THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP - H

THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP - H

Found this at Easy Health Options

We are travelling the alphabet exploring the language used to express our leadership.

Today is the letter H.

Which H letter words immediately come to mind?

I was surprised how quickly I came up with my H letter words. I hear myself using these three words on a daily basis: Hope, Honesty and Happiness.

Let’s begin with HOPE.

Viktor E. Frankl wrote ‘Mans Search for Meaning’, way back in the 40s and people are still reading it, including me and attributing their success as a leader to his lesson of hope.

Our ability to choose how we respond to people and situations (our behaviour) is attributed to knowing your purpose in life and the hope you have in fulfilling that purpose.

In leadership, we create the culture of the working environment which helps people fulfil their purpose; giving them hope to achieve their goals, whether that be intrinsic or extrinsic motivated.

When I work with people, as their leadership intelligence mentor, I hope that it will have a greater impact than they expected. I give them hope that they can be a better leader given our conversations and the advice provided.

This leads to HAPPINESS.

I ask this question when I host my Personality Intelligence workshops: What makes you happy?

If you immediately know what makes you happy, fabulous. Knowing what happiness looks like for your colleagues, boss and in particular, your team members (your staff) then you have the equation to create meaning and purpose in their working life. On top of that if you know this information, you can adjust your communication to talk leadership in their language.

Finally, HONESTY.

Too often I uncover in my conversations with people that they haven’t had an honest conversation with someone. Generally a team member or their boss, who hasn’t been given the honest feedback on the impact they are having on the team, the business or even the customer.

I struggle with performance management frameworks which leads to the belief that you only give feedback annually. C’mon, let get better with being honest with ourselves as a leader and honest with the people who we can influence and inspire to be better humans!

I hope you have a happy day and provide some honest feedback to the important humans in your life!

We’ve already visited A-G on the leadership alphabet. Keep reading my blogs to help you consider the words you express your leadership.

THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP - G

THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP - G

One of the greatest books of its time (2001) - my copy proudly sits in my office library.

Thank you for reading my blog. Thank you for spending one minute of your precious time to contemplate the G words in your ‘Language of Leadership’.

At the conclusion of the workshops which I facilitate, I ask everyone to individually offer words of gratitude (and sometimes a gift of chocolate) to one person who also participated. This is done  publicly and sometimes there is a pregnant pause as people grapple with the courage to kick off the exercise. However, once the group feel the warmth and sincerity of the gratitude, I can’t stop them!

We are void of gratitude and we need to take the lead to stop and say thank you, with context, to acknowledge the people who show up in your life.

The phrase, Good to Great, is a book title. It’s notoriety is synonymous with its internal terms, ‘Hedgehog Concept’ and ‘The Flywheel and the Doom Loop’. We used this language through the ‘noughties’ in the corporate world in our bid to have: a one big thing which we did globally well and an attempt to build momentum to achieve a transformation (on numerous occasions).

What has me sharing Good to Great, ever so regularly, is the statistic of the Good to Great CEO’s (13 of them) – as their uniqueness was their humility. Most of them were introverts and all but one was appointed from within the company. The key message is, leadership isn’t about bravado and ego, it’s about the company, the customer and the employee.

Our use of good to great is applying and experimenting with the practices that we know work. They are tried and tested and it’s about the will to make it work for you.

Gut. Yep, Gut. That’s my third G word!

Do you ever hear yourself say, I can feel it in my gut or others say, “trust your gut feeling”.

In my readings of neuroscience, I learnt that almost 100 years ago, neurons from the brain were discovered in the stomach – and we are still grappling with this aspect of intuition. When you can’t observe behaviour, it is difficult to believe that this can be proven. However, so many of us can honestly say that intuition guides us in our decision making!

The importance of the gut is that it links to other brains in our body (yet, there’s more than one) which we can train to help us communicate more effectively. I continue to work with, explore and learn about the power we have at our disposal and challenge you to consider your gut and how it helps you make decisions.  This research is worth investigating - Conversational Intelligence helps us communicate as leaderships should - to move from good communicators to great communicators!

What are your G words?

THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP - F

THE LANGUAGE OF LEADERSHIP - F

psychology.com

It's the F day!

We're playing The Language of Leadership.  

Think of the F words which you hear yourself say when communicating your leadership.  

I'll offer a few and I'll be interested to hear your Fs!

Feedback is over talked and underused. When you give the gift of feedback, whether that is to reinforce the positive or to identify what needs to be corrected, you are being courteous and courageous, all at the same time.

Too often we walk past or overhear language or activity which is unacceptable. We are more than likely to acknowledge great customer service and become closed lipped when someone is being rude or intimidating. This can be due to a lack of skill, lack of confidence or it may not be safe to do so.

In the workplace, feedback as a daily practice, would build a trusting, strong and ethical environment.

In all the work I do, I would help people build the skill of providing feedback, more than any other skill. What does this say about our confidence, pro activeness and accountability? I believe we have a lot more work to do in this area of communication.

This is a simple statement. Some people love facts.

It’s a great asset to have and it’s advantageous when we’re giving feedback. Facts are favorable when providing feedback. Let’s not rely on hearsay … we know what happens when we play ‘Chinese Whispers’.

Facts are useful when you’re doing your work, when applying your expertise. On the other hand, your feelings are also important. The challenge is, realising that facts and feelings are both important.

Facilitation is a skill. I’ve been working on my practice of facilitation for almost 30 years (yikes!) When you facilitate a team meeting, the outcome is illuminating. Engaging everyone in the room, setting and expecting pre-work to be completed, giving back the work and ensuring everyone has a role in the meeting (why else would they be there?) makes on time attendance the norm.

Facilitation is also about acknowledging that the answer is in the room – adults generally have the answer or know where to locate the information.

Leaders facilitate conversations – they ask questions rather than tell. They listen to responses and respond with where to find or how to develop the solution.

Do you facilitate?

It's been great to have you join the conversation sharing, your language of leadership.