Today, I welcome thought-leader Nathan Magnuson as guest blogger...
Nathan writes:
Nathan writes:
This is it, your first day in a formal leadership role. You’ve worked hard as an individual
contributor at one or possibly several organizations. Now management has finally seen fit to promote
you into a position as one of their own: a supervisor. You don’t care if your new team is only one
person or ten, you’re just excited that now – finally – you will be in charge!
Unfortunately the euphoria is short-lived. Almost immediately, you are not only overwhelmed
with the responsibilities of a team, but you quickly find that your team
members are not as experienced or adroit as you. Some aren’t even as committed. You find yourself having to repeat yourself,
send their work back for corrections, and staying late to fill the gap. If something doesn’t change soon, you might
just run yourself into the ground. How
did something that looked so easy all of a sudden become so hard?
Now what?
Does this sound familiar? Fortunately, Dale
Carnegie worked long and hard to provide answers for those of us in this
exact situation. Among the many
principles he shared in his two classic books How to Win Friends and Influence People
and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,
Carnegie included nine ways to simply be a leader. Here they are:
1. Begin
with praise and honest appreciation. This doesn’t mean simply buttering
someone up so you can tear them down. When
you begin with praise, the other person is open to hearing what you have to say
and you earn relational capital.
2. Call
attention to people’s mistakes indirectly. Confrontation only puts people on the
defensive. Use your best effort to avoid making someone’s shortcomings the sole
purpose of your interaction with them.
3. Talk
about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person. Mark Batterson once said that people often
relate more to our failures than our successes. Admitting our own mistakes makes us seem more
human.
4. Ask
questions instead of giving direct orders. When you ask a question, you put the “ball” in
the other person’s court. Instead of
simply following your directive, you empower them to take leadership
initiative.
5. Let the
other person save face. I
once wired $77 million to the wrong bank. There’s no way to sugarcoat that, no matter
how hard you try! Thankfully, my
supervisor put the emphasis on the complexity of the situation instead of on my
oversight and even took some of the responsibility on himself.
6. Praise
the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your
approbation and lavish in your praise.” Most
people get this entirely backwards. They
are “hardly” in their praise and lavish in their criticism. Make much ado about small wins. Everyone likes to be celebrated.
7. Give the
other person a fine reputation to live up to. You simply can’t do this without believing
the best about the other person. Tell
the other person what you truly believe they can become, and they will work
hard not to let you down.
8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct. This doesn’t mean to downplay inappropriate
behavior, only to use encouragement to gain momentum that can carry over into
areas that need improvement.
9. Make the
other person happy about doing the thing you suggest. The only way to get anyone to do anything is
for them to want to. Zig Ziglar
says that happiness is one of the
eight things everyone wants. If you
make the other person happy, you’ll truly experience a win-win.
Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, and thought leader. Visit him often
at NathanMagnuson.com or
follow him on Twitter.
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