Leadership Material How to Develop Leadership, in Yourself and Others

BU_gd_Report_Leadership_Material_170403.docx

Ellen Rohr

First Serial Rights

Leadership Material – How to Develop Leadership, in yourself and others.

“There just isn’t anyone on staff who can step up and take over for me. I’m lookingto hire a general manager.”

Are you burning out? Are you looking for someone to help? Not just to perform the technical work, but to help with planning and marketing and, you know, everything else? Perhaps you are unsure of your skills as a leader, and don’t see any potential in your team members either. Of course, it would be great if you could call a “headhunter” or put an ad on Career Builder and find a superman or super woman who could make everything better. He or she could take the reins, and fix your business while you cash checks at your beach house. My mentor Al Levi calls this “looking for lightning in a bottle.” I’m not saying that never happens. I am suggesting a more predictably successfulroute.

Leadership can be learned. I’ve met lots of top-level executives from many companies, of all sizes. They are all imperfectly human. They do some things well. All of them have challenges and weaknesses. In other words, when it comes to taking your company to the next level, why not you? Why not the wonderful people who work for you already? You could grow into leadership. Here are my best tips for developing leadership skills at every level of the company.

(NOTE: Our friend and mentor Howard Partridge inspired me to share this Special Report. He has even incorporated Inspiration and Implementation as the key elements of the Inner Circle logo. He gets it. No wonder he is so successful! Read on…)

Inspiration is half of it.

Listen to famous speeches, read inspiring books, study the lives of successful leaders, and clarify your own dreams and vision. Start, or dust off, your business plan. Write down your mission and values. Set some goals that get your blood flowing. Pick a point on the horizon worth marching toward. Do you want a turnkey company? To spend more time with your kids? To create career paths for team members? To give back to your community? Write it down.

A fellow said to me recently, “I just want to find a few technicians who aren’t terrible.” I recognize the obvious frustration. Still, he won’t have much success rallying the troops around that mantra. Go to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Or, at least take an afternoon to regroup and rekindle the flame.

Then…what? Many leadership courses and books and speakers share inspiring stories of how, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” (The original quote is attributed to John F. Kennedy, fyi.) But what do leaders actually do when the going gets tough? Yes, get inspired. Then…take some aligned action.

Implementation is the rest of it.

When studying leadership, you’ll find plenty of lofty advice on inspiration. When it comes to implementation, you’re looking for less sexy fare, like help with planning, scheduling time, holding meetings, projects management and writing procedures.

Begin by identifying what is getting in the way of achieving your dreams. Assess your current team and who is doing what. The Organizational Chart is a great tool for getting your arms around what’s happening now, and what – and who – may need to change to accomplish your goals.

Your Organizational Chart lists who is responsible for what and who reports to whom. Schedule a meeting with the owners and people in managerial positions to create or update your Org Chart. Each “box” on the Org Chart is a position, and each position needs definition. A Position Description is a short, bulleted list of the responsibilities of that position. Work together to craft your current Org Chart and Position Descriptions. You may discover that you and/or someone else is/are holding several Positions and juggling LOTS of tasks. Not surprising for a small company. However, many large companies are jammed up at the top, with managers taking on way too many tasks.

Next, fill in the boxes for the people who report to those in management positions. Draw lines to reflect the reporting relationships. Consider capping the number at 6. Does someone in a management position already have more than that? Take note.

Wrap up this meeting with this assignment: You are all going to fill in your calendars with exactly what you spend your time on, over the next two or three weeks. I recommend using a digital calendar, like Outlook or iCalendar or Google calendar. Set the view to show a week at a time. Plan your day, then, overwrite the calendar throughout the day with what you are actually doing. You’ll probably find a disconnect between what you are doing, and with what you want to do, or think you should be doing, according to the Org Chart and the Position Descriptions.

Hold a follow up meeting and discuss what you’ve learned. Consider, so much of what you are doing could be done by someone else. And, much of your wasted time is because you haven’t implemented a procedure for doing that task successfully. For instance, you might do all the sales, because, well, you know how to do sales, and think you’re good at sales. However, this responsibility leaves little time for the other Positions you hold. You might update your Org Chart, to try out new arrangements, and be open to more changes as you grow.

As you share your findings from the Calendar exercise, be careful not to spin into despair, and keep whining to a minimum. For every challenge, consider reframing it as a potential Project, and assemble your Master List of Projects.

Challenge: Time wasted running parts to the Techs.

Project: Create a truck restock procedure.

Challenge: Too many callbacks.

Project: Pick a few frequent callback topics and create procedures, and training, to prevent them.

Challenge: Need two more Technicians, like, yesterday.

Project: Formalize a recruiting, hiring and training system for building careers for willing people with no experience.

Challenge: Our uniforms are scratchy, hard to keep clean, and the Techs don’t wear them.

Project: Overhaul our uniform standards and procedures.

Challenge: Time wasted writing up a fence-testing employee for the umpteenth time.

Project: Commit to a progressive discipline policy and incorporate it into the Employee Manual.

Challenge: Spending all day on sales calls.

Project: Identify someone else at the company who may be willing and able to do sales. Adopt a sales training program.

Get the idea? Jot down all these Projects on your Master List of Projects. Use a flip chart or Word doc or an electronic list app like Trello or Wonderlist. It will be a loooooong list!

Now, pick a few Projects and energize them. Call them Top Projects. I used to recommend having no more than 10 Top Projects. Working with my ZOOM DRAIN partner, Al Levi, I have discovered that 10 is just too many to focus on at once. Al suggests no more than five Top Projects. You may select two or three. The concept is that you “greenlight” a few projects that are going to get DONE. Leave the rest on the Master List. You can’t do everything at once. As a Project is done, another Project gets energized.

You might have your team weigh in on which Projects should take priority. As the owner, you have veto power, however it helps to pick Projects that team members are passionate about. Why? Because you will have much better success delegating when employees buy into the need to solve the particular problem the Project could fix.

Let’s say, for example, that you have elevated three Projects from the Master Projects List to Top Projects status. For an example, one of the Projects is “Creating a Safety Program.” Here are a few ways to engage your team and successfully complete the Project!

Put the Project Meeting on your Calendar. Create the appointment, and invite people who you’d like to be involved in the Project.

At the Project Meeting, refine the scope of the Project and delegate it. Ask the basic Journalistic questions: What? Why? Who? By When? How Much? How?

What? “Create a Safety Program.”

Note that 90% of the time, a completed Project means you have a Procedure. A Procedure is a list of to dos that make sure something good happens. So, for this Project, you might determine that, “We need a written procedure for our Safety Program, regularly scheduled meetings, and agendas. We need to determine which Position on the Organizational Chart will be responsible for using the Procedure.”

Why? “We want to keep people safe. We’ve seen our team do some dangerous things. We have had accidents and injuries that may have been preventable. Our insurance rates will go down with a formal safety, too.”

Who? It makes good sense to delegate this Project to someone who is really concerned about the issue. “Mary has agreed to lead this Project. Sue and Kanye are available to help.”

By When? Establish your timeline. Set your team up for success. Be generous on the due dates. Schedule Project Work Time on their work calendars. (Don’t expect people to do Projects on their own time.) Schedule the next follow up meeting.

How Much? Discuss and establish the budget of time, money and resources.

How? Let Mary, Sue and Kanye come up with the plan. You don’t have to be the sage. This Project is an awesome opportunity for your team to develop project leadership skills. You will, too, if you will let go of the “hows” and give them some rein. What I have found is that your team will fix everything! Delegate – don’t abdicate – projects and help them win.

Attend the follow up Project Meetings. If something is way off, you can coach them…however, don’t take the Project back. Work together to get back on track. As you work through a Project, you may find other “rocks in the road.” Put those Projects on the Master Projects List. Just keep chipping away at the list.

If a Project stalls, it may make sense to step back and look for inspiration. Recently, I got stuck with a Project. The team members I was working with had different ideas for how to get it done. Neither of them were wrong; we just couldn’t get consensus. What we all agreed on was that it needed to get done. Our mission is so much bigger than this one “rock”. Once we reminded ourselves of the bigger picture, the details of the Project took their proper scope. We decided to get some help, and found an awesome vendor to do what had been tripping us up internally.

So often we take on more than we need to because we don’t ask for help. Your team wants to help you achieve your goals, if they are inspired by them, and they can move towards their goals in the process. You can use this approach to lead family members and vendors, too.

In 2017, commit to a formal systematic way to get Projects done. Leadership can be developed at every level of the company with clarified vision and systematic implementation.

I wish I’d learned leadership skills in grade school. I didn’t pick these tools up quickly, even once I’d been exposed to them. Be patient with yourself and your team. You are Leadership Material.

And, we are too old to waste any more time. If your burn-out has reached carbon black, crispy levels, remember that you don’t have to do any of this. You could walk away. You could sell your company. You could work yourself into a health crisis and let someone else pick up the pieces. All of these are legitimate options. Consider them.

Or you could dream. You could pick a worthwhile point on the horizon: Your biggest yet sales goal. A turnkey company. Bonuses, career opportunities, ownership for team players who get stuff done, and develop their leadership chops.

Inspire. Implement. And layer on the love. May 2017 be your best year yet.