As a leader, you set the tone for communication in your area. What you do and say is modeled. An email from you carries more weight than those from peers. As such, your email etiquette and behavior can either help your team be more productive or totally trip them up.
Here are three types of emails that a leader should never send. And I do mean never!
At times people are startled when I refer to them as a leader. “But I’m only an employee, a student, or a volunteer,” they say in protest. For they believe that leadership is defined by role, position, age or appointment. I don’t.
I believe leadership is about who you are and what you do. It is seeing a way to create a better future, stepping up to make that happen and engaging others in the pursuit of that goal.
To illustrate my point, let me tell you a story about Lilly…
Hate to tell you, but if you are patiently waiting for upper management to proclaim their vision for your work and your team, it most likely is NOT going to happen. Or at least in the degree of granularity you might be hoping for.
We all want to have work with meaning – and as a leader, it is your job to help create that meaning. The good news is that each of us has the ability (and perhaps the obligation) to cast vision – for yourself and your team.
The notion of vision scares us at times. It sounds big. Pretentious. Unknown and unknowable. You might struggle with deciding what is “too big” and what is “too little”. I encourage you to acknowledge the doubts and plow ahead. I’d much rather put my effort toward a “too big” vision than none at all. And if you err by starting small, you will have at least started. Small steps are better than no steps. …
I stumbled across Mary Parker Follett’s name about six months ago in the book, The Power of Collective Wisdom. My curiosity got the better of me – and I dug deeper. And what I found was the work of a brilliant women with great influence. Some call her the “mother of modern management.” How is it that I know her work and not her name?
In celebration of Women’s History Month, I honor this female visionary. Although I never knew her name till recently, my study of her work reveals just how much of my practice in leadership and organizational dynamics is influenced by her…
I’m not sure how we came to the point where demanding accountability is equated to finding a scapegoat, placing blame, and demanding retribution. The cry for “someone to be held accountable” is code for finding someone to fire or dismiss so that business can go on usual. It has very little to do with what I would define as true accountability.
It’s very easy to spot someone with a high degree of personal accountability by what they do and don’t do…
I often say “we are smarter than me,”… referring to the increased capacity, deep wisdom, creativity, and solid decisions that groups of people can make – as opposed to one individual acting in isolation. No matter how smart that one person is, in general they will be “outsmarted” but a group of people. That is, of course, if that group of people can work together effectively.
Briskin, Erickson, Ott, and Callanan examine the phenomena of group decision making in their book, The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly. They answer how groups can come up with novel and powerful solutions to intractable problems at times – and at other times wallow in cobbled together solutions that are amazingly awful.
Think about these three retailers: WALMART, KMART, and TARGET. All discount department stores. All ones that you have likely shopped in at some point. Now, see if you can match the company values with the retailer.
Retailer A
Retailer B
Retailer C
Read on to find the answers… and to explore what value congruence has to do with profitability.
As my children were growing up, Saturday was “clean the house” day. Everyone participated, no matter their age. For my daughter, Nicole, at age six it meant that toys and clutter had to move off the floor and into their designated storage places so that the vacuum could be run.
In spite of knowing this, the floor would often be strewn with Barbie shoes on Saturday morning. After reminders that escalated to nagging and warnings, there was one thing that was certain to create an immediate surge of frantic activity to put the shoes away. And that was the sound of the vacuum cleaner headed to her room.
Now Nicole was not a naughty or unruly child. She just has at least one thousand things better to do than to pick up Barbie shoes. Until the roar of the vacuum sent a clear message: Run now to save the shoes!
Not unlike most of us. We have many things to do. We aren’t bad or lazy; perhaps distracted and overwhelmed. So the leadership question becomes this: WHAT CAN WE DO TO SPUR FOCUS AND ATTENTION ON THE THINGS THAT ARE MOST IMPORTANT?
Ahhhh… how comfy our comfort zones are. We know these places so well. We can be on autopilot. We don’t have to expend emotional or physical energy. It’s easy. It’s like riding a bike downhill – all the time.
Ultimately, however, our comfort zones can be our undoing. Too much time there are we become stale, unchallenged, and stagnant. And that is a dangerous place to be in a world in which maintaining the status quo becomes obsolete in the blink of an eye.
WARNING: If you love bureaucracy, you’ll hate this post. If your life is consumed with climbing the corporate ladder, this post will give you a splitting headache. If you are in what is considered a “safe” occupation (HR/accounting/law) – be prepared to be unnerved.
This is a follow-up to my post about unlearning. Here, you’ll learn what you might need to unlearn about how organizations operate and the work done within them. The content of this post draws both on my personal experience with a variety of organizations I work with, and the work of Frederic Laloux and his book, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.
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