How To Be A Better Leader: 70 Tips

Back by popular demand...

The 70 tips below make for a good list for learning how to become a better leader when you don't have a lot of time to read books about leadership.

And, if you've been a leader for a long time, how about taking a few minutes to run through the list and scoring yourself on how well you carry out each leadership skill?

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

Comments

Communicate Often And Tell A Story

"Most leaders' visions fail, not due to a leader's inadequacies, but due to the leader's lack of communication," said Margaret Reynolds of Reynolds Consulting, LLC in Lee's Summit, MO. Reynolds shared her expertise with me recently during an interview. She added that it's not that leaders don't communicate, but that they don't beat the drum regularly enough. "Leaders need to communicate often, regularly and consistently," she recommended. "In terms of how to communicate so people get it, it is pretty widely accepted that story telling is the most effective," explained Reynolds. Leaders need to paint a vision where people see it often. She recommends that leaders share their vision at least seven to 10 times with their employees, and to make it clear to everyone what specifically each person can do each day to help achieve the collective mission. Reynolds' other advice to leaders is to be one who: •listens with respect...

Key Interviewing Questions To Ask To Identify Leaders

The next time you are interviewing a candidate and you want to access their leadership skills, consider asking the candidate these questions: What personal qualities define you as a leader? Describe a situation when these qualities helped you lead others. Give an example of when you demonstrated good leadership. What is the toughest group from which you've had to get cooperation? Have you ever had difficulty getting others to accept your ideas? What was your approach? Did it work? Describe a situation in which you had to change your leadership style to achieve the goal? One leadership skill is the ability to accommodate different views in the workplace, regardless of what they are. What have you done to foster a wide number of views in your work environment? Thanks to Sharon Armstrong, author of The Essential HR Handbook , for these helpful questions!

Find The Ideal Tone For Your Emails

Can't quite master the ideal tone for the emails you send employees and customers? Or, do you have employees whole struggle with the tone of their emails? You might want to check out ToneCheck. ToneCheck , a software program that works with Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010, helps to ensure your tone is clearly communicated and understood. It acts somewhat similar to an email spell checker, and you can select the suggested alternatives or ignore the advice. The program evaluates words and phrases for the intensity of eight primary emotions, allowing you to adjust the overall tone before you send your message. ToneCheck scans your messages for terms that may be inadvertently conveying: • Affection • Friendliness • Amusement • Excitement • Sadness • Grief • Fear • Uneasiness • Anger • Shame Over 165 billion email messages are sent worldwide each day. The average worker will spend 10 years of their work life dealing with email. And, sometimes, perhaps all t...

How To Write An Employee Satisfaction And Engagement Survey

According to Polaris , a company that specializes in employee research, “a company’s employees are often the face and frontline of an organization and their opinion of that organization affects their attitude, thus affecting customers’ attitudes, behavior and ultimately, the bottom line.” That is why Polaris recommends that business leaders conduct employee research that allows leaders to better understand what motivates employees, drives loyalty, and makes and keeps employees happy. “An added benefit of conducting employee satisfaction research is that, in doing so, a company lets their employees know they are important, their opinions and suggestions matter, and there is a sincere desire to make the company an enjoyable place to work,” reports Polaris. Here are 10 questions Polaris recommends you ask employees as part of a wide-ranging employee satisfaction and engagement survey : For each of the following statements, indicate if you: • Strongly disagree • Disagree • Somew...

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 ha...

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 ot...

Give Positive Feedback. Don't Praise.

There is an important difference between giving your employees positive feedback and giving them praise . Positive feedback focuses on the specifics of job performance. Praise, often one-or two-sentence statements, such as “Keep up the good work,” without positive feedback leaves employees with empty feelings. Worse yet, without positive feedback, employees feel no sense that they are appreciated as individual talents with specific desires to learn and grow on the job and in their careers, reports Nicholas Nigro, author of, The Everything Coaching and Mentoring Book . So, skip the praise and give positive feedback that is more uplifting to your employees because it goes to the heart of their job performance and what they actually do. An example of positive feedback is : “Bob, your communications skills have dramatically improved over the past couple of months. The report that you just prepared for me was thorough and concise. I appreciate all the work you’ve put into it, as...

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 : Honesty and integrity Learning and initiative Resilience Positive attitude 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

Do Exit Interviews

Knowing why an employee leaves your company can help you to reduce your employee turnover rate. That's because you can use the reasons a departing employee provides to gather information about processes, people and departments that might need some redirection to correct situations that may have contributed to the employee's reasons for leaving. So, do an exit interview whenever possible with each departing employee. Ask each person: Why they are leaving What they liked about their job What they would have changed about their job How they felt about the cooperation level among co-workers How they felt about communication and interaction with co-workers Whether they received the necessary training to do their job Whether they received frequent coaching and balanced feedback from their supervisor Would they recommend a friend apply for work at your company How they felt about their pay How they would describe the morale in the company and in thei...

Use A Board Of Advisors

David Burkus often provides valuable comments to my various Blog postings, and he's a person who effectively uses a board of advisors, instead of mentors, to help him achieve success. "I've found that in my life, it was easier and more effective to set up a board of advisors," said Burkus, the editor of LeaderLab . "This is a group of people, three to five, that have rotated into my life at various times and that speak into it and help me grow. I benefit from the variety of experience these people have." LeaderLab is an online community of resources dedicated to promoting the practice of leadership theory. Its contributors include consultants and professors who present leadership theory in a practitioner-friendly format that provides easy-to-follow explanations on how to apply the best of leadership theory. Community users can download a variety of research reports and presentations about leadership and leadership versus management. For example, a pr...

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