Category: No-Øs of Business

A strong company culture is essential for organizational success. It fosters a positive work environment and helps in attracting and retaining the best talent. But how can someone develop and maintain a strong company culture? In this blog post, we will explore the insights shared by Mike, a seasoned leader, on understanding culture, its importance, and how to build and maintain it in an organization.

Understanding Culture: Before diving into the process of building a strong company culture, it’s crucial to understand what culture is. Mike defines culture as the summation of the automatic thoughts and reactions that people have based on a set of core beliefs about their organization. It is the unwritten rules that define how employees relate to each other and the outside world.

Changing Core Beliefs: If you want to change the culture in an organization, you need to work on changing the core beliefs. Modifying these beliefs is not an easy task, as it involves rewiring people’s brains to perceive, think, and value things differently. However, it is doable over time. To change behaviors and culture, leaders should celebrate the aspects they like and quietly extinguish the ones they don’t without punishing them.

Celebrating Success and Telling Stories: Building a strong culture requires celebrating successes and sharing stories of employees who exhibit the desired behaviors. Telling stories of success and reinforcing positive actions helps establish the desired culture. On the other hand, punishing undesired behaviors can reinforce them by drawing attention to them. Letting those behaviors die quietly on the vine is the best way to extinguish them.

Developing and maintaining a strong company culture is a continuous process that requires a deep understanding of what culture is and how it influences an organization. As the leader of the team it’s also critical to understand your leadership point of view and how this impacts the direction and beliefs you are promoting. By changing core beliefs, celebrating success, and sharing stories of positive behaviors, leaders can foster a strong culture that contributes to the overall success of the organization. For more insights on leadership and company culture, explore the “A Leader Worth Following” development model and learn valuable lessons from experienced leaders.

Balancing Team and Organizational Needs: Navigating Post-COVID Leadership Challenges

As leaders, we often face the challenge of finding the right balance between the needs of our team and the needs of the organization. Ideally, the goals of the team should align with and contribute to the overall objectives of the organization. However, in the post-COVID landscape, unforeseen challenges such as supply chain disruptions, the need to relearn face-to-face communication, and resource scarcity have made this balancing act more complex.

During these trying times, it’s not unusual for conflicts to arise within teams due to increased competition for resources. As a leader, it’s essential to be able to identify the sources of conflict and to prioritize tasks effectively. By clearly communicating the importance of specific tasks and rallying the team around a common goal, you can help minimize internal friction and refocus the team’s efforts.

One key aspect of leadership is managing trade-offs within your team, which requires allocating resources and attention to tasks that best serve the organization’s objectives. This often involves stepping away from day-to-day tasks temporarily to concentrate on higher-priority projects. By doing so, you create an environment where your team members can collaborate and work together to achieve common goals, reducing competition for resources and fostering a more harmonious atmosphere.

Leadership is not always as glamorous as it may seem. In reality, it can be messy, and it often involves juggling various responsibilities and challenges, many of which may be beyond your control. Effective leadership means recognizing these challenges, adapting to them, and guiding your team through uncertain times.

To successfully balance the needs of your team and the organization, consider the following strategies:

Communicate clearly: Keep your team informed about the organization’s priorities and how their efforts contribute to achieving these objectives. Encourage open dialogue and address concerns as they arise.

Foster collaboration: Create opportunities for your team to work together on common goals, which can help alleviate competition for resources and strengthen relationships within the team.

Adapt to changing circumstances: Be prepared to adjust your approach as new challenges and opportunities arise. Demonstrate resilience and flexibility in your leadership, and your team will follow suit.

Focus on development: Invest in the professional growth of your team members, helping them acquire new skills and knowledge that will benefit both them and the organization in the long run.

If you’re looking for guidance on navigating the complexities of balancing team and organizational needs, particularly in a post-COVID world, don’t hesitate to reach out for a consultation. By learning about our “A Leader Worth Following” development model, you can acquire valuable insights and tools to help you lead your team effectively, even in the face of uncertainty. Invest in your leadership journey and unlock your team’s potential by embracing the challenges and opportunities that come with being A Leader Worth Following.

How do leaders create a space to give and receive constructive feedback?

At times it can be tricky to be a leader, especially if you want to grow and progress professionally. It can be easy to become defensive when you start to hear feedback or criticism about the way that you lead. As a culture, we often feel that we need to defend ourselves or explain our actions. I have found as leaders, one of our greatest strengths can be to listen to feedback with gratitude.

As leaders, we can gain feedback in so many ways. If you are a leader in an organization, an All-Team Survey can be a vital tool to help you keep your pulse on what is happening within the organization. This can be a powerful way to remove the “grit from the gears,” but only if you are committed to the action and follow-up required and are looking for more than a one-and-done survey. Team leaders can benefit from All Team Surveys as they compare and contrast their numbers to the overall numbers of the organization. All leaders can benefit from constructive feedback from subordinates, co-workers, industry contacts, as well as those they report to. This is commonly called a 360 Survey or evaluation. In my experience, this is essential for leading organizations as a whole or even larger teams. I also recommend that these be done with professionals who specialize in surveys, presenting and organizing the feedback, and helping the leaders effect and manage change.

I remember being in a boardroom after a meeting, and I was asking for feedback. I genuinely wanted to know what I could do better. What should I stop doing or even start doing? I wanted to get their perspective on how I could improve as their leader. As they began to give me feedback, I noticed that I started to get triggered and felt that I needed to defend myself from what they were saying. After a few minutes, one of the members of the meeting said that I was doing a great job, but I had asked for feedback and now was pushing back and not really hearing what they were saying.

To combat this type of defensiveness I immediately started thanking people for their feedback. I do this because when you come from a place of gratitude it is challenging to be defensive. It has been my experience that when receiving feedback, you have two options; you can thank them and put the feedback to work or make excuses and do nothing with it. If we aren’t using feedback to improve ourselves, we become stagnant leaders. Without feedback, you won’t know what areas of improvement you need to make to be a more well-rounded leader. As leaders, feedback is vital to our growth, and being able to seek, accept, and grow from feedback is an essential skill in becoming A Leader Worth Following.

How did you build the confidence to lead others, especially when you have made a mistake?

The very first experience I remember of having a real desire to be a leader goes back to being a Patrol Leader for Boy Scouts. At the time I felt that if I was in charge then there wouldn’t be mistakes during campouts or other activities. I had the desire to better the system and help it to be more cohesive. I ultimately wanted a more positive experience for all my friends which pushed me into my first leadership role.

One of the most significant leadership roles I have experienced was being a CEO for 22 years. It was my first and only CEO job and I can tell you that I am now completely different than when I started. My view of leadership has evolved, as well as my confidence level. I think that as we grow as individuals, we can sometimes face a bit of imposter syndrome where we feel like we aren’t enough; we might think we are not smart enough, in shape enough, or experienced enough to be qualified for a job. I would often ask myself why am I giving this person advice or how am I going to be able to help this person. What can I contribute to better this organization or the people I am working with?

I feel that this can be a manifestation of the human condition. If we are depleted, tired, stressed, or have a crisis in our lives then it’s as if we have a one-way negative filter and all that we experience and see is negative. We can also have a voice of inadequacy that begins to become louder and louder. One way to help turn down your voice of inadequacy and build your confidence up, is to take care of yourself. I mean take really good care of yourself. Otherwise, you could be spending your time trying to figure out ways to compensate or adapt to the negative self-talk inside your head telling you that you aren’t good enough. This can lead to dysfunctional behaviors or bad habits that can be used to cope with feeling inadequate in your leadership role.

If you shift away from your ego and toward serving people, you can start building a quiet confidence that is founded on experience and hard work instead of bravado confidence that may be more of a bluff to hide a lack of confidence. Don’t get me wrong, occasionally there are times when you will have to act like you know what you’re doing, even if you’re not sure. When you are working to serve people, you are also building the trust of those around you. By gaining their trust you make it easier for them to be able to follow your lead, even if you aren’t quite sure what you are doing.

Being a leader comes with a lot of responsibility. No one can know how to do everything. There will be things that no one will want to do and there may be times when there isn’t a right or wrong answer. It will take confidence to pick a path even if you aren’t sure what the best path is. There are many real-life problems that we don’t have the answer to which requires us to stick to our values, as well as put trust in those around us as we make decisions.

All leaders will make mistakes, but it is how those mistakes are handled that matters. The sign of a confident leader is the ability to acknowledge that you hoped for a different outcome, but you did the best with what you had. Someone that is going to fail over time as a leader is one that didn’t face their mistakes or take responsibility for them. Mistakes are painful things that help us learn, so let’s not miss the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and use those lessons on our journey to become A Leader Worth Following.

How does a leader know when to shift their leadership style?

In my early years as a leader, I assumed that my favorite style (delegating) was what everyone wanted and needed from me as a leader. It seemed like my success with this approach varied widely depending on the person and the situation I was in. I can recall times when delegating led to cohesion and amazing results, and other times it was painful for me, as well as the person I was delegating to, and would ultimately affect the organization I was working with.

When this happened, I would tell myself that a delegating style did not work for me, so I would pick from the three other styles, directing, coaching, or supporting, and use that approach. I would then experience the same thing. Sometimes it worked with amazing results and other times it was painful to everyone involved. I could not understand why this was happening. I knew something was wrong, and I questioned both myself and the people I was leading.

I wish that I could tell you that I figured this out early in my career, but unfortunately it was not until I was working on my Ken Blanchard Executive MBA at Grand Canyon University that I finally understood what was happening. It was in this program that I learned about Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership model. This model posits that leaders need to shift the kind of leadership they are giving based on the needs, experience, and tasks of those they lead.

As leaders, we need to be competent in being flexible in how we lead. We need to be able to use the leadership styles of directing, supporting, coaching, and delegating to be able to deliver to those we are leading. This will be dependent on the person, the situation, and the task at hand. Leaders do well when they can properly diagnose the type of leadership that is most helpful to the person and the situation. To do otherwise is inviting difficulty and conflict. It is a painful mismatch that consumes everyone’s emotional energy and feels like we are pouring “grit into the gears”

A leader who is providing directive leadership to someone who is a competent performer may come off as being bossy because they will have already mastered the set of skills at hand. While the same leader who provides directive leadership to someone doing a task for the first time will be a leader who is building trust with that person. A leader who tries to delegate to someone who is new at a task, or a job may feel like they are showing trust, but most likely that person needs more support and will feel inadequate to accomplish what has been given to them.

If you are experiencing, what feels like, random difficulties in leading others, perhaps you are not providing the best type of leadership for the person and the situation at hand. Consider the idea of being able to deliver the type of leadership that your team’s individual members need to problem solve and start to establish their independence as a Self Leader. Becoming A Leader Worth Following is all about being self-aware, having empathy, and understanding what it is like to be in your own wake. Understanding when to shift your leadership style to better serve those you are working with is an important step in becoming A Leader Worth Following.

Have you ever made mistakes as a leader? I know I have. Read on to learn about some of mine and how you might avoid them.

The worst mistake I made early on in leadership was that I felt I had to have constant control of the people and environment where I was working. And by having this type of control and people looking to me for all the solutions, I came off as thinking I might be the smartest one in the room. I had many years of experience across a range of topics, but thinking you might be the smartest person in the room is definitely a sign of ego kicking in.

If you are in a situation where everyone defers to the leader for solutions you will eventually start to come off as arrogant, and you miss the opportunity to work on becoming A Leader Worth Following. When you think that you already know everything, you don’t understand that different people need different types of leadership to bring out their best. If you try to be a one size fits all leader, you will miss opportunities for delegating, directing, coaching, and developing different people within your team.

Being A Leader Worth Following requires you to be able to adapt to your team, instead of them adapting to you. If you are self-focused on your own capabilities, you won’t see others’ potential. Your leadership style may need to change to better serve the people you work with. Adapting your leadership based on their needs is truly serving your people. Using a one-size fits all approach may result in misreading people and situations. Misreading is a common issue among leaders, as well, and one that I have also personally struggled with.

Misreading people, or situations, can be very difficult and create churn and grit in the gears. If we think that we can solve everyone’s problems, then as a leader we will become very frustrated because sometimes people don’t need ideas and suggestions to solve their problems. Rather a supportive leader to help them find their own path.

I think about my early years as a leader, and I remember people telling me about their problems and challenges and, I felt like I had a responsibility as their leader to fix everything. But that is not the case.

I believe that as a leader when people have problems, our first job is to help make sure that the problem that they are seeing is the real problem. Helping someone discover the core issue is helping them discover their own solutions. Helping others see problems and challenges more clearly will help you be more successful as a leader.

If as the leader you are solving the problem for them and telling them what to do then the people you work with will only be as good as you and your solutions, so you end up eroding their autonomy away. Autonomy or competence is an important need that we all strive to have.

My friend Susan Fowler is a master of Self-Determination Theory and an author of some of my favorite leadership books. She has researched the science behind how to optimally motivate people. Helping people maintain and grow their autonomy, and the feeling of competence is one way to help them achieve lasting and high-quality motivation. Being a leader that helps people grow and learn to find their own solutions while helping enhance their motivational outlook is one aspect of becoming A Leader Worth Following.