by Charles Plant | Jul 10, 2012 | Exercises, Leadership Development
The Dog and the Wolf
A gaunt Wolf was almost dead with hunger when he happened to meet a House-dog who was passing by. “Ah, Cousin,” said the Dog. “I knew how it would be; your irregular life will soon be the ruin of you. Why do you not work steadily as I do, and get your food regularly given to you?”
“I would have no objection,” said the Wolf, “if I could only get a place.” “I will easily arrange that for you,” said the Dog; “come with me to my master and you shall share my work.”
So the Wolf and the Dog went towards the town together. On the way there the Wolf noticed that the hair on a certain part of the Dog’s neck was very much worn away, so he asked him how that had come about. “Oh, it is nothing,” said the Dog. “That is only the place where the collar is put on at night to keep me chained up; it chafes a bit, but one soon gets used to it.” “Is that all?” said the Wolf. “Then good-bye to you, Master Dog.”
Better starve free than be a fat slave.
And so it goes at work. If you take no risks you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll end up being a very fat slave, eating well but unfree.
The ability to take measured risks is one of the key components of leadership. The key is to be taking risks that are manageable and measured, ones that will not destroy your career.
Try this at work:
Risk is personal. What might be risky to you may not be risky at all to other people. What you need to do to start down the path to risk taking is to first identify those things that you find risky and then begin to try a strategy to manage your risks.
- Identify 5 things that you find risky at work.
- For each item, figure out the rewards for taking the risk.
- Next figure out the consequences of failure.
- Evaluate all of those items and pick one that seems the least risky.
- Now go and do it, take that risk and see whether it works.
Once you get the hang of taking risks, you should be trying out your new risk taking behaviour on a regular basis, trying new things and learning from them.
If you feel like it, tell me what you find risky and how you’ll manage taking that risk.
by Charles Plant | Jul 9, 2012 | Leadership Development, Literature Review
McKinsey has done some interesting research and written a great article on how leaders kill meaning at work. I had a conversation recently with a friend who is a recruiter and we were discussing (not gossiping) about a variety of people we know who are serial tormenters. They go from job to job, tormenting new people at every organization. The recruiting system must be broken if this keeps going on. I guess they get good references from current employers in the hopes that they’ll leave.
The funny thing is that the serial tormenters I know don’t even realize that they are doing it. They seem to think everyone else is doing something wrong. Where do serial tormenters come from? Are serial tormenters born or are they made? Do they learn from being tormented themselves? Great research ideas if anyone out there has time.
Ask yourself: Do you work for a serial tormenter? Could you be one yourself? Would you know it if you were one?
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by Charles Plant | Jul 7, 2012 | Leadership Development, Video
When I was out interviewing people, I asked a basic question: What was the most valuable skill you learned to become an effective leader? I was surprised by the answer because I thought that they would reply with something like Delegation as that would have been my reply. What most of them identified as the most important leadership skill was Listening. James Standen did a great job of explaining why this was the case.
http://vimeo.com/45210222
If you are getting this blog in an email, click on the link to the blog to be able to watch the video.
by Charles Plant | Jul 5, 2012 | Management
There’s a great story about a programmer named Ron Avitzur that was pointed out to me by my Director of Content Acquisition, Lachlan Plant (aka, my son). Ron was working for Apple on a project as a contractor when the project was canned and he was terminated, fired, canned, etc.
No big deal except that Ron was really keen about completing what he was working on. What he did about it was to keep working on the project, at Apple, by keeping his old pass for a while, by sneaking in at other times, by claiming office space and resources, some of it with the cooperation of Apple staff who knew what he was doing. He even got a friend who had been terminated to work on the project as well. They both claimed they worked for each other to make sure they weren’t discovered.
They both continued on working until the project was complete, tested, and bundled with a software release as Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers.
Don’t you wish you had employees with that type of initiative. A perfect counterpoint to Milton Waddams from Office Space.
by Charles Plant | Jul 4, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development
Are you being tormented by your boss? Do you cringe at the thought of going to work in the morning? Perhaps you’ve quit and stayed. If this is the case then there’s a good chance that you’re suffering from left-brain leadership.
Left-brain leaders focus on logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy. Right-brain leaders, on the other hand, focus on aesthetics, feeling, and creativity. Here’s a chart that shows the difference.
Left-brain leaders tend to be from engineering, computer science, accounting, banking, science and many other hyper-logical disciplines. Right-brain leaders tend to come from sales, marketing, and HR.
If you have a left-brain leader, chances are you’re experiencing one or more of the following behaviours:
- Relying only on logic for decisions.
- Denying that emotion has any place in business.
- Being a perfectionist.
- Micromanaging you.
- Assigning responsibility without authority.
- Being a stickler for process.
- Not explaining the context behind decisions.
- Expecting you to work faster and faster as volume increases.
- Keeping you in the dark because you just don’t need to know.
- Berating you or criticizing you, especially in public.
Left-brain leaders really need to learn the emotional side of business. They need to learn how to communicate, how to connect and how to motivate and that logic isn’t always the way to solve a problem.
If you’ve got other examples of how left-brain leaders torment you, I would love to hear them through comments.
Try this at work:
