision

Give yourself time to marshal all the facts and devote your entire attention to the decision in hand. If you can, then go for a walk, and when you do so, don't force your mind to concentrate on the decision; let your unconscious mind turn the matter over. Then decide. But don't tell anyone.

7. Sleep on it

Live with the ‘trial decision' you made above for at least a night. This is an old piece of wisdom that is still of huge value in today's fast-moving and turbulent world.

8. Give yourself ‘wiggle room' - nothing ever works out exactly as expected

This is of particular importance in the current environment, when things seem to be changing so fast. This runs in the face of much comment on decision making; that praises people who force through unpopular decisions as ‘visionaries'. Actually, the visionaries are the ones who force through unpopular decisions that turn out to be right. If the decision is wrong, they get called other names. The best decision makers implement their decisions gently, in the light of changing circumstances. They are prepared to change tack if the world around the decision changes.

9. Make sure there is an escape route if things go really wrong

This takes the point above further. Sometimes decisions, however well made at the time, just turn out to be wrong. Then the role of the good leader is to admit the fact, accept the new circumstances and make a new decision. Sometimes it will be a simple reversal; more often a hybrid of the old and new.

10. Follow your intuition

If your head says yes but your gut feeling says no - it's wrong!

Decision Making in a Crisis

How to Treat People

Don't talk to all your staff or all your clients/customers the same way, because they're not the same.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition posits that there are five stages people go through:

1. Novice

--wants to be given a manual, told what to do, with no decisions possible.

2. Advanced beginner

--needs a bit of freedom, but is unable to quickly describe a hierarchy of which parts are more important than others.

3. Competent

--wants the ability to make plans, create routines and choose among activities.

4. Proficient

--the more freedom you offer, the more you expect, the more you'll get.

5. Expert

--writes the manual, doesn't follow it.

If you treat an expert like a novice, you'll fail.

How to Treat People

The Snowstorm Study: A Classic Study of Employee Commitment

With the UK gripped in the midst of another winter freeze, consider this fascinating piece of research!

Behavioural scientists do many studies, including controlled experiments, which entail massive advanced planning. But some of the most interesting studies happen when something strange or unplanned unfolds, and the researcher capitalises on serendipity. Consider a little study done in the late 1970’s by industrial psychologist Frank J. Smith, who had collected employee attitude data from about 3000 employees at Sears’ headquarters in Chicago. Smith found that employee attitudes towards their jobs and their supervisors weren’t especially useful predictors of which employees were absent from work UNTIL the day a crippling snowstorm hit. Employees had a good excuse to stay home, so they had considerable discretion over whether to make the tough trip in or not. That day, employees who were more satisfied with their supervision and other parts of their jobs were far more likely to make the trip in than those who were dissatisfied.  In particular, whether or not they were satisfied with their supervision was among the strongest predictors of attendance.

Since then, many other researchers have shown that when people feel mistreated and dissatisfied with their jobs, they are unwilling to expend “discretionary effort.”  It makes sense.  When you are stuck working for, or with, people you don’t admire, you don’t go out of your way to help. But when you  admire your bosses and peers, you will go to extreme lengths to help –- and it is clear that most people feel and act the same way.

For more, see :http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/work-matters/201011/the-snowstorm-study-classic-study-employee-commitment

The Snowstorm Study: A Classic Study of Employee Commitment

Chinese, Indian Workers Give Bosses Top Marks

Workers in Japan gave their bosses low marks while managers in China and India won kudos in a recent survey. Only 35% of employees in Japan rated their company's senior management highly on a set of five attributes—such as their commitment to high-quality products and their people management skills. Globally, 55% of employees rated their senior managers highly, and in the U.S., 56% of employees did.

The survey was conducted earlier this year by the Kenexa Research Institute, and included 29,000 respondents from companies with at least 100 workers.

Separately, Kenexa's research has found that employees at higher-performing companies tend to rate their leaders more highly than employees at lower-performing companies do. In the U.S., Americans gave the highest scores to senior managers' commitment to high quality products and services, and the lowest marks to the confidence they inspired. Among industries, only 46% of government workers believed that their senior managers were effective, according to the report. In contrast, 64% of workers in high-tech manufacturing rated them highly.

For more, see: https://www.kenexa.com/KenexaResearchInstitute

Chinese, Indian Workers Give Bosses Top Marks

Making Choices

Life provides all of us with a series of choices. The choices we make determine how successful we are.  

When you acknowledge that you and only you are responsible and accountable for the choices you make, and when you refuse to blame others for the choices you have made, you have in your hands the blueprint for success. When you allow others to choose your path so that you can then blame someone else when things don’t go your way, you are fooling no one and cheating no one but yourself.  When you accept the fact that you are in your present condition, good or bad, because of the choices you have made, you will then find yourself capable of changing your situation by making better choices.  No one but you determines your success in life. Making the right choices paves your way.

Think about all of the sports fans, who love watching successful coaches lead their teams, cheering them on when they win, exhorting them when the game is close, or even booing them when they fail, not living up to expectations. How many of these fans, fans who expect nothing less than excellence from their favourite teams, have the same high expectations for their occupational teams, ie, their work or business teams? 

High achievement requires disciplined thinking, thus the goal setting, personal responsibility and work ethic.  But, why is it that many of these same fans, fans that pay good money to see excellence during the sporting event, will, in their own professional lives, live with mediocrity, seeming to ignore the success standards and principles that they demand of their favourite sports teams?  Have you ever thought about this paradox?   

Why do fans, who love excellence in competitive sports, enough to pay for the right to experience it real time, not apply the same excellence in their own competitive professions, even though others are paying for the right to experience it real time.  Don’t the customers or employers have the same right to witness excellence in the workplace that fans at the sporting event have?  Imagine the quality of products and services across the world, if everyone took their professional excellence, as seriously, as they did their professional sports.

Making Choices

Keep Your Team Smiling

We once had a colleague ask how we trained our employees to smile. We told him we didn’t. We hired the people who smiled during the interview, and then told them to just keep smiling when they worked.

Now here’s the story about what good managers can do to keep employees smiling.

Welcome employees — everyday!

Try to imagine being a new employee (again) for a day and realise what that’s like. Joining a new group of people or a new company is usually confusing and full of anxiety. Most of us don’t like change and this represents one of life’s bigger changes.

• Give them a warm initial welcome.
• Provide lots of information and printed materials. Make sure the answers to all their questions are easy to find and understand. Create FAQs about everything.
• Say “good bye” and “thank you” when you’re done, always.
• Let them take stuff with them, to read and absorb it when they can, and have it when and how and where they need it.

Follow the Golden Rule

Treating others the way you want to be treated is just plain good sense. It’s what we all learned growing up and there’s no reason not to practice this at work, everyday, in every way:

• Set high standards for yourself and make sure you apply those standards to them.
• You like getting as much information, in a friendly and relaxed environment, as you can get — so will they.
• You want to be treated with respect and sensitivity — so will they.
• You want to know how you’re doing and what’s really going on — so will they.
• You want to feel comfortable — so will they.
• You’ll want answers to your questions — so will they.

Explain “why”

Adults like to understand the big picture, to see how things fit together with everything else, to feel like they matter, to know that there’s a plan, to have a say in what’s going on. You can do all of that if you are always prepared to explain “why” you’re doing or asking something.

• Be attentive, communicate well, articulate your thoughts understandably, listen to questions about what you just said, resolve conflicts and confusion, and respond appropriately — all the things effective managers are supposed to do that employees appreciate.
• And if they appreciate you, they’ll follow you.
• Remember: “People don’t care what you ask them to do as long as they know you care”.

Catch people doing things right

If you’ve hired the right people, told them in simple terms what you need them to do, trained them well and explained “why” – then get out of the way and let them do what they do.

• If they meet or exceed your expectations, let them know! How often have you been in the situation where you’re doing what’s expected and nobody says anything? It’s disheartening.
• Decide what you can and should you do to recognise those efforts (after all, isn’t that what you asked them to do?
• Never ignore the behaviours you want repeated — start telling the people who meet or exceed your expectations how good they are and how much you appreciate their efforts.

Ask questions and really listen to the answers

The best people to ask about customer needs and preferences are your employees. They’re also the best ones to ask how you and your company can be better. They’re out there on the front line, so they should know.

• Don’t say you don’t trust them. You hired them, so now you need to listen to them and use their experience to make things as good as they need to be.
• Give them the tools they need to do what’s expected — everybody’s okay with doing more with less; most won’t put up with doing it with nothing.

Be fair

• Forget consistent — unless two separate circumstances are identical, consistency is far less important than fairness.
• “Play the face.” It means you look someone in the eye and use your experience, common sense and judgement to do what’s right. In the end, that’s all anyone asks for and can expect. Done right, this promotes trust and respect.

Sounds like a lot, but it’s not! In reality it’s just about following the Golden Rule,  and if people feel like you are — every day and in every way — they’ll smile. 

Keep Your Team Smiling

Winning Breeds Winning

An appreciation of legendary basketball coach John Wooden who died earlier this year.

Winning Breeds Winning

Positive Leadership and Elite Sport

Positive Leadership Limited helps leaders throughout an organisation excel under pressure. Our advice assists clients solve critical strategic issues, accelerate growth and enhance financial performance. We equip leaders at all levels with the values, confidence and practical skills necessary to succeed and win consistently in a highly competitive environment.  

The Values of Positive Leadership™ are the keys to unlocking the strategy for delivering high performance and optimum results under pressure. We draw extensively on thought leadership from international business and elite sport in our consulting work. 

For more information on how our advice might help you and your team excel under pressure, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership and Elite Sport

Creating Meaningful Corporate Values

Andrew Cosslett has been Chief Executive of IHG since February 2005. IHG is the World’s largest hotel company operating over 4,100 hotels under brands such as Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and InterContinental. 

Here he talks about how to turn your front-line into raving fans of your corporate values and why bringing passion into the business is so important for all winning organisations. Don't just talk about your values, live them!

Creating Meaningful Corporate Values

Servant Leadership In the Workplace

An exceptional recent study of 815 employees and 123 supervisors published in the Journal of Applied Psychology makes a very strong argument for the value of servant leadership at work. 

The authors found that the practice of servant leadership had important implications for both individuals and the groups they worked in. The study found that servant leadership enhanced both the self-efficacy and the commitment to the supervisor of the individual employee. At the group level, servant leadership lead to employees’ perception that they were treated fairly (justice climate) and the shared perception customer service was expected, supported, and rewarded (positive service climate). These individual and group effects combined to produce a significant impact on the organisational citizenship behaviour of individual employees.

Employees that are good organisational citizens go above and beyond their formal job descriptions. If everyone in an organisation only did what was required of them, the organisation would be mediocre at best. Organisational excellence requires a critical mass of employees doing more than what is officially recognised and rewarded. The extant research has demonstrated organisational citizenship behaviour is strongly associated with employee task performance, organisational productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Servant Leadership In the Workplace

Asking the Right Questions

Today, we would like to suggest a way to ask questions that will help you change your focus from problems to solutions.

If you want to make your communications as effective as possible, and if you're interested in finding solutions to problems rather than becoming bogged down in them, we have a suggestion that will help. If you ask the right questions, you can direct your communications to get answers that are genuinely helpful.

For example, if you ask someone, “What's wrong?” you will get an answer - often a long one - which will focus on the problem. But if you ask, “What do you want?” or “How would you like to change things,” you have redirected the conversation from the problem to the solution.

In every situation, no matter how dark or dismal, there is a desirable outcome. You can convince people, including yourself, to focus on that outcome, by avoiding questions that ask “why” and choosing “how” or “what” questions instead.

So, instead of asking your boss why you didn’t get a raise, ask him, or her, what you need to do in order to justify a salary increase. And, instead of demanding from your employees why they didn’t make the sale, ask them what they can do differently so they will be certain to make the next one.

Asking the Right Questions

How Companies Can Develop Critical Thinkers and Creative Leaders

This article was written by Col. Bernard Banks, a faculty member in the Department of Behavioural Sciences & Leadership at West Point and a Colonel in the United States Army.

'Today's leaders are continually cajoled to act as "outside-the-box" thinkers. Such pronouncements give the impression the only sound solutions are ones never previously conceived. However, what industry and the military really strive to produce are leaders possessing strong critical and creative thinking skills. Both implicitly eschew the notion that a box even exists. What can industry learn from the military about how to advance the development of such leaders? One tangible example is how to construct and execute experiential training while continuing to meet the needs of customers and stakeholders.

Today's organisations operate in what the U.S. Army War College defines as a VUCA environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are constant realities in the 21st century. The military seeks to prepare for the challenges it will inevitably face by crafting realistic training scenarios and routinely integrating such activities into its ongoing operations. The goal is not to teach them what to think, but to enhance their ability to think critically and creatively about the myriad of contingencies posed by a fluid environment — in essence to teach them how to think.

In industry, 90% of time is typically devoted to executing business actions, and less than 10% is allocated for increasing organisational and individual capabilities through training. The military, on the other hand, spends as much time training as it does executing — even in the midst of high stress/high risk operations. A unit in Afghanistan or Iraq will not suspend its experiential training program while involved in combat operations, because its ability to cogently and creatively address future challenges is enhanced by an enduring commitment to improving people's competence and adaptability through experiential exercises, as well as actual experiences. But the real lesson for industry leaders is not simply that training is important. What's really valuable is how the military crafts its training opportunities.

The Army defines leadership as both accomplishing the mission and improving the organisation. Permanently improving the organisation requires the development of its human capital. The military believes you substantively improve people by improving their ability to adroitly address challenges in their environment. Therefore, we do not seek to confine people's thinking by restricting the solutions available to them, unless the proposed action violates any of these criteria: is it immoral, unsafe, unethical, or illegal?

In order to have people wrestle with what it takes to conceive of action plans where the aforementioned criteria constitute their only boundaries, the military structures its experiential training activities with wide parameters. Events are constructed to reflect ambiguity in the operating environment (while also targeting specific organisation needs). Leaders are responsible for setting the conditions in every training event and resourcing them appropriately, as well as for reminding participants throughout the exercises that there are a myriad of potentially elegant solutions to each ill-defined challenge.

Two other things are important to take away from the military practice of engaging in routine experiential training. First, feedback is crucial. The military practice of conducting intermediate and final after-action reviews (AARs) — in which all participants examine the planning, preparation, execution, and follow-up of any significant organizational initiative — fosters a learning culture. Second, coaching is required to translate feedback into behavioural changes. Research has demonstrated that feedback without coaching  rarely results in behavioural changes. So, all leaders must develop their capacity to coach others. Reflection and dialog lie at the heart of development. Experiential training creates the impetus for both to occur.

If you wait for the right time to train it'll rarely occur. Today is the opportunity to prepare for tomorrow, regardless of how much else is going on.'

For more, see: http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2010/10/how-companies-can-develop-crit.html

How Companies Can Develop Critical Thinkers and Creative Leaders

Persistence Wins!

Persistence. 

You must have more than your fair share to succeed. There's plenty of advice out there about knowing when to give up!

Tom Peters' advice? Hold out longer than anyone thinks is wise.

Persistence Wins!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all followers of the Positive Leadership Blog and especially to all our friends in the USA. 

Please remember at this special time that everyone we interact with is a chance to create a remarkable experience.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Aligning Behaviour Around Values

Leaders intent on optimising performance and results need to recognise the importance of aligning everyone around a single set of core leadership values; defined as the behaviours and activities essential to the organisation's success. 

Here are four steps to align behaviours with core leadership values:

1) Start by listing your core leadership values and related performance measures.

2) Next brainstorm the associated behaviours that support these core leadership values.

3) Share this list with other people in the organszation and solicit their feedback.

4) Incorporate the core leadership behaviours into your performance appraisals and assessments.

This process can be done regularly and will result in an organisation whose behaviours are well aligned around its core leadership values.

For more on the Values of Positive Leadership™ and how our approach of building strategy around these values can help maximise profitability, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Aligning Behaviour Around Values