Your Ultimate Leadership Feedback Loop: Their LeadershipLearn Management Articles on management-info.biz. Your Ultimate Leadership Feedback Loop: Their Leadership article will help answer your questions on Management Articles.We at management-info.biz specialize in Management Articles. Management Articles at management-info.biz provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Word count: 517 Summary: Leaders need feedback to thrive. If they don't constantly evaluate how they are doing as leaders, they face repeated failure. Here is one important feedback mechanism that most leaders ignore. Your Ultimate Leadership Feedback Loop: Their Leadership by Brent Filson Life on our planet flourishes through feedback. If life forms don't develop feedback loops and get good information about how well they are interacting with their world, the world eventually kills them. This holds true with leaders. Leaders must get feedback as to how they're doing -- otherwise they won't be leaders for long. One kind of feedback is results. After all, leaders do nothing more important than get results. You should understand the kinds of results you're getting, if they are the right results, and if you are getting them in the right ways. There is another kind of measurement that is as important, and sometimes more important, than results. It's a measurement most leaders overlook. That measurement has to do not with you but with the people you're leading. To explain what that measurement is, I'll first describe a fundamental concept of how one goes about leading people to achieve results. There's a crucial difference between doing a task and taking leadership of that task that makes a world of difference in the task's accomplishment. For instance, if one is a floor sweeper, doesn't one best accomplish one's task not simply by doing floor sweeping but by taking leadership of floor sweeping? Such leadership might entail: -- taking the initiative to order and manage supplies, -- evaluating the job results and raising those results to ever higher levels, -- having floor sweeping be an integral part of the general cleaning policy, -- hiring, training, developing other floor sweepers, -- instilling a 'floor sweeping esprit'that can be manifested in training, special uniforms and insignias , behavior, etc. -- setting floor sweeping strategy and goals. Otherwise, in a 'doing' mode, one simply pushes a broom. You may say, 'Listen, Brent, a job is a job is a job. This leadership thing is making too much of not much!' Could be. But my point is that applying leadership to a task changes the expectations of the task. It even changes the task itself. Think of it, when we ourselves are challenged to lead and not simply do, our world is, I submit, changed. Whenever you need to lead people to accomplish a task, challenge them not to do that task but to take leadership of that task. This gets back to the key measurement of your leadership. Your leadership should best be measured not by your leadership but by the leadership of the people you lead. Now, in becoming leaders, they can't simply do what they want. They must come to an agreement with you as to what leadership actions they will take. You can veto any of their proposed actions. However, use the veto sparingly. Cultivate your confidence and their confidence in their leadership. When you evaluate the effectiveness of your leadership by the feedback loop connected to their leadership, you are assessing your world as it should be, and great results will follow. 2005 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
|
More Articles:1. Knowledge Management - Keys to Successful Communities of Practice (Networks) By Chris Collison How can I make my community of practice truly effective?How can I prevent my network becoming a "notwork"?Communities of practice (networks) lie at the heart of successful knowledge management in most organisations. They are the lifeblood of informal exchanges of knowledge. Typically, communities go through a series of stages as they develop. This article, drawn from a best-selling knowledge management fieldbook by its author, identifies the key steps involved in creating and sustaining a su… 2. Focus Leads To Nonprofit Success: Is Your Organization Rowing or Drifting By Judith Rothbaum Picture yourself standing on the bank of a river watching a rowing competition. Carefully watch the crews. Crewmembers dip the oars and bring them to the surface again and again in a carefully orchestrated rhythm. Crewmembers are working together to realize their common vision of a first place finish. Every team member is clear about the mission - complete the race in the fastest time.Everyone is working hard to pull in the same direction at the same time. They are focused on the desired end r… 3. Take Your Good Idea One Step Further Whether you're an executive, manager, professional, or entrepreneur, you need to think ahead. When you do it in a formal sense, it's called it planning, when you do it informally it's something like speculating.Whether you're planning or speculating, the exercise represents just the tip of the iceberg. For the plans or scenarios to amount to something, they have to be implemented. In turn, that usually involves other people.Which takes us to the subject of communication: How do you convert those… 4. Performance Appraisal - What IS The Point? From Blaming To Better Performance By Robert Bacal Probably the most misused and abused and disused management tool in history is the performance appraisal. It's the strangest thing. Ask managers or human resources staff whether they think performance appraisal is an important thing to do, and you'll find they usually agree. "Of course it is", is the common response. If you ask why it's important, they will tell you and tell you and tell you. But they don't tell you the right thing!The odd thing is that they often don't get done, and managers,… |
||||
