by Charles Plant | Aug 29, 2012 | Exercises, Leadership Development
Well? Do you have one? I ask many people this question and I get very few coherent answers. This vision stuff is hard. It’s easier to go with the flow but as Yogi Berra famously said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.” You weren’t expecting that quote were you. You were probably expecting something like: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I also happen to like: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”
Whatever. The thing is, if you don’t have a personal vision, then your life will be subject to those around you who do have personal visions. You’ll spend your life making their visions into reality instead of making one of your own.
If you don’t have one of your own and want to develop one then you could read “A Lazy Man’s Guide to Success.”
For a short cut to developing your own vision, you could answer the following questions that come from the book:
What is your Work? What happens when you are giving your greatest gift to the world? How are people different as a consequence of having been in your presence? See it as an image. Use present tense. Answer these questions:
- What gives you a sense of aliveness, that feels “just right”?
- What do you dream about; what holds you spellbound?
- What are blessings you could give back to the world?
- Whose work or life inspires you?
- What would you talk about if given an hour of prime time TV to influence the nation or the world?
- What makes you angry enough to correct in the world?
- What contribution of yours will be more profound than others doing something similar?
by Charles Plant | Aug 22, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development, Video
Chip has written some great stuff in his book Emotional Equations. He really speaks to this issue of Intrapersonal Intelligence, measuring what makes you happy. I found this TED Talk very enjoyable and thought you would too.
I had trouble embedding the video so just follow this link:
by Charles Plant | Aug 20, 2012 | Leadership Development, Learning
Every now and then you meet someone with extraordinary intrapersonal skills but chances are, you may not even know it. That’s because you usually notice it only when someone has poor skills in this area.
Someone without good intrapersonal skills might be timid, take stupid risks or start yelling and screaming at the drop of a hat. You tend to notice these extremes of behaviour but you don’t notice it when someone is balanced and even tempered.
Intrapersonal skills are the foundations of a successful career. This is emotional intelligence, the ability to know, understand and mange your own emotions.
Years ago, I used to look at senior people in companies and wonder how on earth they got to where they are. With time I came to recognize that a lot of their success was predicated on emotional intelligence and have come to recognize that this type of intelligence has two parts, interpersonal skills and interpersonal skills.
I started looking at this list of interpersonal skills and found a whole slew of them that warranted examination. This isn’t an exhaustive list as there are so many skills you could list in this area
The List
Some people are high in some skills and low in others and no two people have the same set of skills in the same degrees. And the mix probably doesn’t correlate with effectiveness.
You just need enough interpersonal skills in enough different areas to be effective in a work situation..
by Charles Plant | Aug 14, 2012 | Exercises, Leadership Development
As a leader, you’ll understand the need to forgive and forget and the poison that comes from holding a grudge. That is after all, what makes you a leader. The hard part isn’t forgiving. The hard part is forgetting. When it comes down to it, in fact, should you even try to forget?
If you’re a good leader, you’ll be giving your staff lots of leeway to be making mistakes. After all, if they don’t make mistakes, they’re not going to learn anything. It can be quite painful in fact to watch the dunderheaded moves that some people can make. Staying quiet while they screw up is essential to being a good manager as long as the mistake isn’t catastrophic. So to help people learn and grow, you need to let them make mistakes and then you have to forgive them for those mistakes.
But forgetting, I don’t think so. If you did actually manage to forget then you risk someone making a mistake time after time. The key is to remember the mistake a but watch to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. If you do see something happen again and again then you’ll need to step in to make sure it stops finally.
If the issue never arises again then forgetting is also not appropriate as this is great fodder in a performance appraisal of how your direct report has grown and learned.
Try this at work:
Next time one of your direct reports does something totally outlandishly boneheaded, be quick to forgive and make sure your forgiveness is verbal. At the same time though, find some way to keep track in a performance management system of lessons learned so that while you forgive, you can remind them later of lessons that they have learned and how they have grown.
by Charles Plant | Aug 13, 2012 | Exercises, Leadership Development, Management Training
A Countryman’s son by accident trod upon a Serpent’s tail, which turned and bit him so that he died.
The father in a rage got his axe, and pursuing the Serpent, cut off part of its tail. So the Serpent in revenge began stinging several of the Farmer’s cattle and caused him severe loss.
Well, the Farmer thought it best to make it up with the Serpent, and brought food and honey to the mouth of its lair, and said to it: “Let’s forget and forgive; perhaps you were right to punish my son, and take vengeance on my cattle, but surely I was right in trying to revenge him; now that we are both satisfied why should not we be friends again?”
“No, no,” said the Serpent; “take away your gifts; you can never forget the death of your son, nor I the loss of my tail.”
Injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten.
by Charles Plant | Aug 7, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Exercises, Leadership Development
Work, like life, is usually two steps forward and one step back. Your ability to handle the one step back periods is what will define a lot of your success. To get through the setbacks, you’ll need resilience.
Resilience, or the ability to bounce back from setbacks, can be comprised of the following 8 qualities identified by Frederic Flach, MD in his book, “Resilience: How to Bounce Back When the Going Gets Tough” :
- A sense of hope .
- The ability to tolerate painful emotions.
- Seeing other perspectives.
- Having a support system.
- Belief that you control your own destiny.
- A good self-image and self-respect.
- Self-reflection and insight.
- A sense of humour and lots of interests.
Of these eight qualities, seven of them take a long time to develop but there is one that is easy to put in practice right away. That is perspective. Being able to see things from multiple perspectives will make you see that what you are going through isn’t all that bad.
Try this at work:
The next time you have a setback at work and find that you are feeling sorry for yourself then try seeing your situation from another perspective.
- First, take your bosses perspective. Chances are that your setback is not all that material to your boss and perhaps it shouldn’t be material to you either.
- Instead of looking at what went wrong, look at what might have also gone right in that situation, however small.
- Look at all the other things that are going right in other situations.
- Look at what you can learn from the setback.
- Finally look at what happened in relation to your whole life. Is the setback all that important?
