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“Creating Successful Leaders”

Category Archives: Leadership

March 19, 2014 Balancing Head And Heart: Friendships At Work

Friendship on the job can be beneficial to everyone. It makes work a fun place to be. It brings unity and camaraderie to the business. 

But friendships can potentially make it hard on your responsibility as a leader to remain consistent and fair. It might be easy for you to give your friend a break, extend a deadline, or ignore or overlook a mistake. And this is where having friends in your business can be detrimental.

The recent Harvard Business Review article offers a few helpful insights on how to navigate the tricky waters of managing your friends.

1. You’ll make them angry sometimes, but this is okay.

You have a job to do. Above all, remember why you’re there, in the position you’re in. You’ll have to “turn up the heat” on everyone from time to time, and this includes your friends.

They probably won’t be too pleased at this, at least not at first. Remember that this is their problem, not yours. Stay consistent, compassionate, but firm with your staff, and in time your work friends will appreciate and respect your consistency.

2. Learn to disagree with friends while still being their friend.

Disagreements are a natural part of any relationship. You can be passionate about a disagreement without being disrespectful. It’s a tricky balance, but it’s possible.

3. Keep work out of it at the dinner party.

When you spend time with them outside the office, remember the rules and standards of the workplace do not apply outside.

4. This arrangement won’t always work.

In some cases, having friends that report to you just doesn’t work. As the article’s author, Peter Bregman, points out: “Even if you have clarity about your role as a leader, emotional mastery, and friendship skills, the other person may not be able to live with your decisions.” As tough as it is, it’s better for both parties in this case to accept the reality of the situation and move on.

On the flip side, there are countless instances where your friendship with a staff member motivates them to do their best work. This is why knowing your staff is so crucial, so that you’ll be able to determine the relational dynamics early on and avoid potential conflicts.

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July 3, 2013 Leading With Agility

Today’s global, interconnected market demands that leaders be agile as they navigate through the diverse range of disciplines, cultures and skill sets that compose it. But what do we mean when we say, “agile?”

According to the Center for Creative Leadership, learning agile leaders “show the willingness and ability to learn throughout their careers, if not their entire lives.” They also assert that leaders who “refuse to let go of entrenched patterns or who do not recognize the nuances in different situations tend to derail.”

Learning agility is as much a mindset as it is a practice. For instance, if you’re in a rut with your career, it’s possible you aren’t taking advantage of learning opportunities. There are many possible reasons for this: perhaps you’re afraid of failure, or worried about getting outside your area of comfort and expertise. However, without allowing yourself to encounter new experiences, you’ll have no shot at developing the necessary life skills to navigate through an increasingly interdisciplinary economy. You can’t expect different results from doing the same thing over and over again; Albert Einstein defined insanity as such.

So, to be agile in practice, you must first retrain your brain to be open to newness. It may not be comfortable at first, but hopefully you’ll find that new experiences are rarely as duanting as we build them up in our minds.

I’ll be focusing on learning agility and how it plays out when applied this month, so stay tuned!

Mitchinson, Adam and Robert Morris, Ph.d. “Learning About Learning Agility.” Teachers College, Colombia University, April 2012.

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May 8, 2013 Are Middle Managers Still Relevant?

Researcher Behnam Tabrizi recently conducted a study to examine whether middle managers are still relevant in a world where executives have direct access to the front lines of their businesses. The results of the study showed that not only are middle managers still important, but the successful ones had a direct hand in the success of their company.

Based on the results, Tabrizi crafted three “rules” for being a successful middle manager:

Alignment

Successful middle managers were able to see how their own personal aspirations lined up with the greater aim of the company. This notion of alignment is similar to ideas I shared in a previous post. Accommodating someone’s personal goals does more than simply make them feel good about their job; research continues to show that it has a direct, positive impact on the company.

Authorship

Successful businesses gave middle managers the power to initiate projects. According to Tabrizi, “organizations create cross-functional teams of MLMs, who author change and innovation plans that turn executives’ visions into concrete steps.” Putting the power of the initiative into the hands of middle managers provides them a sense of ownership and commitment to success.

Action

Because middle managers in Tabrizi’s study were authoring initiatives, he stresses that they must be responsible for the enactment of their plans. They are the foot soldiers who must work through obstacles on a daily basis. It’s not always a glamorous job, but they’ll be motivated by the fact that they authored the initiative, not some out-of-touch executive.

This study puts the scientific stamp of approval on the things we already knew: that managers who didn’t share the common aspirations of their company don’t make good managers; that the company must place trust in their managers to come up with initiatives of their own; and that managers who work through enacting their own initiatives do much better than when they are handed an initiative from above.

Here’s a link to Tabrizi’s article.

Eager to learn more?  Read my post about authentic leadership HERE.

Happy managing!

Tabrizi, Behnam. “New Research: What Sets Effective Middle Managers Apart.” Harvard Business Review, May 8, 2013.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/reinventing_middle_management.html

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