the art of leading

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Do you find yourself with extra time to further your leadership knowledge and skills? Then check out these resources, which I found so useful and I’m sure you will too.

The Art of Schmoozing
This is an old post from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It makes it easy to understand the mechanics of relationship-building, or schmoozing in his words.

We are All Accountable to Make a Difference
Great story about how one person can create so much extra value by going the extra mile.

Do People Really Want Transparency and Authenticity?
Brian Clark over at Copyblogger wrote this post. I feel it relates a lot to the modern leader. Take a look.

Take off at noon for greater results
Nice viewpoint that could get you thinking about how well - or badly - you utilize your time, and how that impacts leaders.

Categories : Links // Add Comment »

Imagine a full-grown, 6′3″ 200 lb. man weeping like a baby. Doesn’t sound right, huh? Well that was me a couple of years ago. What made me cry for the first of two times in my life, you ask? In short, my Architecture Design 202 professor. Why? Well, that’s a somewhat longer story.

For those of you who don’t know, architecture is normally taught by critizicing. You draw a design, and a jury composed of architects trashes it. They tell you everything that is wrong with your design. They tell you how you were supposed to do better. They tell you what you can do to make it better.

But believe me, they don’t have to be nice about it. Some try to be tactful. Others just make you feel like you are the single most disgusting human being in this Planet Earth.

After this dehumanizing process, then it starts all over again. New drawing, new jury, same criticism, same professors trying to make you cry (many succeed, by the way).

Then you build the model. A group of professors gathers around you, in front of your peers, and criticize you, and trash your design, and…Well, you get the point.

So it turns out that my specific design for this class went through this same process 11 times in one semester, without counting the dozen or so informal meetings with my professor where he tore apart my model and used it as his little doll house.

The last day of the semester was here. [Read more →]

Categories : Failure, Relationships // 1 Comment »

Once in a while, an article comes by that condenses a tremendous amount of information into an easily digestible format. I was recently alerted about such an article in Inside CRM called The Manager’s Cheat Sheet: 101 Common-Sense Rules for Leaders. Please take a look at it…I’m sure it’ll interest you.

Categories : General Leadership // Add Comment »

Brains, Guts, and the Capacity to Act

By Stephen H. Baum

author of What Made jack welch Jack Welch

What allows a leader to take the steps needed to solve a problem or master a
difficult situation? What keeps the desire to act from being impetuous and
uninformed, as in “ready, fire, aim” behavior? The answer is that the
capacity to act effectively and decisively is a complex mixture of brain and
gut, a combination I call threads in thinking. It includes these qualities:

* An ability to distill a situation to its simplest dynamics; to
understand the issues and the consequences of doing nothing; and to
formulate a specific plan.

* Being extro-spective: seeing the business in the larger context of
the industry and in the marketplace; seeing a situation from a high-altitude
view and making sense of it on the ground.

* For opportunities, an ability to see the true benefits and risks,
which are not always obvious.

* Possession of a mental library of truly relevant analogies and other
mental models that can be applied to characterize the situation in a way
helpful for making a choice.

* An ability to identify valuable sources of advice, experience, and
wisdom (inside the company and out); to elicit information and know when to
do so.

* An instinct for calibrating the value of and motive for facts and
information people are giving you, the subtext of real agendas.

* An ability to discern both financial and nonfinancial impacts and
include them in the calculus (company reputation, morale, future business
options), then weigh the risks.

* An ability to anticipate issues and define a point of view so you
don’t have to do it for the first time under crisis.

* Being able to think a couple of moves ahead, as in chess, or as
Steve Kaufman put it: “the ability to look around the corner and see what’s
coming.” This ability and most of the others can be tested and developed.

It’s a tall order, but remember that no one starts out with all of these
abilities. You develop these threads and judgment only with experience. This
is done mainly through on-the-job training. Just remember how many of the
leaders we’ve been discussing failed in school, how many were far from the
top of their class, how none were rocket scientists. Only by working through
major challenges in the first place do you develop and nurture these
abilities until they become part of you and part of your instinct.

In the Eye of the Storm

Deciding that you must act, and then acting, is not as straightforward as it
seems. Circumstances will often make your decision to take action in the
first place very challenging. Remember [Read more →]

Categories : Action, Communication, Confidence, General Leadership, Loyalty, Personal Development, Proactivity, Relationships, Responsibility // Add Comment »

Treatment that produces an emotional and psychological impact is said to have therapeutic effects. Therapists dedicate themselves to help patients reach states of positive emotions and psychological well-being. Leaders can exert those therapeutic effects through their leadership methods. I would call that therapeutic leadership.

Leadership is a social force with concrete consequences. When the level of influence of one person reaches respectable heights, whatever that person does may determine the feelings of an anonymous follower.

Leaders have the capacity to impact people in an emotional and psychological way. I don’t know if this has any scientific value, since I’m neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. But it seems to me that leaders may be able to exert a very specific emotional or mental impact on any one individual who happens to listen or follow them.

What’s the point, you ask? Well, I’d like for you as a leader to be accountable for what you say and do. You should be aware of the impact that you may have on your followers. I’m not implying that you should be paternalistic and that you should be everyone’s therapist.

At least be conscious of your actions. The shadow that those actions throw over your followers may be bigger than you thought. The first step toward practicing therapeutic leadership, then, is to simply be aware.

Categories : Change, Communication, Personal Development, Relationships, Responsibility // Add Comment »

The Art of Leading will participate in Blog Action Day. Here’s what it’s about:

The goal is to bring the blogging community together, for just one day, talking about one issue — and for Blog Action Day 2007 (Oct. 15, 2007), that issue is the environment.

I look forward to contribute to this initiative by writing about leadership in environmental issues, so stay tuned!

Categories : Environment, General Leadership // Add Comment »

Yesterday I talked about stupid people. Today I’ll talk about smart people. Both stupid and smart people hold strong to their beliefs. But the beliefs of stupid people are prejudicial and close-minded. The beliefs of smart people are well analyzed and open-minded.

The first step to being smart, as opposed to stupid, is to exercise your intelligence and adaptive capacity, which set you apart from ants and lizards. I told you how human beings are supposed to be “smart”. It isn’t too difficult. Just look for whatever caused you to screw up, fix it, and try not to repeat it.

Read and learn about different ways to attack the same problems. Explore and search for new answers to old questions. Make new questions. Fix old answers. Learn from your mistakes and apply those lessons. Accept your errors and amend them. Adapt to circumstances. Be open to change and criticism. All these are somewhat simplistic ways of being what human beings are supposed to be: smart.

Categories : Failure, General Leadership, Personal Development // Add Comment »

Leadership covers many areas, but I can’t cover every single one. For that reason, I’ll start posting, now and again, different posts and articles from other websites and blogs that I believe contribute in one way or the other to the development of leadership skills. They’ll be useful, I hope, for most people most of the time.

This is not to say, though, that the main source of information in The Art of Leading won’t continue to be original material that I write myself. I just hope that the site is enriched and complemented by other material.

So here is the first. An article was posted over at Lifehacker that gives negotiation tips that pet-owners may use when looking for a place to rent. Negotiation is definitely a tremendously important skill for all leaders to develop, and this article may get some points through. It’s called Apartments and pets - how to make it work. Hope you enjoy.

Categories : Negotiation // Add Comment »

Just as imperfection makes us human, so does logical reasoning. When humans screw up, they normally look for whatever caused that screw-up, fix it, and try not to repeat it. That is what I consider a very elemental level of intelligence. That “mistake-recognition” skill also shows what many call adaptive capacity.

Other species in the animal kingdom, like ants and lizards, don’t have the capacity to go through this marvelous process. These other animals don’t learn from their mistakes; they just endlessly repeat them. They don’t recognize mistakes, and they aren’t able to adapt in the same logical way that human beings do.

Stupid people are very much like ants and lizards. But ants and lizards can be forgiven. Stupid people cannot. They’re human, and they’re supposed to have intelligence and adaptive capacity. They obviously make mistakes, as does everyone else. That makes everyone human, so that doesn’t make them particularly stupid.

What sets them apart from smart people is the fact that they don’t know if and when they have made a mistake. Furthermore, they don’t know what to do when they do make them. They deny their faults even when they know they are at fault.

They lack what ants and lizards lack too, which is logical reasoning. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you’ll keep screwing up over and over again. That is called being a stupid person.

Categories : Failure, Personal Development, Proactivity // 1 Comment »

There are multiple traits, characteristics, skills, and abilities that you should develop to discover your leadership. There are many ways to go about this growth process. But whatever method you use, you should first take care of yourself. In other words, you should lead yourself before you lead others.

How do you lead yourself? Well, the most sensible way to get on the right track is to ‘put your house in order’. Simply feel good about yourself. Feel confident about your abilities. Convince yourself that you have the capacity to lead, and that you ought to be a leader. It is only with self-confidence that you will be able to provide a foundation for your followers. Leaders are supposed to provide stability to followers; perhaps a stability that those followers don’t have. Many are counting on their leaders to facilitate that foundation that they haven’t been able to create for themselves. So if the leader doesn’t have that strong foundation, it is impossible to transmit it to anyone else. Perhaps you’re a good actor and attract a following at first, by making people believe that you do have self-confidence. But that building without a foundation will soon crumble.

The remainder of this post will concentrate on some tactics that you should put into practice if you want to be self-confident:

• Set a goal or purpose- If you don’t know what you want, you will never have self-confidence. Self-confidence is all about believing that you are capable of achieving something. But you have to know what that something is. If you don’t, then you have nothing to be confident about! First outline a strong purpose, a ‘North Star’ that you can look towards so you know where you’re headed. This may be as simple (but supremely important) as raising a loving family or as complex as changing the way the world communicates. Nevertheless, it should have some specificity to it, so that you can direct your energy and efforts. Bill Gates didn’t just say “My goal is to change the world”, but “I want every household to have a personal computer.” That certainly changed the world, but in a much more targeted way.

• Prepare- Simply, you should know what you’re talking about. Knowing that you dominate your area will give you the feeling that you have the power to talk authoritatively about anything that involves your scope of influence. Now, I’m not saying you can learn everything there is to know, since you should always strive to know more than the day before. But if you get to a point where you can reasonably say that you dominate your field more than most people, you will have the right to consider yourself an authority. You will have the right to be sure that whatever you say is correct. Now that is self-confidence!

• Practice- Your have multiple scopes of influence. You influence your family, your classmates, your work buddies, your students, your mentors, your bosses, and even complete strangers that you meet in the street. In other words, you have many opportunities to develop your leadership skills. Practice by cheering up a work companion. Propose a cost-cutting process at work. Get involved in clubs and devise initiatives. Take advantage of all those opportunities and use them to consciously practice being a leader.

• Achieve small victories- Some time back I started a short-lived sports tournament business. It failed disastrously. But I did learn many lessons out of that ‘failure’, if you can call it that. One that will especially stick with me is the impact that small victories may have on my confidence levels. A central part of the business depended on raising sponsorship money to cover costs. It is definitely not an easy task, but when I raised my first $50, I felt I was capable of finding $100, and so on. That venture later ‘failed’, but I have nothing to be ashamed of if just because I learned this lesson.

• Talk to yourself- I once thought that I was crazy because I talked to myself. I had these wild pep talks while I was alone in the car or in the shower. But I later found out that many positive and confident people do this. It’s a great way to foster a positive attitude. I feel that after having a solo pep talk, that ‘fake’ or ‘built-up’ confidence carries on to the street. It goes without saying that this should be a positive talk, not a negative one. It works either way.

• Act confident- A variation of the ’solo pep talk’ is to act confident. It has been proven that physical actions and emotions go hand in hand. It was commonly believed that actions always follow emotions. But it is now accepted that your physical acts have an effect in your emotional state. If you feel sad, smile. Maybe you feel weird at first, but that simple act may put you on your way to a more positive attitude. In the same way, if you feel unsure about yourself, act as if you were confident. Stand up, put your shoulders back, smile, and talk authoritatively. You may start feeling truly self-confident in a while. Now, this tactic shouldn’t be used by itself, but when you don’t have any more time to prepare or practice, it is all you can do. And it works.

• TRUST YOURSELF- If you have done everything that I described, there is absolutely no reason at all to feel down on yourself. Simply let go of all mental barriers and go on with your mission!

By now the importance of self-confidence should be obvious. Do you want to project confidence? Do you want to gain a loyal following? Then you should start by gaining self-confidence. You should lead yourself so that you can lead others.

Categories : Communication, Confidence, Personal Development, Relationships // Add Comment »