This is one part of a whole series on leadership.  Check the leadership introduction here for all articles in the series.

It’s impossible to cover the topic of leadership without focusing on people.  You can learn about leadership , understand yourself , develop your leadership skills and have all the right things in place to be a leader, but it’s all for nothing without remembering that leadership is all about people.  It’s about having influence with others and about the relationships and connections you build as a leader.  These skills are the people skills needed for leadership and there are five major areas I’ve learned that make up those people skills.  I hope you’ll go back in this series and read the previous 4 articles if you’ve missed any and please do sign up for my RSS feed or by email to get the next articles in the series if you haven’t yet signed up.

1. Awareness

Wake up!  You need to be aware of things around you as a leader.  You need to be more alert to opportunities, to easily see change and to recognizing solutions easier than the next guy. These will enable you to be thinking and discovering just ahead of your likely followers and gives others that perception of being first.  Little things here can make a big difference.  Just putting more attention to things can easily bring the small percentage increase on a consistent basis that will help you deliver more and more ideas and content before others.  Presenting your thoughts first, offering to take on new challenges and noticing change before others will not only have you demonstrating your willingness to lead but it will give you opportunities that others miss out on that you can further develop and prove your skills with.

Leadership is About People

Not only is being aware of opportunities important but also the interactions with others.  Being aware of when others need help, are struggling or feeling left behind is the best time to show leadership by helping, waiting or encouraging them to continue.  This capacity to see what is going on with the people around you demonstrates great leadership.  Look for times you can give decision or choices to others or even hold your own ideas to ensure those presented by others feel more important.  Often a few simple steps here can gain long term followers as they begin to respect you without seeing you in their way.  You can still lead people without slowing them down and by being aware of these signals with others ensures you do not step outside the boundaries of good leadership.

2. Impactful

This can be the most difficult people skill to develop as a leader as it is often counter to what is first believed.  I’m suggesting here that you need to have impact with others without authority, without position power and without necessarily having the respect or experience to immediately convince someone.  Impact is about earning respect but doing it in a way that you demonstrate your values and leadership characteristics.  Some of those techniques are:

• Trusting others

You must build trust as a leader.  Do this with honesty and sincerity with others.  Offer trust before it is deserved whenever possible as this will gain favor in return that far outweighs the negative impacts from not trusting others as a leader.  Look for places to trust others, tell them you trust them and then show them by accepting their ideas and accepting the consequences without blame.

• Welcome good conflict

Conflict can easily be a bad thing if it becomes personal or in any way an attach (physical, verbal or mental).  However, it can also be a huge team builder if done well and it quickly lets a leader demonstrate their ability to work on difficult problems with others no matter what.  Conflict in this sense is as simple as disagreeing on decisions or methods to use and it sparks discussion.  Look to draw out both sides and seriously weigh the pros and cons of each side of a conflict before trying to move ahead.  Get people to think of all consequences and thank people for participating in any disagreements.

• Be dependable

If you want to have impact on people, you must be dependable on what you say you will do.  Be ruthless in completing any commitments you make and make yourself available to help as often as you can.  This lets others depend on you and proves that you can deliver what you say.  Be careful not be make commitments you cannot keep and don’t ever make commitments for others unless they are involved.

• Show confidence AND openness

As a leader, you want to have impact on others by stepping ahead and having them trust you and depend on you to steer things forward.  You must have confidence in those decisions to convince others to come along and you must also balance this while remaining open minded enough to ensure you are not going down a path, dragging others with you that leads nowhere.

3. Recognize Behavior Patterns

I considered whether this section should be on it’s own or otherwise part of adapting and communicating but I thought it deserves it’s own attention, especially when covering leadership from the people perspective.  I love examining others from the perspective of behavior instead of my own interpretations or opinions.  Behavior is real and is always something you can see or hear from someone else.  It is about what they did or said and not a personal character judgment.  There is no value in judging others and will never help you as a leader so it’s much wiser to use behavior as a foundation for examining others instead of any personal opinions.  Look at what they did and consider that, instead of what you might "think" or  "imply".   Judging others is very dangerous and will completely destroy your ability to lead.  It will blind you, guide you by prejudice and create voids in relationships that are difficult to ever close back up.  By using behavior, you can look at something as a single action, not a flaw or personality problem and get past it.  This is not only with others, but yourself as well.  If you put judgments on yourself, you will find you impose the same limitations on yourself.

Here are a couple of previous articles I’ve written about judgments and the dangers of it.

• Happiness Suffers from Self Judgments!
• Don’t Judge Others, Be Helpful Instead!

Understanding others of course requires awareness like the section above but it’s much more than that.  There should be a deep understanding of people in order to enable that awareness and allow communication.  I highly recommend learning the DiSC behavior model and seeing how it fits into understanding other people better.  It’s made a huge impact to me as a leader and I find it far easier to apply than other personality types.  Seeing real things with real behaviors is a key step to finding change as a leader and to then work on changing those behaviors.  Remember, you can’t change someone’s personality, but you can certainly change some of their behaviors.  Plus it is a whole lot easier and more enjoyable since behavior is easy to see.

4. Communicate Meaningfully

Since leadership is really about people, you have to look closely at communication to be a great leader.  Some think there is a specific type of communication style or method that is best for leadership, but I really don’t think that is necessary or required.  I think that communicating well simply means to get through to other people in a way that you impact them and can build the trust and relationship needed for you to successfully lead them.  If that is happening, I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to make that happen, I think it depends on the individual as a leader and any followers.  Everyone communicates in their own way and so being genuine and personal is the important points here.  Does it help to be regularly communicating, laying out direction, having clarity and to be a good well voiced speaker?  Sure, but I don’t think it limits you to not be those things either.  Put attention to communicate your meaning, involve followers, give them the communication they want and that works for them and don’t worry about how you communicate, it just doesn’t matter that much.

5. Adapt

The last section I have about leadership from the people perspective is about a leader’s ability to adapt.  Not only are circumstances always changing that you need to adapt to, but so are the people you are leading.  They will grow themselves, challenge you as a leader both positively and negatively and continually change. You must be able to adapt to these people changes as well.  All the above pieces can assist in adapting and they will continue to need changes as long as you hope to lead.  Leadership really is all about change so if you cannot adapt to the people you want to lead, you will never successfully lead them.

Expect people to change that you lead.  Some people will come, some will go, others will follow you for ages, and some will hope to or even pass you in leadership skills in a short time.  You must enable this, encourage it, allow it, and welcome it as a leader.  Know the changes will occur, don’t get discourages by them and certainly don’t hold back anyone else to quickly adapt, even if it’s faster than you can as the leader.  There are ways to adapt yourself, demonstrate this and then use it to lead others as well by showing the results of it.  Look to teach others to adapt and adapt them into your own leadership to take the journey with you.  If you can adapt with the people you lead, instead of only adapting yourself, you can enable a large following to not only deeply believe in you and have trust and respect for you as a leader, but you will develop more leaders and yourself along the way.  Now, that is leadership with people my friends!

Examples of Leading When It’s About People

I have a few points listed here to help illustrate examples of some of these ideas and what it might look like to lead with people more than simply leading them.  I’d love to read your stories and examples of leadership, so please comment them below…

• Integrity – hold your values strong and don’t sell out for anything
• Always give (or at least include) your followers the credit for your successes
• Take the responsibility and blame for your follower’s mistakes
• Do not self-promote, learn to be a humble leader
• Give decisions to your followers or at least include them
• Regularly ask for others’ views and never judge them
• Share your vulnerabilities
• Help your followers anytime they need it
• Be fair and treat everyone equally
• Do what you say and hold others accountable for the same
• Encouraging your people to grow, to learn and to take on as much as they want to, at a pace they can handle
• Show compassion for others and what they share with you
• Be confident and positive in all your actions
• Read good books in your field and always encourage learning
• Be a storyteller
• Smile, have fun and be passionate about your goals!

Posted by Mike King under Success | 26 Comments »

This is one part of a whole series on leadership.  Check the leadership introduction here for all articles in the series.

Skill development is crucial to advancing your leadership ability and a strong focus on specific leadership skills can not only shore up any shortcomings but can also massively boost your abilities as a leader.  Not a lot of people take their own initiative to develop their skills but this is one area that is very easy to do for a leader.  You’ve probably all heard the saying that leaders are made, not born and it’s all to do with developing the right skills to become a leader.  Anyone can do it and then apply those skills in a style that suits them.

Whether leadership is all new to you or you have years of experience, there are always areas to improve your skills and so putting some attention to the development of those is important.

If you missed the previous article in this series, you might want to review that first.  Leadership: Know Yourself and Your Capabilities

Reading

I cannot promote this one enough and unfortunately it is a task that few people actually make common in their lives.  A sad fact that reoccurs in North American surveys is that nearly 60% of all adults never read another book after high school and more than 80% did not read a single book in the past year.

Leadership – Skill Development

Photo Credit: trazmumbalde @ flickr

I was one of those statistics until about 3-4 years ago when I found and tackled reading a couple of leadership books.  I had never realized how much there was to learn in books as I had always read the wrong books.  They just didn’t interest me and I was typically bored before I could finish a few pages.  With finding books that actually helped to train and development my skills, I was able to experience a new love for books and I’ve ramped up my reading to where I’ve read over 30 books this year alone!  I now consider books to be one of the best resources for new knowledge that exists.  And yes, I still rank them far higher than the internet, so if you read my blog but you don’t read books, then please find a book of interest from my many book reviews and don’t come back until you finish it!

Reading is a fantastic way to develop new skills and master the ones you already have.  It gives you access to learn from experts in any subject and it is a cheap and quick way to experience and take in a lot of knowledge that would be very time consuming and costly to learn the hard way by trial and error.  Of course reading expert books can’t replace personal experience, especially with something as personal as leadership, but it can easily give you ideas, a foundation of knowledge and a massive jump start into an area that is so huge, a lifetime can easily be spent developing it.  That area is of course leadership.

Continuous Learning

Considering the scale of leadership and simply how much there is to learn, it isn’t something you just learn once and then be done with it.  It requires you to be learning and developing your skills further and further.  A leader will never stay a leader if they are not able to progress themselves and so continuous learning is an excellent way to not only stay ahead of a group of followers but it is also useful to spark innovation, creativity and changes in a leader’s style or approach that makes them more effective.

Adapting and Changing

Refining your skills inevitably leads to realizing that there is room for change.  Room to adapt and adjust your methods to fit new people, situations or simply because of a change in leadership knowledge.  The ability of a leader to change is easily detected by followers and quick adaptations can be very inspiring.  Not only the adaptation itself, but also in the results those changes can bring about.

Aside from the inspiration or motivation that change can feed to others, it is also necessary in a competitive world.  Adapting to the rapid changes is a best way to stay ahead and for a leader this is not only with external factors in their area of influence but also the areas within it.  Adopting an acceptance of change so that new areas are looked at as opportunities instead of problems or roadblocks allows a leader to carry things through any transitions.

As these changes occur, the skills required to stay effective as a leader will also change.  A good leader accepts this and not only looks to get through the change, but to also lead the change itself.  Since the change is innevitable for survival, why not continue to develop your skills and take the change on, head on as a leader.

Posted by Mike King under Success | 25 Comments »

This next topic about leadership takes what you know from the last article (Leadership – Understanding What It Is ) and looks at how those areas of leadership can be utilized within the boundaries of your own personality and capabilities.

Don’t Fake Who You Are, Just Be You

The last thing you should do to be a leader is to pretend you are something you are not.  You should never fake or display a specific personality in order to be seen as a leader.  A lot of people do this thinking that leadership is automatic if you have a specific set of personal characteristics but that is simply not true.  The individual person and unique personality makes more of the leader than any specific qualities or character traits.  Leadership is something that has to come from the person you truly are.  Now that can be changed over time which I’ll cover more in a later article but you can’t fake it without a genuine change in your core values and beliefs.

So of course bringing up values and beliefs is an important part of knowing yourself and that extends deeply into a leader’s character.  One trait that I’ve learned that is common of great leaders is that they hold true their values and beliefs.   This is only possible if you actually know those values, display them and let other people see them revealed by your actions.  Many traits are related to this core principle and that is why I believe you cannot pinpoint specific characteristics.  These 4 are the ones that stand out the most for me in someone who holds true their values:

• Integrity
• Honest
• Courage
• Confidence

“No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.” (William Penn)

Know Your Limits

Not only is it important to know some of the principles your character is built upon, it’s also important to know your limitations and what you are not.  Leadership has many stereotyped expectations and there is little to gain by trying to fit some area that just doesn’t suit you.  The different styles of leaders need to fit your personality and you shouldn’t force yourself to portray characteristics you simply don’t have.  Yet.  The limits you have now are certainly something that can change with time but leadership is hard enough in areas you are good at, let alone attempting to falsely mold yourself (mold removal North York) into areas you know are beyond your limits and capabilities.

Be Open About Your Capabilities

There is nothing wrong with being open and honest about where your leadership skills fall short.  Honesty in addressing your capabilities are a sure way to gain a trusting and respectful eye from others and helps to stay far away from the perception that you have a big ego (a leader’s natural arch-nemesis).  A leader will not only recognize their own limits and inabilities, they will look to find new ways to fill those gaps.  A mindset to support continuous improvement and admittance of needing help with that is important as it allows a leader to accept imperfections in themselves and in people with their own shortcomings.

Self-Analysis Tools

Whether you think you know yourself well or not, it’s very helpful to use various techniques and resources to self assess where you are at as a leader, what style you have and what skills or capabilities you need to put priority attention to for improvement.  Personality tools can be helpful here but since I believe that powerful leadership can occur from any personality type, they tend not to look enough at action and influence with others, which is where leadership really counts.  I have found these techniques to work best for getting an accurate self assessment when it comes to leadership.

Talk to Close Friends and Family

You can always trust your closest friends or family to be brutally honest with you but keep in mind they might not ever tell you anything bad thing about you, until you ask.  So, ask!  Be specific to ask about leadership traits and how they see you leading.  If you have little experience ask how they feel you would lead best if given the opportunity.  Does it match your own ideas?

Colleagues

Ask your peers, your boss and any mentors or role models you may have for them to give you an honest opinion about how you express your values and what leadership characteristics they see and don’t see you demonstrating.  Remember it’s not the knowledge, it’s the practice of what you can demonstrate.  Use the same specific questions as with close friends or family here.  Ask specifically about leadership.  You might want to look at leadership in a specific role for your workplace or future role.

Surveys

There are hundreds of surveys available online, in books, at seminars or in courses that you can take to help evaluate yourself.  Here is one simple but very useful survey I found online to help evaluate what your natural leadership style is .  From the same site, here is a survey to assess how you are doing as a leader now. There are many more online if you do some searching, these are only a quick starting place.

I’d love to hear about any other tools, resources and methods you have used or can suggest to evaluate yourself and your leadership skills.

Posted by Mike King under Success | 32 Comments »

In order to understand leadership it is important to realize that leadership is not about a specific set of traits or characteristics.  It is about trust, relationships and guidance between someone leading and others following.

Many studies have been done and none have led to any definitive list of attributes that one must have to be a good leader.  However, leadership does have a series of actions and behaviors which is what I hope to focus on in this series.

Qualities Of Leadership

While there are not specific characteristics that define a leader, there are a number of qualities of leadership that can be seen valuable in leaders.  These include integrity, honesty, humility, courage, commitment, sincerity, passion, confidence, positivity, wisdom, determination, compassion, sensitivity, and a degree of personal charisma.  These are not things that make a leader, but they tend to be some of the qualities of a leader and are often shown by their actions.

Leadership Style

Leadership doesn’t require or expect you to behave in a specific way or have a pre-defined set of leadership qualities either.  It has many styles and the only really important thing about leadership styles that is important to know is that you must practice your own style.  You cannot copy someone else’s or learn a specific style, it must be something that comes natural for you.  There is no right or wrong style and so you must embrace a style that works for you as a leader and one that you can value.

Some of the styles are based similarly to personality styles or behavior based styles, such as the Meyers Briggs (take a free test here ) or DiSC (more info here ) profiling models, respectively. There seems to be three main styles of leadership:

• Authoritarian / autocratic
• Participative / democratic
• Delegative / free-reign

Good leaders will use all three styles depending on every situation with only a minor bias to their natural style.  Poor leaders will generally stick with one style and not adjust for different situations limiting their influence greatly.

Regardless of the style applied, a leader’s approach can be one with a focus on rewards that are positive to motivate or they may use penalties to frighten (which is also a motivator) action.

Lead By Ideas

While leadership is largely about behavior, that behavior will never be different from others’ without the ability to act on new ideas.  A leader’s ideas direct their actions, decisions and new behaviors.  Ideas are the only way to challenge things we currently do and belief and a great leader is able to shift and motivate people from a static life to one of great transformation changing views, beliefs and values.  All these changes ultimately lead to new actions which is what leadership is driving to change!

Ideas are what enables a leader, as its ideas that are forceful to others and its ideas that will engage others to see from new perspectives and take on new possibilities.  These ideas are how a leader finds its followers and how they find a new path to follow.

Leadership

So, to me leadership is about inspiring and motivating others either deliberately or passively by your own way of doing things.  It is about steering not only your own path towards something, but also the path of any number of followers that value something about you enough to follow.  The variations here are endless but all leadership requires this at some level.

What would you add to help someone better understand what leadership is?

Please continue reading the next article in this series.  Leadership: Know Yourself and Your Capabilities

Posted by Mike King under Success | 23 Comments »

This is the start of a new series on leadership.  I’ll briefly introduce each section below to give you an idea what you can expect in this series of articles.

NOTE: Each of the titles links into the series.

Understanding What It Is

Leadership is something that can easily be explained, but it is very difficult to put into practice.  It’s important to understand what it is and the various things that make up leadership.

Know Yourself and Your Capabilities

In order to put the areas of leadership into practice once you do have an understanding of it, you need to look at yourself and your own capabilities so that you know what areas to develop, use and avoid in your leadership style.  The characteristics of your own personality will also great impact your leadership and you should know how.

Skill Development

Any leader is going to realize that they cannot be everything they want to be without a lot of development of their skills.  No matter where you are in your leadership abilities, there are always skills to learn, new ones to develop and refining to do on the ones you have.

Remember, It’s About People

Human nature is important to know, understand and handle as a leader.  Every step you take as a leader will need to be done with one important fact in mind, it’s all about people.

Willingness to Take Risks

Leaders drive change and they inspire others to follow them by challenging new things and persisting through it to a point of success.  That willingness to take risks is a critical aspect of leadership to explore.

Accepting Mistakes

Leaders are not better at things than others, they are not smarter, they are not lucky and they are not born that way either.  They are however able to learn and accept their mistakes without mistakes holding them back from continued leadership.

Give Direction

Leaders can only lead if they give some direction or example for others to follow, otherwise it’s not leading.

Humility

Finally, my final area to cover of leadership is doing all this while staying humble.  Great leaders are humble in their work, lives and leadership and it enables them to be lasting leaders well beyond their time and direct role of influence.

Each of the articles titles above link into the series.

Posted by Mike King under Success | 19 Comments »

The world has a lot of cycles in it.  So do our lives, our work, our relationships and everything around us in the economy.  Lately, that has been a hot topic as the market takes a turn for what seems like the worst.  However, it has a lot of great things about it and while this is not a financial blog, I see a lot of parallels in good investment techniques as I see with good leadership in your career and life!

Guard Yourself Before a Fall

A balanced life is like a balanced investment portfolio.  From the investment perspective, if you expect things to go down (which you always should do when things have been on the rise for some time), you should position your funds into securities and holding that are less volatile and offer some protection from a downturn.  Since this isn’t a financial blog, I won’t get into whether that should be a certain type of mutual fund, stock, bond, or money market, just that you should keep some protection and wiggle room available BEFORE things start to drop.  This way, you don’t suffer the downfall as much as others in a heavily invested turning growth market.

From the life and leadership perspective, you don’t want to be putting in everything you’ve got when things are going all in your favor.  Use your skills and tools available to help you sail smoothly through the good times to take advantage of getting restored mentally and physically when it is relatively easy to do this.  Make the most of delegation, take your vacations, enjoy your free time and keep your life as clear from stress as possible.  All of this insures you are prepared for the worst before it happens! And it will happen.  Things will fall around you and its best to have room to step up and dedicate more in times of trouble.  If you have no room to expand and stretch your abilities when times were good, you will only struggle when things take a turn for the worst.  So, guard yourself so you have room to push a little harder than normal and be prepared for those times, they will come and go.

Invest When Things are At There Worst

Sometimes it takes a sudden drop to realize any gains and leadership is similar.  You cannot see potential growth as easily when you things are going smoothly and its the bad times that can easily highlight the areas of growth, improvement and focus that a leader must tend to in order to help turn things around.  Investing time to train, grow and develop those areas and others when its not going well will pay off when things turn around, as long as you stick it through!  This is the same as contributions when markets are down (like now) since the potential for growth is HUGE and only requires that brave investment when things don’t look like they are worth it.

Don’t Lose a Positive Attitude

Keeping a positive outlook is certainly not easy when things go bad, but its crucial to being your best during those times!  If you let others and your situations drag you into a negative or victim cycle, it suddenly gets much harder to get out of it.  Know that the cycle will bounce back and that you are still able to do everything you’d always been able to do to help drive things forward.  Keeping an eye on the potential and truly believing you can get their is required to be the best you can in the the worst of times.

Be Your Best

Being your best is even more than believing in yourself and having the confidence to stay positive.  It’s about actually stepping up, and putting into action the things you must do to be your best.  Leading when others don’t dare, and taking risks that push your ability!  Its about taking a stand and demonstrating that you are willing to practise what you preach to truly be the best you can be.  It’s about putting in more effort, focusing on results, eliminating waste, holding true to your values and not slacking in any of your activities.

Putting these steps in place can help you demonstrate great leadership and it can drive success for you and those you are involved with during those bad times.

Posted by Mike King under Success | 8 Comments »