How To Be A More Collaborative Leader

Edward M. Marshall's book, Transforming The Way We Work -- The Power Of The Collaborative Workplace, remains relevant today, more than a decade after Marshall wrote it.

Particularly useful is the book's section that teaches readers how to be a collaborative leader.

Marshall says that there are seven different, important roles and responsibilities of collaborative leaders when leading teams, and those leaders should select the appropriate style to meet the team's needs.

The seven roles are:

1. The leader as sponsor -- You provide strategic direction, boundaries and coaching for the team. You also monitor progress and ensure integrity in the team's operating processes.
2. The leader as facilitator -- You ensure that meetings, team dynamics, and interpersonal relationships function effectively. You also ensure internal coordination of activities among team members.
3. The leader as coach -- You provide support and guidance and you serve as a sounding board.
4. The leader as change agent/catalyst -- You hold team members accountable, make the unpopular decisions, energize the group to action and enable breakthroughs where possible.
5. The leader as healer -- You play the role of the mediator and serve as the catalyst to bring people together.
6. The leader as member -- You serve as part of the team, taking full responsibility for the success of the team and actively participate in the team's activities.
7. The leader as manager/administrator -- You serve in a traditional role of tackling the daily administrative responsibilities, processes, and systems essential to managing the boundaries within the larger organization or key stakeholders.

Within any collaborate workplace, leaders will find themselves fulfilling all seven of these roles at different times, and sometimes fulfilling a combination of the seven styles at the same time, while working with work groups and teams.

Four years after Marshall wrote, Transforming The Way We Work, he penned, Building Trust At the Speed Of Change. Marshall won an award for excellence in organization development from the American Society for Training and Development. He holds degrees from Claremont McKenna College, Syracuse University and the University of North Carolina. 

How To Be A Stronger Career Mentor

Author Paul Falcone offers the following great advice for how to become a stronger career mentor and coach by helping your subordinates grow and develop in their own careers.

• Encourage others to engage in random acts of kindness.
• Find creative ways of surprising your customers.
• Focus on making bad relationships good and good relationships better.
• Look for new ways of reinventing the workflow in light of your company's changing needs.
• Think relationship first, transaction second.
• Realize that people can tell more about you by the depth of your questions than by the quality of your statements.
• Separate the people from the problem.
• Always provide two solutions for each question you ask or suggestion you raise.
• Employ right-brain imagination, artistry, and intuition plus left-brain logic and planning.

And, one of my favorite pieces of advice from Falcone:

• Convert "yes...but:" to "yes...and" statements to acknowledge the speaker's point of view and to share additional insights.

Four Ways To Be A Humble Leader

From John Blakey's book, The Trusted Executive, here are these four tips from Jim Collins for how to be a humble leader:

1. Demonstrate a compelling modesty, shunning public adulation and never be boastful.
2. Act with quiet, calm determination and motivate others through inspired standards, not inspiring charisma.
3. Channel ambition into the company, not the self, and set up successors for even more greatness in the next generation.
4. Look in the mirror, not out of the window, when apportioning responsibility for poor performance.

Follow Your Dream

Seven Questions To Ask Each Team Member

High-functioning and effective teams can disagree and still produce excellent products and results. Team members can also disagree and still care about each other. And, they can challenge each other to think differently.

Best-selling leadership book authors Scott J. Allen and Mitchell Kusy recommend that leaders ask seven tough questions of their teams to help maximize their results.

Here are those questions to ask each team member:

1. What are some obstacles affecting this team?
2. What are opportunities we could take advantage of that we have been largely ignoring?
3. Where can you take greater ownership on this team?
4. Where have you let this team down?
5. Compared to other teams with which you are familiar, how are we doing?
6. When was the last time you complimented the team or one of its members?
7. How open are you to giving direct feedback to team members?

Time To Check In On Your 2016 New Year's Resolutions

You made it through the first half of 2016. So, now it's a good time to check on your progress with your New Year's Resolutions for how to be a better leader.

Hopefully, you're still doing great. So good that you're ready to add another one or two resolutions to your list to tackle during the remainder of the year. Here are some choices to choose from.

1. Don't micromanage
2. Don't be a bottleneck
3. Focus on outcomes, not minutiae
4. Build trust with your colleagues before a crisis comes
5. Assess your company's strengths and weaknesses at all times
6. Conduct annual risk reviews
7. Be courageous, quick and fair
8. Talk more about values more than rules
9. Reward how a performance is achieved and not only the performance
10. Constantly challenge your team to do better
11. Celebrate your employees' successes, not your own
12. Err on the side of taking action
13. Communicate clearly and often
14. Be visible
15. Eliminate the cause of a mistake
16. View every problem as an opportunity to grow
17. Summarize group consensus after each decision point during a meeting
18. Praise when compliments are earned
19. Be decisive
20. Say "thank you" and sincerely mean it
21. Send written thank you notes
22. Listen carefully and don't multi-task while listening
23. Teach something new to your team
24. Show respect for all team members
25. Follow through when you promise to do something
26. Allow prudent autonomy
27. Respond to questions quickly and fully
28. Return e-mails and phone calls promptly
29. Give credit where credit is due
30. Take an interest in your employees and their personal milestone events
31. Mix praise with constructive feedback for how to make improvement
32. Learn the names of your team members even if your team numbers in the hundreds
33. Foster mutual commitment
34. Admit your mistakes
35. Remove nonperformers
36. Give feedback in a timely manner and make it individualized and specific
37. Hire to complement, not to duplicate
38. Volunteer within your community and allow your employees to volunteer
39. Promote excellent customer service both internally and externally
40. Show trust
41. Encourage peer coaching
42. Encourage individualism and welcome input
43. Share third-party compliments about your employees with your employees
44. Be willing to change your decisions
45. Be a good role model
46. Be humble
47. Explain each person's relevance
48. End every meeting with a follow-up To Do list
49. Explain the process and the reason for the decisions you make
50. Read leadership books to learn
51. Set clear goals and objectives
52. Reward the doers
53. Know yourself
54. Use job descriptions
55. Encourage personal growth and promote training, mentoring and external education
56. Share bad news, not only good news
57. Start meetings on time
58. Discipline in private
59. Seek guidance when you don't have the answer
60. Tailor your motivation techniques
61. Support mentoring - both informal and formal mentoring
62. Don't interrupt
63. Ask questions to clarify
64. Don't delay tough conversations
65. Have an open door policy
66. Dig deep within your organization for ideas on how to improve processes, policies and procedures
67. Do annual written performance appraisals
68. Insist on realism
69. Explain how a change will impact employees' feelings before, during and after the change is implemented
70. Have face-to-face interaction as often as possible

How To Listen And Learn As A Leader

In John Baldoni's book, The Leader's Guide to Speaking with Presence, he provides these tips for listening as a leader and learning as a leader:

When Listening As A Leader:

• Look at people when they are speaking to you. Make eye contact.
• Ask open-ended questions, such as "Tell me about..." or "Could you explain this?"
• Consider the "what if" question:  "What if we looked at the situation like this?"
• Leverage the "why" question:  "Why do we do it this way?"
• Employ the "how" question:  "How can you do this?"

When Learning As A Leader:

• Reflect on what people have told you.
• Think about what you have not observed.  Are people holding back?  If so, why?
• Consider how you can implement what you have observed.
• Get back to people who have suggested ideas to you and thank them.
• Look for opportunities to collaborate with others.

For nearly 20 years, Baldoni has coached and consulted for a number of leading companies in a variety of different businesses, ranging from automotive and banking to computers, high technology, fast food, and packaged goods.