Learning to Lead for Results

Leading for Results.

It’s one thing to master the technical aspects of a job. It’s quite another to move into the realm of motivating, influencing, and driving the performance of a team, department, or organization. Every new role you take with more responsibility requires different skills.

You manage to provide controls: Planning, Organizing, Reporting, Developing Processes. These are basic skills. To take yourself beyond supervision, and managing, and being a technical expert, you must learn how to lead and work through others rather than do it yourself. Just as you learned to be a good technical manager, you now need to learn how to lead others. Skills needed look different: Influence, Vision, Motivation, Encouragement, Engagement, Mentoring and Gaining Commitment.

Leadership development is a critical component in any successful managers tool kit. It starts with understanding your strengths, and how can you leverage these; identifying your areas of needed growth, compensating for these or learning new skills; and finding out what impact you have on others. Addressing leadership development consists of a variety of approaches. Successful interventions may include self assessments and others, such as 360o feedback, on the job leadership learning, mentoring, class work, strong follow through, and boss support.

Improving Leader Effectiveness

It’s easy to get caught up in day to day activities that occupy our time at work. Meetings, report generation, analysis–it never seems to end. Yet, one of the more important aspects of being a leader is knowing how to align your resources to achieve your organization’s goals.

How do you as a leader motivate employees for high-level performance? More importantly, how do you do this in a sustained manner?

A coach can help focus the manager intervention on what’s most important:

• The leader’s effectiveness in motivating and leading their team.
• The leader’s success in influencing peers.
• The leader’s communication skills to effectively throughout the organization.
• The leader’s ability to achieve results.

And, working with a coach allows you to continue doing your work in real time, accessing expertise and advice as you need it.

Leadership Scenario: George

A Director for a little over 5 years, George had developed quite a reputation in the company. Known for being visionary, and for being the smartest guy in the room, George was able to find success by working his people hard to achieve results and micromanaging every step of their processes. Turnover in George’s group was twice as high as other departments. Talented people routinely asked to move out of his area rand it was getting harder to recruit people from outside the company, because word was on the streets. George has been issued an ultimatum: Stop the hemorrhage of talent out of his group.

The Coaching Approach

Initiate a candid conversation with George about his leadership challenges. Assess George using a variety of techniques including:

• Interviewing of key stakeholders regarding George’s effectiveness and potential blind spots.
• Multi-rater assessment Personality assessment Observation.
• Provide George summary feedback on the key themes.
• Discuss effective behaviors needed to move forward.
• Mutually agree on an area of focus; set goals.
• Track George’s progress.

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Melodie Howard’s firm, In Perspective Consulting, focuses on designing and executing sustainable systems for development. Her particular specialties are: succession planning, corporate values, performance management systems, senior leadership competency development, executive coaching, 360o feedback and talent management. Melodie’s previous experience includes serving as the Group Director of Organizational Development for leading international re-insurance company, Partner Reinsurance, Ltd., based in Hamilton, Bermuda. She continues to work with them on a retained consultancy basis. Prior to her role at PartnerRe, Melodie spent 16 years at the Center for Creative Leadership in both operational and profit and loss responsibility roles. Melodie received her Master’s of Science in Organization Development from Pepperdine University in August of 2000 and a B.S. in Psychology from Guilford College in 1980. You can find Melodie’s profile on TheCoachingAssociation.com.