What’s interesting is what gets frontline managers and executives fired. While there is some basic commonality between frontline leadership and senior leadership, senior leaders get promoted for certain abilities that aren’t necessarily required of frontline leaders, they get fired for different things, and their role is fundamentally different.
There’s an easy way for you to practically apply the Dead Man’s Test. The easy way to pass the test is to avoid saying ‘don’t’. Or to put it another way, don’t say don’t.
It’s quite amazing what dead men don’t do. But dead men can teach you something about Effective Leadership.
Your expectations of people and their expectations of themselves are key factors in how well people perform at work. Known as the Pygmalion Effect, the power of expectations cannot be overestimated.
When it comes to maximising employee motivation and performance, first and mid-level managers matter much more than senior leaders. And the reason is as old as the history of human kind.
If you’re interested in dramatically improving employee motivation and performance, then you’ll be interested in Daniel Pink’s latest book, “Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.”
In the modern western world the cult of work has become highly valued. Its most recent incarnation is the ‘always on’ culture. Being available via mobile and email, if not 24/7, then at least more hours each day than was acceptable a decade ago.
Of course it feels good to be busy, to submit to the siren call of activity. Yet there is no special virtue in hard work.
The great military and political leader of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, was quoted as saying, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon.”
In more recent times, the Corporate Leadership Council identified that fair and accurate informal positive feedback from a knowledgeable source (such as a person’s immediate manager) is the single most effective performance management lever available.
In last week’s post, “What’s the Difference between Feedback and Feedforward”, I noted that discussions that are mostly past focussed feel more like an interrogation that creates defensiveness. On the other hand, discussions that are mostly future focussed feel like a supportive coaching discussion that emphasises problem solving and creates opportunities. Consequently, in many situations you face day-to-day, feedforward makes much more sense than feedback.
We know what feedback is, even if we frequently don’t like receiving it. And we don’t like receiving it for good reason. Imagine a time in the past when you held a job in another organisation. The ‘phone rings and when you pick it up your boss is on the line. He says something like, “I want to see you in my office. Got some feedback for you.” What would you be expecting to hear about?