Tag: Influence

Goals, Humility, Investing, Potential, Team Building, teams, Uncategorized

True Leadership

True leadership is sacrifice, doing the right thing when you are tired, worn out and just ready to go home.  That is true leadership and I saw it today!  This lovely face is Zzora1

She joined our family 2 weeks ago.  She is a rescue 15/16/17 (her age is up for grabs) OTTB.  Which means she’s been mistreated was bred to go fast and isn’t sure who she is.  So yea we adopted her because that is what we do.  I’ve been teaching her manners on the ground. Today she decided that she didn’t like something, a smell a sound, pressure, you name it. She backed all the way down the stalls until she had backed into a corner where finally stopped. I yelled for help from our trainer who promptly came running along with one of the guys who takes horses in and out.  (Side note you can tell they don’t like this horse because of her issues)

My trainer (who is amazing) was at a show for the last 4 days.  Showing horses, sleeping in a hotel, etc.  She had just gotten back when we pulled in and I am sure she was tired, hot, dirty and really ready to go home. Instead she spent 15 minutes with my crazy horse helping her get her brain back.  Did she have to do this? Nope she could of said put her back in her stall I will work with her.  Instead she got into the arena with us and worked with Zora.  She helped me navigate that moment and several after.

You see leaders know that their leadership isn’t on a clock, that even if they are tired, or hot or sick or just not into it that they still have to lead.  And in that moment they don’t stop to think about it they just do!

Leaders do where others wait, or think or stop.  Super loud shoutout to my trainer who just did today and who made me feel like I wasn’t alone or stupid or anything else…

And to those of you who lead, we see you!  You aren’t alone!  And thank you!!

Leadership, Potential, Team Building, teams, Uncategorized

Catching the Vision

As I listen to my companies Town Hall Meeting I am wondering as lower level managers how do we see that our team is excited about the information provided.  I find find myself asking the question, is my team excited about the numbers provided?

When your company sees an increase in revenue how do you relate that to your team? Do they care that the company is making money?  Should they be?  I mean the honest answer is DUH! Of course they should be but it can be hard for them to understand how all of this information effects them!

As leaders it is our job to see that our team understands how what they do is impacting this!  For example if you are in customer service it’s easy to relate what you do to the bottom line.  You make the customers happy they come back and spend more money.  However, how does your admin staff or even the support staff relate this to what they do?

It’s your job as the leader to make sure they know what they do directly impacts this bottom line!! For example, your admin person orders lunch for the project management team.  This means that they don’t have to go out and they are happy because they got a free lunch.  This translates to them providing excellent service to the customer, which translates to better customer service.

As leaders it’s also important to understand the numbers ourselves. Do you know what the revenue is for your company? Do you know how this effects your organization?  This is where knowing your team becomes very important.  I am not personally driven by bottom line numbers, however there was a person on my team who was.  He wanted to know what these numbers meant.  That meant that I had to know the numbers and could explain them.

Don’t underestimate what might motivate your team, and make sure they see how their job is critical to the organization.  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again EVERYONE on the team is important.  From the person who answers the phone to the CEO and as leaders it is our job to make sure everybody knows that!

Leadership, Potential, Team Building, teams, Uncategorized

Learned Helplessness

Reading social media today I came across an article on Learned Helplessness.  You need to google it to get a full understanding however it really struck me how this might happen to our teams.

The article I read was about horses and how they often begin to ignore pain and other stressors simply because they can’t get away.

As leaders we often want our teams to work a certain way.  We want to push them into a behavior that makes sense to us, the leader!  We either can’t or don’t want to deal with behavior that seems outside of our norm.

We punish, belittle, even use sarcasm to get behavior we want.  By doing this we often make our team become numb to their own pain.  Now there are behaviors that do not go well when working with a team, however by using punishment we often get to our results faster and with little work on our part!

Take the horse for example, Duke doesn’t like pressure.  (Pressure for horses means bad things and they react to that pressure). Horses also don’t like things they can’t process.  Noises, shifts in their vision all cause them to spook.  It is our job to get the horse to trust us to keep them safe.  We do this by exposing them to these pressures and noises and by showing them that we are keeping them safe.  We want them to trust us!  However, some people use other methods to train their horses.  They punish them, they leave them tied tightly to force the spook out of them. Horses who are trained this way learn they can’t escape and eventually become really good horses on the outside but they are no longer horses on the inside!

As leaders are we doing this to our teams? Are we tying them down to simply get behavior we want instead of teaching them to trust us.  Teaching our team to trust us means we have to make difficult decisions, we have to stand up to our leadership for our teams.  We then often have to go back to our teams and tell them we failed.  We have to show that we aren’t perfect and that is a hard thing to do!

Think about this as you lead your teams, what if you were honest with them!  What if you told them the truth that you spoke up at the last meeting but you were turned down. Or that you feel that the decision is a good one for the organization and that you support it even if it means something bad for the team?

When someone on your team works in a way that is different or in a way that maybe needs improvement, try understanding why they work that way and getting them to trust you that your way might be better?

Being a good leader isn’t about forcing people into a mold it’s about getting them to trust you and know that you have their best interest at heart!!

Leadership, Potential, Team Building, Uncategorized

Do what you love!!

Leaders, how many days do you go home and think I just can’t do this again?  I can’t make myself go through another day!  Then you remember the mortgage and the car payments, and the kids and all the other bills that need to be paid and you do it again.

Not all of us love our jobs, and I would guess some of us down right dislike it alot!!  As leaders we put ourselves out there, we support our teams we strive to be better and we sometimes forget that we need to find something that feeds our soul!

This doesn’t have to be your job, in fact it’s OK to not be but there has to be something that you do that you love!  For my amazing husband it’s greeting new people at our church.  He has a sixth sense for new people like seriously can smell them from inside the building!  He takes great pride in welcoming them and then having me meet them later!  This and coaching are 2 things that he loves more than most anything else!

For me, welcoming people at church is OK, it’s not something I love, I’ll do it but it doesn’t make me smile.  Today I did the thing that makes me smile. I rode a horse!  For an hour all I could think about was sitting in the saddle and attempting to steer. (I am still learning so doing more than 1 thing at a time is still really tough!) My smile was huge! I felt joy like I haven’t felt in a very long time!

You see I was not control, I didn’t have to teach the other riders in the room. I had to focus on my horse and the horses around me but all I was responsible for was my horse and myself! I was doing the thing that feeds my soul!

This weekend take time to figure out what feeds your soul! As leaders we are no good to anyone if we aren’t taking care of ourselves!  So go feed your soul!!

Leadership, Team Building, teams, Uncategorized

Be a Beginner!

beginner tuskey dressage

(Photo cred to Tuskey Dressage)

Why is it we always want to jump to the end of everything!  We don’t allow ourselves OR our teams to learn.  This is something that has been causing quite a bit of conversation in our family lately.  We are meeting with alot of young people who are struggling because they don’t know what they want to be an so many companies are requiring them to be an expert before they start!

Most of us who are in our 40’s and older started at companies and were taught the skills we needed to do the jobs.  We didn’t ‘know’ everything when we started, fewer and fewer organizations are allowing people to grow into jobs.  This can be both good and bad as it often means that you are missing out on someone who might be really good at the job if you gave them a few months to learn!

As leaders we often follow this mentality as well with our teams, we expect people to be instantly good leaders and forget that we didn’t start off knowing what we know.  We had to learn and grow into our positions!

What IF (stay with me here), what if we found someone who seemed to have some skills and we invested in them?  Taught them how to be a good leader, how to lead a team, how to handle conflicts?  Taught them the skills they needed to be good leaders and then allowed them to expand their leadership skills in small but impact-full ways? Mentoring another member of the team or leading a small project?  Not only could we guide but they would have the chance to learn!

Today your exercise is to find someone on your team who you think might make a good leader.  Setup a meeting with them and then help them find small ways they can lead within your organization.  Allow them to fail, allow them to succeed and guide them along the way!  I promise you, you won’t be disappointed!