70 New Year's Resolutions For Leaders

Lose weight. Exercise more. Stop smoking. Read more. Shop less. Volunteer.

Okay, so you've found your New Year's resolution for your personal life. But, have you identified your New Year's resolution for your workplace life?

If not, and you want to be a more effective leader for your team at work in 2011, select one or more of these 70 New Year's resolutions for leaders:
1.  Don't micromanage
2.  Don't be a bottleneck
3.  Focus on outcomes, not minutiae
4.  Build trust with your colleagues before a crisis comes
5.  Assess your company's strengths and weaknesses at all times
6.  Conduct annual risk reviews
7.  Be courageous, quick and fair
8.  Talk more about values more than rules
9.  Reward how a performance is achieved and not only the performance
10.  Constantly challenge your team to do better
11.  Celebrate your employees' successes, not your own
12.  Err on the side of taking action
13.  Communicate clearly and often
14.  Be visible
15.  Eliminate the cause of a mistake
16.  View every problem as an opportunity to grow
17.  Summarize group consensus after each decision point during a meeting
18.  Praise when compliments are earned
19.  Be decisive
20.  Say "thank you" and sincerely mean it
21.  Send written thank you notes
22.  Listen carefully and don't multi-task while listening
23.  Teach something new to your team
24.  Show respect for all team members
25.  Follow through when you promise to do something
26.  Allow prudent autonomy
27.  Respond to questions quickly and fully
28.  Return e-mails and phone calls promptly
29.  Give credit where credit is due
30.  Take an interest in your employees and their personal milestone events
31.  Mix praise with constructive feedback for how to make improvement
32.  Learn the names of your team members even if your team numbers in the hundreds
33.  Foster mutual commitment
34.  Admit your mistakes
35.  Remove nonperformers
36.  Give feedback in a timely manner and make it individualized and specific
37.  Hire to complement, not to duplicate
38.  Volunteer within your community and allow your employees to volunteer
39.  Promote excellent customer service both internally and externally
40.  Show trust
41.  Encourage peer coaching
42.  Encourage individualism and welcome input
43.  Share third-party compliments about your employees with your employees
44.  Be willing to change your decisions
45.  Be a good role model
46.  Be humble
47.  Explain each person's relevance
48.  End every meeting with a follow-up To Do list
49.  Explain the process and the reason for the decisions you make
50.  Read leadership books to learn
51.  Set clear goals and objectives
52.  Reward the doers
53.  Know yourself
54.  Use job descriptions
55.  Encourage personal growth and promote training, mentoring and external education
56.  Share bad news, not only good news
57.  Start meetings on time
58.  Discipline in private
59.  Seek guidance when you don't have the answer
60.  Tailor your motivation techniques
61.  Support mentoring - both informal and formal mentoring
62.  Don't interrupt
63.  Ask questions to clarify
64.  Don't delay tough conversations
65.  Have an open door policy
66.  Dig deep within your organization for ideas on how to improve processes, policies and procedures
67.  Do annual written performance appraisals
68.  Insist on realism
69.  Explain how a change will impact employees' feelings before, during and after the change is implemented
70.  Have face-to-face interaction as often as possible

A Maxim For Leaders For 2011

I heard this advice quoted the other day and wanted to share it.  It's from William Arthur Ward, one of America's most quoted writers of inspirational maxims:

• Do more than belong: participate.
• Do more than care: help.
• Do more than believe: practice.
• Do more than be fair:  be kind.
• Do more than forgive: forget.
• Do more than dream: work.

All great advice for leaders and managers as we start 2011.

Resolve To Find A Mentor In 2011

Having a mentor is one of the best things you can do to advance your career as a leader. So, decide today to secure a mentor who will work with you during 2011. Make that one of your New Year’s resolutions.

A mentor can benefit leaders new to their leadership role and they can benefit experienced and seasoned leaders, as well.

A strong mentoring relationship allows the mentor and the mentee to develop new skills and talents, to build confidence, and to build self-awareness.

Proper mentoring takes a commitment from both parties and it takes time to develop and to reap the rewards of the relationship. Plan to work with your mentor for no less than three months, and ideally for six months or longer.

When seeking out a mentor, think about these questions:
1.  Will the relationship have good personal chemistry?
2.  Can this person guide me, particularly in the areas where I am weakest?
3.  Will this person take a genuine interest in me?
4.  Does this person have the traits and skills I want to develop?
5.  Is this a person I admire?
6.  Does this person have the time needed to properly mentor me? And, do I also have the time to devote to a mentoring relationship?

Most often, you’ll find your best mentors are not your supervisors, but instead are other individuals in your workplace, at other companies in your city, or are members of organizations to which you belong.

Before you start to search for your mentor for 2011, take some time to learn more about mentoring — how mentoring programs work most effectively and what to expect from a mentoring relationship.

One nice benefit of having mentoring as a New Year’s resolution is you’ll have a dedicated partner helping you to fulfill your resolution!

Great Year-End Advice For Leaders

Lynn Flinn of EWF International in Tulsa, OK wrote the following in a recent newsletter.  It's so powerful I wanted to pass it along.  EWF International provides professionally facilitated peer advisory groups for women business owners and executives.

• Do something that you are afraid to do. Run through the fear rather than running away from it.
• Take a personal risk. Tell someone something you've always wished you'd said to them.
• Write a note to someone who inspires you but probably doesn't know it.
• Pick one characteristic about yourself that you'd like to change and earnestly work on changing it. It is really hard to change a behavior, but it is possible if you are aware, patient and persistent in making a change.
• Realize when you are not engaged and re-engage. Turn off the television, turn off the cell phone and pay attention to the people around you.
• Smile and talk to strangers that you meet. It is amazing how much shorter a long line feels when you are talking to someone versus focusing on how long the line is.
• Meditate, pray, relax, exercise, hike, laugh or whatever brings you peace. Some people say they are just too busy to do these things, but taking time for self-renewal shows self-awareness, not selfishness.
• Take a trip somewhere that you've never been. It could even be a place you've never visited in your home town. How many experiences have you overlooked in your own town, because you just keep going to the same familiar places?
• Do something meaningful for a non-profit organization. Volunteers are the lifeblood of non-profit organizations. If everyone volunteers a few hours a week, think how much non-profits can accomplish.
• Don't get stuck in the same old routine. Shake it up and do something different. Something as simple as taking a different route to work or going someplace new for lunch makes life a little more interesting.

Thanks Lynn for this great end-of-the-year advice.

Ask Your Customers To Help You Write Your Strategic Plan

Mike Brown, the founder of the Kansas City company called, The Brainzooming Group, encourages business leaders to solicit feedback from their customers when creating a strategic plan.

Brown recently wrote in Smart Companies Thinking Bigger magazine, that you should “ask a group of current, former and potential customers the following questions:"

• If you’re a current or former customer, why did you start using us?
• What have we done in the past to make your biggest challenges more difficult?
• If you still use us, why do you continue to do so?
• If you don’t use us currently, what are some of the reasons why you don’t?

“These questions are designed to allow your customers to share their perspectives and opinions openly, not rate performance on a numerical scale,” explained Brown.

He explained that the answers to the questions will provide you valuable insight into:

• Your current strengths and weaknesses
• Opportunities to more successfully help your customers
• Potential challenges from not fully meeting customer expectations

Mike Brown is the author of the ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation,” a guide to breaking through personal challenges to living a more creative and innovation-oriented life.

The Five Points Of Professionalism

Here's more good advice from The Everything Coaching And Mentoring Book:

Professional behavior on the job means that work habits are strong and consistent.  Your organization's work ethic should be solution- and positive-results-oriented.

And you should regularly take inventory of these five points of professionalism:

1. Honesty and integrity
2. Learning and initiative
3. Resilience
4. Positive attitude
5. Teamwork

Check out these useful online resources for more coaching and mentoring tips and advice:

• Micomentor
• The Center for Coaching and Mentoring
• The Coaching and Mentoring Network
• Coaching and Mentoring for Small Business Owners
• Manager's Forum
• Coaching and Mentoring Careers
• Peer Resources
• Coaching and Mentoring Training

How To Talk About Poor Performance With An Employee

As a leader, the time will come when you will have to speak with an employee about his or her poor performance. Perhaps that time is now as you conduct year-end performance reviews.

So, here are six steps that will guide you through that process:

1.  Tell him what performance is in need of change and be specific.
2.  Tell him how his actions negatively affect the team.
3.  Let the discussion sink in.
4.  Set expectations of performance improvement and timeframe, and get his agreement on the desired outcome.
5.  Remind him that he is a valuable part of the team and that you have confidence his performance will improve.
6.  Don't rehash the discussion later. You made your point. Give him time to make his improvement.

3 Coaching And Mentoring Tips

Here are three great tips from the book, The Everything Coaching and Mentoring Book:

• Coaches do not motivate their employees; they inspire them to motivate themselves.  This is best accomplished by allowing employees to see clearly where they stand in the organization versus where they want to be in their careers.  That is, what are their self-interests versus what the company can offer them.
• A mentor always exercises the power of suggestion. That is, wise mentors offer up plenty of suggestions to their mentees. They pose alternatives.  But they refrain, as much as possible, from telling their mentees what to do.
• Mentoring is all about sharing experiences.  It is about mentors imparting the multiple lessons that they've learned to their mentees and helping them better navigate through their own careers.  By absorbing these lessons--of mentors' mistakes and successes--mentees are better prepared to move forward with knowledge and confidence.

How To Avoid 8 Common Performance Evaluation Pitfalls

As the year comes to a close it's likely time for many business leaders to tackle the annual performance appraisal process.

So, here is a good reminder from author Sharon Armstrong about how to avoid eight performance evaluation pitfalls.  These are in what I consider is the best chapter of the book The Essential HR Handbook, that she co-authored with Barbara Mitchell.
1.  Clustering everyone in the middle performance-rating categories
2.  Overlooking flaws or exaggerating the achievements of favored employees
3.  Excusing substandard performance or behavior because it is widespread
4.  Letting one characteristic - positive or negative - affect your overall assessment
5.  Rating someone based on the company he or she keeps
6.  Rating someone based on a grudge you are holding
7.  Rating someone based on a short time period instead of the entire evaluation period
8.  Rating everyone high, to make you look good

There's other great information in this 250-page book that is valuable for any manager, and especially good for managers who are new in their leadership position.

When Armstrong isn't writing books, she's reading. One of her favorite books is The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, written by Leigh Branham of the company Keeping The People, Inc., based in Overland Park, KS.