Lead Where You Are - And We're Off...Now What?
Each of us has the opportunity to lead where we are, no matter our title or position in the organization and to have a positive impact on others, ourselves and our respective organizations. Skeptical? Then try a few of these actions in the next couple of weeks and let us know your impact.
True leadership is not a title or position. True leadership is daily actions and behaviors that influence others. (Hopefully positively).
Each of us has the opportunity to lead where we are, no matter our title or position in the organization and to have a positive impact on others, ourselves and our respective organization’s. Skeptical? Then try a few of these actions in the next couple of weeks and let us know your impact:
Lead Your Performance – Set time on your manager’s calendar and listen to their vision and priorities for your organization in 2020. Based on that vision, develop a set of expectations that you will communicate back to your manager and commit to achieving. Delivering on these expectations will be your contribution to the organization’s 2020 success. Next, set 20 minutes each week on your managers calendar to review your progress, good, bad or indifferent, and proactively create an ongoing, dynamic performance development plan.
Lead Change – See possibilities for change in and around you. Identify what has been drifting that might be negatively impacting you and or others. Take action, think disruptively, create options and form recommendations for change. Then, act with urgency. Don’t let the drift and negative impact continue. Finally, don’t stop the process of seeing possibilities for change you can impact.
Lead with Accountability – When you hear blame being placed or excuses being made, then intervene with these simple but powerful statements, “How can I help?” and “What does success look like if we take a step back from the blame and excuses and how can I help get us there?” You will be amazed at the positive impact you will have just by reframing the focus.
True leadership is performing actions like these on a daily basis that will provide a positive and lasting impact on others and your organization. So, for the next couple of weeks, take a risk and step up and step out to lead right where you are.
To aid in your progress of leading where you are, check out our new book, Lead Where You Are, available today on Amazon. Available for the reduced price of $7.99 for a limited time! Don’t wait!
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Lead Where You Are - From the Boardroom to the Mailroom
For decades, leadership was reserved for a select few individuals in any organization. Top-down decision making and command and control management created a performance environment of employee compliance, focused on task completion.
However, an evolution in performance is rapidly occurring. With disruption and globalization impacting nearly every industry and organization, the top-down, command and control performance and leadership models of the past are proving to be too slow and increasingly ineffective.
For decades, leadership was reserved for a select few individuals in any organization. Top-down decision making and command and control management created a performance environment of employee compliance, focused on task completion.
However, an evolution in performance is rapidly occurring. With disruption and globalization impacting nearly every industry and organization, the top-down, command and control performance and leadership models of the past are proving to be too slow and increasingly ineffective.
Expecting and developing core leadership traits and behaviors in every employee regardless of title, position or tenure provides a key competitive advantage for any organization. Leading personal and team performance actions and activities, creating and cultivating an environment of personal change and accountability and developing authentic relationships that are aligned to a clear and compelling purpose ensures top-tier employee engagement, not command and control compliance.
This new, lead where you are, no matter where you are culture creates a positive, powerful and differentiated employee experience. So, whether your role resides on the executive floor, the shipping and receiving dock or somewhere in-between, leading where you are is truly the future of performance. Don’t get left behind.
To aid in your progress of leading where you are, check out our new book, Lead Where You Are, available today on Amazon. And we have decided to give everyone the opportunity to download the eBook version for free until January 18th! So don’t miss out, go download it today!
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Lead Where You Are - 2020: A Career Year
It’s now December 31, 2020 and another year has just flown by! You are at a New Year’s party with family and friends, reflecting on this past year and the start of a new decade. You mentioned to the group that 2020 was by far the best year, professionally, you have had. They asked, “What made the difference over other years?” You told them that you make a conscious decision last January that 2020 was going to be different; that you were going to take more control of your career, your performance and the impact you would make.
It’s now December 31, 2020 and another year has just flown by! You are at a New Year’s party with family and friends, reflecting on this past year and the start of a new decade. You mentioned to the group that 2020 was by far the best year, professionally, you have had. They asked, “What made the difference over other years?” You told them that you make a conscious decision last January that 2020 was going to be different; that you were going to take more control of your career, your performance and the impact you would make.
You decided to lead where you are, not wait for others to manage you and your activities. You listened to the direction of the organization and you proactively asked your manager what success would look like in 2020. You aligned your personal plan and worked with renewed purpose to achieve that success. You set expectations with your manager and each month connected on your results and your planned actions for the next month. In other words, you reviewed your performance each month, not your manager reviewing your performance at the end of the year. You took control of your performance, good, bad or other wise, and did something about it each month.
Instead of waiting for change to happen to you or trying to “manage” it, you led it. You saw possibilities for change, not obstacles and barriers. You viewed your work differently and acted with urgency to make the change happen by creating options and making proactive recommendations.
You led with personal accountability no matter the circumstance. No excuses, no blame, no justification, you just did what was right. You cultivated more authentic relationships by getting out of your daily world to understand others’ view of success, their obstacles and barriers, so you could align your actions and activities to better achieve team success.
Bottom line, you stepped up and intentionally made a difference in 2020. Making a decision to lead where you are, not waiting for things to happen, but making things happen made all the difference.
Now back to January 2020. Are you ready to try something different to make a difference?
To aid in your progress of leading where you are, check out our new book, Lead Where You Are, available on Amazon for pre-order now and release on January 13th!
If you would like to get the ebook for free, head to the book page from January 13-18 and download the book for free!
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Lead Where You Are - Making Greater Impact Through Purpose
Make it your task each day to achieve a purpose. A sneak peek from the Leading With Purpose chapter of our new book, Lead Where You Are, due to be released on January 13th, 2020.
WORK YOUR DAILY TASKS WITH MEANING AND PURPOSE EVEN IF THEY SEEM MENIAL TO YOU OR OTHERS.
While each of us has our tasks to do no matter where we are in an organization, deliver those tasks with a greater purpose. If things in your department are drifting, step up with a purpose to make a positive difference this week. Intervene in the drift with options and suggestions for improvement. Most importantly, get more in touch with what drives you from day to day. What energizes you? Is it connecting with others? Contributing to a team? Organizing company events? Whatever it is that energizes you, focus on doing more of that. Make it your task to achieve a purpose each day.
FIND PURPOSE IN THE TASKS YOU COMPLETE AND WATCH THE IMPACT YOU MAKE GROW.
In our book, Lead Where You Are, we explore how purpose creates meaning in our work and extends the impact we can create. We discuss how in today’s workplace performance environment, matching unique individual talents to unique opportunities creates an undeniable competitive advantage against those organizations who rely solely on title and position to delve out tasks. And we discuss how individuals can create purpose in an environment lacking of purpose.
Here’s an excerpt from the Leading With Purpose chapter:
MATCHING TALENT TO OPPORTUNITY
Creating a sense of purpose starts by connecting what you do to the impact you are having. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best. “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”
Our ability to match our talents with our opportunities and to create a lasting impact on our customers, co-workers and family energizes us and in return energizes those around us. Purpose inspires and it rouses us to be better today than we were yesterday and better tomorrow than we are today.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Lessons From The Best: What's Your Purpose?
Organizations that are deemed ‘Best Place to Work’, ‘Most Admired’, ‘Best Companies to Work For’, and so on, invariably have a very defined and compelling purpose beyond just making a profit or completing tasks. Purpose provides a pathway to success and ensures alignment between the organization and the actions and behaviors of every employee.
As we prepare for the release of our new eBook Lead Where You Are which will be coming out right after the first of the year, we will be exploring how organizations rated as a Best Place to Work create dynamic, highly engaged workforces delivering sustained results by leveraging many of the concepts we highlight in the book.
Week 1 (Oct. 10) - Leading with Purpose
Week 2 (Oct. 17) - Leading Change
Week 3 (Oct. 24) - Leading Accountability
Week 4 (Oct. 30) - Leading Performance
What’s your purpose?
Organizations that are deemed ‘Best Place to Work’, ‘Most Admired’, ‘Best Companies to Work For’, and so on, invariably have a very defined and compelling purpose beyond just making a profit or completing tasks. Purpose provides a pathway to success and ensures alignment between the organization and the actions and behaviors of every employee. It cultivates commitment, not compliance. The purpose drives everything from recruiting, selection, advancement and “dehiring”, if necessary. Let’s see how some of the best are purpose-driven and purpose-led.
Netflix
Our core philosophy is people over process. More specifically, we have great people working together as a dream team. With this approach, we are a more flexible, fun, stimulating, creative, collaborative and successful organization.
What is special about Netflix, though, is how they:
1. Encourage independent decision-making by employees
2. Share information openly, broadly, and deliberately
3. Are extraordinarily candid with each other
4. Keep only our highly effective people
5. Avoid rules
HubSpot
“There’s this notion that to grow a business, you have to be ruthless. But we know there’s a better way to grow. One where what’s good for the bottom line is also good for customers. We believe businesses can grow with a conscience and succeed with a soul. Success is making those who believed in you look brilliant.”
Just a few statements from HubSpot’s Culture Code:
Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing.
Solve For The Customer -- not just their happiness, but also their success.
Power is now gained by sharing knowledge, not hoarding it.
HubSpot has a no-door policy, where everyone has access to anyone in the company.
You shouldn’t penalize the many for the mistakes of the few.
Results should matter more than when or where they are produced.
Influence should be independent of hierarchy.
Great people want direction on where they’re going -- not directions on how to get there.
“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
We’d rather be failing frequently than never trying.
As you can see from these two examples, purpose guides and everyone contributes. It is about unleashing talent and potential, taking personal and team accountability and seeing the possibly for change everywhere. Culture is a powerful competitive advantage, if cultivated and invested in.
Join us next week as we will explore some lessons from the best in cultivating an environment of change.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Teaming Up: Where is the Support?
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
An engagement team’s level of success and the ultimate impact of that success is often determined by the level of organizational support it receives throughout the team engagement.
Does the overall organization embrace and enable employee engagement by sponsoring and supporting individual and team engagement training? Are senior organizational leaders actively participating by allocating time for engagement activities, and by showing interest in and implementing many of the various engagement team and individual recommendations? Lastly, do our front-line leaders encourage greater engagement by inspiring and enabling people and teams, not directing or controlling their activities?
A team can have a clearly defined and communicated purpose, exhibit all the positive team behaviors during the teaming process and all members be completely committed, but if they do not have organizational support to listen and act then it marginalizes, if not destroys, all future employee engagement activities.
Our experience enabling employee engagement points to a simple, but effective success model for team and individual engagement. Purpose, behavior, commitment and support. If you and or your organization would like to know more about enhancing employee engagement, please contact us here.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.