Quick Brainstorming Activities

According to Brian Cole Miller in his book, Quick Brainstorming Activities For Busy Managers, there are 50 ways to improve your brainstorming at your company or in your organization.

My favorite is the Paper Swap brainstorming activity:

• A brainstorming technique where participants write their input on separate pieces of paper; then they swap papers and continue to add input.

Miller provides 49 other techniques in his book (released by Amacom last month), all of which take less than 15 minutes to complete.

For all brainstorming sessions, Miller reminds leaders that you should:

• Focus on quantity not quality
• Don't allow criticism
• Encourage wild ideas
• Combine ideas for more ideas

Miller also suggests that the best starting question for a brainstorming session is a Focus Question -- one that:

• Uses the participants' own language
• Is personal to the participants and not the organization
• Evokes responses with imagery

This is a must-read book for any manager who needs to effectively lead brainstorming sessions.

How To Be A Synergist To Lead Your Team To Predictable Success

Why do so many teams and groups fail to perform--achieving compromise at best and gridlock at worst?

According to best-selling author Les McKeown, the problem lays in conflicting personality types:

• the Visionary with big ideas and little execution.
• the Processor who insists on putting every detail through a system, slowing things. down
• the Operator who just wants to end the meeting and get back to the "real work."

It takes a Synergist, says McKeown to end the gridlock. A Synergist, who can take all three--the bold dreamers, the pragmatic realists, and the systems designers--and knit them together into a dynamic, well rounded team.

"Most importantly, the Synergist is a role anyone can learn," explains McKeown.
And, he teaches that skill set in his new book, The Synergist -- How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success.

A Synergist:

• sets their personal interests below the best interests of the enterprise as a whole.
• sees the big picture of what the team or group is there to do and works tirelessly to make that happen, without manipulating the process or its outcome to their own personal advantage.

According to Tom Rath, author of Strengthsfinder 2.0, How Full is Your Bucket, "The Synergist speaks directly to the single greatest challenge leadership teams face today: a lack of relationship and communication."

• In Part 1 of The Synergist, you'll learn about the root cause as to why most groups and teams are ineffective and fail to produce their best results.
• In Part 2 you will see how highly effective groups and teams subconsciously and intuitively address that root cause.
• And, finally, in Part 3, McKeown provides you the tools and techniques, as the Synergist, to consciously and in an accelerated and structured way bring success to the group.

McKeown is also the author of, Predictable Success, which hit the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-seller lists in 2010.

Six Questions To Ask As A Superboss

From Sydney Finkelstein's book, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, comes these great questions you should routinely ask yourself as a leader:

1. Have you answered the "why do we exist" question for your team? Could all of your team members share this answer with you right now?
2. Do you have people on your team who have followed non-traditional paths to their jobs, or do you find yourself attracted to cookie-cutter backgrounds?
3. Are people on your team energized to come to work in the morning? How would you even know?
4. Are you inspiring people to believe that they can achieve great things?
5. Are you removing the bureaucratic barriers and hierarchy that get in the way of meaningful interaction and getting the job done?
6. How often do you actively teach people how to do something, as opposed to just telling  people what to do?

How To Be A Catalyst Leader

"Catalyst leaders represent the gold standard -- energetic, supportive, forward-thinking mentors who spark action in others," explain Tacy M. Byham and Richard S. Wellins, authors of the new book, Your First Leadership Job -- How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others.

More specifically, the authors share that a catalyst leader:

• Asks and listens
• Fosters innovation
• Provides balanced feedback
• Builds trust
• Focuses on people's potential
• Collaborates and networks
• Empowers others
• Encourages development
• Energizes and mobilizes
• Aligns actions with strategy

In the book, you'll learn how catalyst leaders bring out the best in people. They do that by, among other actions, by:

• Encouraging the person to try new things.
• Giving the person input on things that affect him/her.
• Allowing the person to safely learn through failure, so they can take appropriate risks.
• Taking the time to find out what motivates the person.

The authors also cover the following topics in the book:

• How to build trust and ownership
• How to be authentic
• How to delegate 
• How to nurture business relationships
• How to become an adviser

Your First Leadership Job is certainly a good book for a first-time leader, but it's also equally relevant for any leader who wants to become that gold standard catalyst leader.

How To Identify A Leader During An Interview

The next time you are interviewing a candidate and you want to access their leadership skills, consider asking the candidate these questions:

• What personal qualities define you as a leader?  Describe a situation when these qualities helped you lead others.
• Give an example of when you demonstrated good leadership.
• What is the toughest group from which you've had to get cooperation?
• Have you ever had difficulty getting others to accept your ideas?  What was your approach?  Did it work?
• Describe a situation in which you had to change your leadership style to achieve the goal?
• One leadership skill is the ability to accommodate different views in the workplace, regardless of what they are.  What have you done to foster a wide number of views in your work environment?

Thanks to Sharon Armstrong, author of The Essential HR Handbook, for these helpful questions!

Eight Good Company Culture Guidelines

"The clearer your company culture, the less likely it will be hijacked by the weaker personalities in your team," explains Mary Christensen, author of the book, Be A Network Marketing Leader. "A few guidelines will ensure a level playing field for all team members as they pursue their individual goals."

Christensen's recommended eight guidelines are:

1. We respect each other.
2. We support each other.
3. We appreciate everyone's contribution.
4. We're always professional.
5. We operate in a spirit of fun and friendship.
6. We keep it positive.
7. We're a gossip-free zone.
8. We deal with our disagreements in private.

How To Ask More And The Power Of Questions

"Questions help us break down barriers, discover secrets, solve puzzles, and imagine new ways of doing things, But few of us know how to question in a methodical way," explains Frank Sesno, Emmy-award-winning journalist, and author of the forthcoming book, Ask More.

Set to publish in January 2017, Sesno's book teaches readers how the power of questions:

• Opens doors
• Uncovers Solutions
• Sparks Change

More specifically, he reveals:

• The power and payoff of targeted diagnostic questions.
• How strategic questions can ease the hardest decisions and support triumphant outcomes.
• How and when to use empathy questions.
• How asking creativity questions help to get people to imagine, set their sights high and soar above failure.

And, "when a leader fails to know where he/she is going, refuses to listen to what he/she doesn't want to hear, or relies on faulty information, bad things happen," adds Sesno.

Frank Sesno

Sesno also shares that some questions work best when they don't end in a question mark. Examples are:

• Tell me more
• Explain that to me
• Go on

Sesno is a former CNN anchor, White House correspondent, and Washington bureau chief, and is now the director of School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University.

Thank you to the book publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.