Say thank you

by | Jun 14, 2012 | Management, Video

In case you need to be reminded, saying thank you is one of the most powerful tools in business. Listen to Anne Avery on this subject.

http://vimeo.com/43540277

Gregg Saretsky – WestJet CEO

by | Jun 13, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leaders

Gregg Saretsky gets a lot of press for his efforts to improve the performance of Canadian airline WestJet. What he should also get a lot of press about is his skill as a leader. I really liked a story about Gregg working a flight recently as a cabin attendant. he was obviously experienced in the role and comfortable joking with passengers and staff alike as the flight progressed.

Having worked his whole life in the airline industry, he can empathize with other staff and bring a much more personal touch to the role that someone who would never have worked in the industry. This degree of empathy that experience brings is essential, not only in the good times but particularly in bad ones as well.

An empathetic leader will still have to make the tough calls but employees are much more comforted and thus motivated even in bad times knowing that someone understands what their troubles might be, is sensitive to their needs and has their back.

Are leaders born or made?

by | Jun 12, 2012 | Leadership Development, Literature Review

Research from the Center for Creative Leadership attempted to answer the question of whether leaders are born or made. You can read the research here. While 52% of the respondents believe that leaders are made, fully 19% believe that people are born leaders. A further 28% believe that they are both born and made.

I found it to be a very strange topic to research. If you look at the results, 48% of people would appear to believe that you need to be born with leadership capabilities to become a leader and of those, 19% think that no amount of training can help. I suppose that those who believe that you need to have some innate leadership capability would be those that support streaming of children in early grades or that an aristocracy is a better form of government than a meritocracy. The same discussion takes place all the time in the world of entrepreneurship wherein people attempt to pontificate about whether entrepreneurs are born or made.

It is a silly discussion as it doesn’t get us anywhere as a society. We need entrepreneurs and we need leaders. Every single person has some degree of entrepreneurial spirit and some degree of leadership capability. Leadership does not only happen at the CEO level or in politics. Each and every person needs to perform some act of leadership even if that is only providing a vision and motivating oneself to get through the day. Every person in a working environment who collaborates with others needs to perform small acts of leadership on a daily basis.

I’m hoping that the Center for Creative Leadership come out soon with a study about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Perhaps instead of arguing about whether leaders are born or made, we should be trying to figure out how to accelerate their growth as fully 81% seem to believe that this is possible..

Leadership lessons from Survivor – It does take some skill

by | Jun 8, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence

I must first admit that I love Survivor. I have watched every single episode, almost all of them when originally aired. Now there are two types of people who like Survivor; really stupid ones and really smart ones. I’m not sure which I am. The reason I like it is that it is so close to the business world that the game becomes reality when looked at in a business context. Just as in business, you need to build a strategy, keep yourself positive, communicate well, build alliances and if you want to win you need to motivate people. These are essential leadership skills that come together in one person only once in a while. The last winner, from Survivor One World was Kim Spradlin, a 29 year old bridal shop owner from San Antonio.

I’ll do a number of posts about the show in upcoming weeks but this is the first. Kim was really special in terms of past winners as she had it all. She played the game flawlessly and deserves the million dollars. The first thing she had was skill.

You need some degree of skill

Survivor is partly an athletic game so you need some athletic abilities to make it to the end. You don’t have to be the best athlete but at some point in time you must prove yourself on the field of combat. Kim had the perfect set of athletic skills and in fact went on to win four individual challenges. She had competitors like Jay, Matt, Michael and Troy who probably had more athletic ability but in Survivor, that is usually a hinderance. The people with no athletic ability or outdoor skills get voted out first. The ones with very strong athletic skills typically make it to the merger of tribes because of what they offer to the tribe in winning contests. After the merge however, the game is individual and a strong competitor will likley be thought of as a threat and be voted out unless they are really good at getting along with others.

But it takes more than skill

So you’re probably wondering how this compares to business. Well, in business if you are very strong at a certain skill such as finance but weak at emotional intelligence, your career will rise and hit a ceiling at some point in time. You are milked for your skills but don’t make the top rung of the ladder in most situations. That’s why:

‘A’ students work for ‘B’ and ‘C’ students.