Follow Through On What You Promise

Set a good example for your employees and follow through on everything you say you are going to do.

If you promise to get an employee an answer, get it for him or her. If you say you'll send a team member a report, do so. As the Nike campaign/slogan so aptly says, "Just Do It."

Too many leaders don't follow through. Perhaps they get busy. Perhaps they forget. However, following through is critical to keeping your team effective and efficient. And it's necessary for gaining respect from your employees.

Following through also means doing so in a timely fashion. If you take too long to follow through, it's as bad as not following through at all.

How To Get The Feedback You Need

Getting feedback is an important way to improve performance at work. But sometimes, it can be hard to seek out, and even harder to hear. 

“Feedback is all around you. Your job is to find it, both through asking directly and observing it,” says David L. Van Rooy, author of the book, Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

As today's guest post, Van Rooy offers these six tips for how to get the feedback you need to improve performance at work.

Guest Post By David L. Van Rooy

1.      Don’t forget to ask:  One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming things are going perfectly (until they make a catastrophic mistake). By not asking, you’re missing out on opportunities for deep feedback: the difficult, critical feedback that gives you constructive ways to improve.

2.      Make sure you listen:  Remember, getting feedback is about improving your performance, not turning it into a “you versus them” mentality. Your reaction is critical. Do not rationalize the feedback or explain it away. Do not blame others or get angry. If you react in any of those ways, you are less apt to get accurate feedback from that person again. All too often, people let feedback that is given with positive intentions spiral into a negative situation by reacting destructively.

3.      Ask clarifying questions:  If feedback surprises you, it may be a matter of miscommunication or misperception, and asking questions will give you a clearer picture. Staying clearheaded enough to ask questions and listen to specific suggestions will help you understand the full scope of the feedback and ways that you need to take action to improve.  

4.      Take time to digest:  This is especially important if the feedback is difficult to hear. Taking time to digest and process before you respond helps you react constructively. Say something like “Thank you for the feedback,” and schedule a later time to follow up. Then, you can come back with additional clarifying questions and a plan to change and improve.

5.      Don’t just look to bosses for feedback:  Some of the best and most insightful feedback will come from colleagues and direct reports. These are the people who get to see and interact with you the most. Instead of relying solely on guidance from a supervisor, ask colleagues and direct reports to provide feedback, because they may spot potential problems before you or your boss would notice. Seeking feedback from people in other departments lets you hear different perspectives from people focused on other sides of the business.

6.      Get feedback through observation:  Learning from your successes and failures is a kind of feedback that helps you change your course of action. Consider the example of a speaker who notices people looking confused or inattentive and uses that feedback to change his approach and recapture their attention.

How To Be A Healthy Leader

If you're like many leaders, you're "too busy" to exercise on a regular basis. And, you don't give yourself time to renew and refresh. Truth is, there are ways to fit exercise and healthful habits into your busy day that will pay off in dividends.

From Experience Life magazine, here are 10 tips for how to fit even just moments into your day (at work, on the road and at home) to help you become more healthful:

1. Make a plan to exercise. Include exercise times, even if they are just in 10-minute increments, on your calendar.
2. Find time to exercise and build on that time. Start off by walking for five minutes at lunch and add to that every few days until you've worked up to 30 minutes every few lunch hours.
3. Limit screen time. Set a timer for how long you'll watch TV or surf the Net. Then, use the time you aren't in front of a screen to exercise.
4. When you are watching TV, do squats, pushups, lunges, yoga poses and crunches.
5. Think positive. Psychologists suggest that you replace "I am too busy to work out" thinking with "I choose to make myself a priority."
6. Hold a "walking meeting" where your group walks together instead of sits in a meeting room. This can be particularly beneficial for brainstorming meetings.
7. Work out when you're traveling. Pack a jump rope. Do push-ups and crunches in your hotel room. Use the hotel's gym. Ask the hotel if they have guest passes or discounted rates at a nearby health club.
8. Exercise first thing in the morning. Don't let a long day end with "no time to exercise."
9. Wear a pedometer. By age 60, most people are down to about 4,500 steps a day. Your goal should be to walk 10,000 steps per day.

10. Negotiate a discounted rate for you and your employees at a gym near your office building. And then use the facility and encourage your employees to do the same.

I participate in 5K and 10K runs throughout the year. They give me a goal to continually improve my times. My entry fees go to support local nonprofit organizations. And, to prepare for each race, I have to schedule times during the preceding weeks to practice and exercise.

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.