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Great teams are led by great leaders, and great leaders all share traits that are absolutely essential to their ability to lead. These are the 5 most important traits leaders have - if you're a leader, they will transform the way you lead for mind-blowingly rewarding results.
Via The Learning Factor
Renée Gendron reminds managers that they need to understand the reasons for and benefits of change for themselves—before they start a rollout with their team members.
Research shows that in leaderless groups, leaders emerge by quickly synchronizing their brain waves with followers through high quality conversations. Simply put, synchrony is a neural process where the frequency and scale of brain waves of people become in sync. Verbal communication plays a large role in synchronization, especially between leaders and followers. Synchrony between leaders and followers leads to mutual understanding, cooperation, coordinated execution of tasks, and collective creativity. On the surface, brain synchrony seems easy to understand. It simply implies that people are literally on the same wavelength. Yet, at a deeper level, interpersonal synchrony involves much more. Dr. Daniel Siegel explains that “presence”, “wholeness”, and “resonance” are at the core of the ability to develop synchrony. Recent advances in brain science can help leaders learn to synchronize with followers on these deeper levels:
Via The Learning Factor
It can be tough enough to manage your own stress. But how can you, as a manager, help the members of your team handle their feelings of stress, burnout, or disengagement? Because work is getting more demanding and complex, and because many of us now work in 24/7 environments, anxiety and burnout are not uncommon. In our high-pressure workplaces, staying productive and engaged can be challenging. Although it’s unlikely that the pace or intensity of work will change much anytime soon, there’s a growing body of research that suggests certain types of development activities can effectively build the capacity for resilience.
Via The Learning Factor
A retired Scottish footballer and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist don’t seem like the likeliest of friends and collaborators. But Alex Ferguson, the long-time manager of the ultra-successful Manchester United team, and Michael Moritz, the chairman of Sequoia Capital, have more in common than you might suspect. Ferguson, whose team won 38 trophies in the 27 years he coached, and Moritz, an early investor in Google, Yahoo, and Airbnb, have both thought long and hard about the art of management. Together they’ve written a book on the art of management — Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United — that distills the lessons in leadership Ferguson learned while heading the world’s most successful sports franchise. Becoming a star on the football pitch (as Europeans call a soccer field) and in business requires “practice, practice, and practice,” and the successful manager must always be prepared to “retune things,” Ferguson told a group of Stanford Graduate School of Business students.
Via The Learning Factor
In the last 10 years, authenticity has become the gold standard of leadership. This is a sea change from 2003 when I wrote Authentic Leadership. Back then, many people asked what it meant to be authentic. Authentic Leadership was intended as a clarion call to the new generation to learn from negative examples like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco. In it, I defined authentic leaders as genuine, moral and character-based leaders: "People of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations … who have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values who have the courage to build their companies to meet the needs of all their stakeholders, and who recognize the importance of their service to society."
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Coming of age for working women in the "lean-in" era isn't easy. For millennial women (those born between 1980 and 1994), life and work are blended. The same technology that makes staying connected so easy makes staying "on" after working hours easy as well. Meanwhile, businesses expect more work for less pay, and parenting challenges are leading many women to take more time off work. That helps explain why 34% of millennial women say they aren't interested in becoming a boss or top manager, according to a Pew Research Center study. Like their male counterparts, millennial women place a higher value on security and flexibility than on pay. But that doesn't mean they're satisfied with their working lives. In fact, 75% of millennial women say gender inequality in the workplace is an issue that needs addressing, compared with just 57% of millennial men. Here's a look at some of those obstacles and what millennial women can do to get past them.
Via The Learning Factor
Everyone wants to be recognized for doing a good job, to be able to earn promotions and raises and to move up the organization. However, the path isn't always clear, and sometimes we are our own worst enemies--standing in the way of our own success.
Via The Learning Factor
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I am feeling great this week. It must be the benefit of a vacation—not only did we enjoy wonderful weather in a beautiful place, I unplugged from the news as well as from social media. Doing this also removed me from the seemingly endless and snarky commentary that accompanies any substantial story these days. It reminded me that anyone can point out what is wrong, what doesn’t work, and what is unfair. The insidiousness of the critical perspective is that it attracts additional criticism. Then, a big pile of what’s wrong is mounded up on the table. It’s hard to see anything else! But is that useful?
When discussing business leadership, the distinction between good management and good leadership is often made. Managers are thought to be the budgeters, the organizers, the controllers — the ants, as one observer puts it — while leaders are the charismatic, big-picture visionaries, the ones who change the whole ant farm. But such a construction, those interviewed for this article agree, erroneously leads to a bimodal way of looking at something that should really be evaluated on two separate scales. "Everybody has got a little bit of each in them," says John Kotter, who admits he is sometimes guilty of using the dichotomy in an effort at simplification. "It's much better to think in terms of measuring people on a zero-to-ten scale for each quality."
Via The Learning Factor
Are you a successful leader? This is a difficult question to answer: No matter how good you think you are, the only evidence of leadership is whether people follow you. Self-serving bias distorts your perception of your own successes and failures. Even if you’re incredibly self-aware, you may have trouble with an objective assessment because your direct reports may only appear to be following — they don’t get an option to be physically present — and not every company conducts rigorous engagement surveys or 360-degree reviews. So how can you gain a reasonably accurate understanding of your success as a leader? Try integrating three distinctive views.
Via The Learning Factor
A little more than two years ago, Stanford GSB lecturer and serial board member David Dodson conducted an informal survey of company board members. He queried CEOs as well as the members, and compiled a list of best practices for these advisory panels.
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Few things are as damaging to an organization as a dysfunctional leader. Left unaddressed, the corrosive impact will show up in low morale, stifled development and poor results. Sadly, most toxic leaders are blithely oblivious of the damage they create. If the slackers would just do their jobs, they think, performance would go up. Leaders come in all kinds of styles and dispositions ranging from tyrants to wimps. What follows are five signs of a dysfunctional leader and tips any leader can use to become more functional.
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There are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. - Simon Sinek The idea of being a leader always appealed to me. I held my first management position at 22, leading a small production team in a bookbindery. I loved being in charge--making decisions and trying to motivate my team. But one day, I heard a comment I've never forgotten. After chastising a line worker for a mistake, he snapped back: You know, you're the type of manager the rest of us hate.
Via The Learning Factor
The world requires a new paradigm, where empathy is innovation and vulnerability is strength.
Via Maria Rachelle
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Great teams are led by great leaders, and great leaders all share traits that are absolutely essential to their ability to lead.
Fantastic points on what characteristics make a good leader. I would also add transparency, I have found that employees thrive when having a very clear picture of what earns an A and conversely what merits an F. It is very disconcerting for employees when working for someone when they are never quite sure where they stand,