All first and mid-level managers have the potential to transform the performance of their teams and the work life of their team members. They have the potential to make a real difference for their organisation and a real difference to the lives of their people.
We’re overwhelmed with choice; not only in everyday life, but also in our work. For many people managers, this is a barrier to leading people for high performance.
Discretionary effort is voluntary effort. It is the level of effort over and above that required for an employee to simply get by and keep their job.
Modern western society is all about speed. You want it fast. You want it now. From business book summaries you can read in 10 minutes, to food in a minute for dinner. You don’t want to hang around.
So to save time, let’s cut to the essence of Effective Leadership. In the end there are only three essential practices of Effective Leadership. Without you taking action on these bad boys, you’ll find it difficult to motivate frontline staff and your team will be going nowhere.
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.
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.