What Makes a Great Leader?

It is one of the oldest questions in the proverbial book. 

If you ask a coach, team leader, or company executive if talent attraction and retention is important to them, it’s fairly safe to say you will get a resounding yes every time.

We may think it’s about price, product, marketing, logos, market share, that new restaurant that just opened up, stock prices, the new thingamajig that start-up from Mountainview launched, and all the other metrics that seem to measure the success of business, yet all pale in comparison to the importance of not only having the right people in your company but the continuation of their ongoing growth and development.

Training is important for some things but is not enough for people development.

It’s not deep enough. It’s a quick fix that simply doesn’t exist and can’t be sustained. Leadership is a daily event that needs to be your top priority. What worked last week may not work today. And what was successful a year ago may never work again. That’s why we don’t offer training, we work with clients on their ongoing leadership growth.

Roselinde Torres has studied leadership around the world and shares her thoughts on what makes a great leader. Her findings may surprise you.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

Roselinde Torres | TED

Turn Collusion into Collaboration

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find most people have some sort of grievance about their work and it’s often something they can’t quantify. Bars are filled nightly with colleagues grumbling about their situation and those chats are often not about products.

Companies spend most of the time refining their offer and trying to increase revenue. Time is spent more on the business and what suffers is time in the business and more importantly on the people. All too often a 'less is more' mantra is adopted. Supplies are thrown from the boat in the hopes the survivors will make it home safely.

Downsize to Success?

Sometimes cuts need to be made but before you make them, have a close look at what’s going on in your organization. Without superior talented and well directed strong people, the amount of money you think you are saving from the bottom line by making knee jerk cuts will evaporate over time. While a competitor who values people and internal customer service over a quick fix may win the day.

A cynical colleague of mine often says; “Customers are profit. People are overhead”.
I couldn't disagree more. The passion and ideas of people are all we have and without them we can chase profit every day and we will never find it. Instead, we try four simple yet powerful words.

How can I help?
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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

livingcivil

Are You Busy?

There are meetings and family commitments and chores and email and deadlines and calls and stress and projects and the list continues. We are busy people doing busy things keeping busy with our busy lives being busy.

Years ago, I worked with a mentor who compared the work we were doing in a larger city next to when he lived in a smaller urban area. He said; “Sure this is a busier place, but I’m not convinced people are getting any more done.”

Technology Tether

We have devices that can share information across the planet in seconds. There are virtual teaming solutions that shrink the globe. I'm often on webinars with people from several countries. It's cool stuff! We have no shortage of ways to connect to each other. But do we really need to check our smartphones every waking moment in case we get an email we'l ignore because we're far too busy for that.

If you think if you can cram more into today than you did yesterday without paying much attention to any of it and grow your business, good luck. If you put the phone and busy away from a moment and enhance the relationships around you, I like your chances.

Or perhaps you’re too busy.
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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

udaya

Being a Vulnerable Leader

You may have seen this and it's worth seeing again. Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston and she has devoted much of her work in the past decade on vulnerability and how authenticity can help us in business and in life.

She explains in her funny and fascinating TEDx Houston talk.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

Brené Brown | TEDxHouston

Defining Success

Not many of us human types get up in the morning to focus on failing. We do our best, we learn each day, we try a little harder, we get a little smarter, and we focus a bit more on being successful. Whatever that means.

One of the worst measurements of success is comparison.

She has a better gig, he has a nicer car, they have a better life. Most of us have fallen into the trap but the key is to stay focused on what success means to each of us. But we get stuck, meet resistance, and sometimes get in our own way.

Richard St. John has been teaching his principles since he learned the hard way. The concept may be simple but it requires determination and a lifetime of focus to execute.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

People are Our Only Resource

The foundation of your business is people. That’s not some fluffy nice to have statement, it has been scientifically proven. If you have good relationships in your business, your chances of success will exponentially improve. If you view that human stuff as a waste of time, or a job for someone else, your company will be built on sand.

If you asked any business leader if they would like to have the most talented people on their team, it’s fairly safe to say you would get a positive response from one hundred percent of them. Who doesn't want the best?

Open Mind Policy

But if you were to subsequently ask them what specific daily steps are they personally making to ensure that happens, the answers could become a bit vaguer. I'm not referring to the employee handbook or some slick delegation process someone else oversees – steps they do themselves.

Now ask yourself those same two questions. You want the best, of course you do, but what are you doing today – not monthly or in your weekly wrap-up meetings or some all-staff email – but today, to help your team be the best?

Your answer has zero to do with your products or services.
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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

istock

Your Secret Sauce

If you sell stuff, make stuff, create stuff, consult stuff, help stuff, or think about stuff, once in a while someone will ask you why you are so special, what is your unique selling proposition, what do you bring that no one else can bring?

Meet Howard Moskowitz who has studied human behavior for decades. He has grasped the fact that we want to be happy but often we don't know how to achieve it.

Author and thought leader Malcolm Gladwell talked about Howard in his 2004 TED Talk that is just as valid a decade later. Watch this.


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Kneale Mann | Leadership Strategist, consultant, writer, speaker, executive coach facilitating performance growth with leaders, management, and teams.

TED | Gladwell | Moskowitz