5 Ways Managers Can Become Real Leaders

When you’re new to something, you make mistakes. That’s how you learn. Young managers make lots of mistakes. It still makes me cringe to think about how incompetent I was as a young manager.

But hey, that’s just the way it works. You get out there, screw up, and hopefully learn from your mistakes.

Unfortunately, not everyone does … learn. That’s the business world’s natural selection process at work. Sometimes young managers self-destruct before their careers even have a chance of getting off the ground.
Here are five ways young managers terrorize their employees and sabotage their own careers:

1. Full of authority they think they’ve suddenly acquired with a title, they order people around and expect quiet compliance and obedience.

2. They put the micro in micromanager, becoming little Napoleon control freaks who don’t just tell employees what to do, but how to do it, too.

3. Thinking they’ve acquired something important that they’re afraid to lose, they stop taking risks for fear of failure.

4. Taking their perceived importance way too seriously, they become full of themselves, enslaved by a hyper-inflated ego.

5. They think they’ve actually arrived somewhere instead of realizing that they’ve only just arrived at the beginning.


And so on. In short, they act like children. We give children a lot of leeway because we figure they’ll eventually grow into mature, fully functioning adults. But like I said, young managers don’t always follow that template. Some make it, others fail miserably, and everyone else falls somewhere in between.

So, if that list of unsavory characteristics describes managers you’ve had or even have now, and they’re not exactly spring chickens, now you know why. Because they never grew up.

We talked about this in Are You a Dysfunctional Manager? or, as some call it, the 5 Stages of Management Development. But what we didn’t discuss is whether there’s some way for managers who are stuck in the “screw up” stage to get with the program. Actually, there is.

It’s counterintuitive, but most of the characteristics people tend to assign to youth are actually adult characteristics, and vice versa. Seriously, it’s true. Here’s the Counterintuitive Guide to Growing Into a Mature Leader:

* Lighten up. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Figure out where you left your sense of humor. Get over yourself. After all, you’re nothing special, just a flesh and blood manager trying to make it in a tough and highly competitive corporate world. Once you take the pressure off yourself, you’ll begin to realize how counterproductive it is to micromanage your poor employees.

* Let yourself fail. Make mistakes. Take risks. Believe it or not, you have less to lose than you think and, in fact, far more to lose if you don’t take risks. They say “no pain no gain,” and “no risk no reward.” But the truth is that, if you don’t take risks, your risk of failure actually goes sky high because playing it safe is a sure way to fail. I know it doesn’t make sense, but in business management and leadership, it’s true, nevertheless.

* Give up control over the little things. Just let them go. Instead, set your sites on the big picture. Set mid-to-high-level goals so you - and your employees - can actually use your brains and skills to achieve them, instead of constantly scrambling and reacting. Imagine accomplishing those goals by motivating, engaging, and challenging your people to do their best. Imagine that.

* Remember life. Most of us think we’re on a path to somewhere, but actually, we’re not. This - what you do every day of your life - is all there is. Life is about connecting with people. And business life is about satisfying your customers and stakeholders who also happen to be people. It’s also about doing a good job, which, incidentally, will make you feel good. They say life is short, but I think it’s long. No matter how old or experienced you are, you likely have a long way to go. Remember that.

By,
Steve Tobak

Lead Under Pressure Like You Were Born for It..

Under Pressure: Learning to be a "Clutch" Leader

In the sports world, a “clutch” player performs best when the pressure is on, backs are to the wall, and all eyes turned their way. Think Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Martina Navratilova. When it was all on the line, they not only didn’t wilt, they got better.

Is there such a thing as a clutch leader? Do you know managers or CEOs who rise above when everything is on the line? A bigger question: Can you learn to be clutch?

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review is spun around the topic of military leadership, and there is an interesting blog post on HBR.org about how military cadets learn what it takes to be clutch. New York Times business writer Paul Sullivan, author of Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t recounts a talk he gave at West Point on the subject.

All clutch leaders display five traits, he said: focus, discipline, adaptability, being present, and fear and desire. Read his post for more depth on each of these.

Sullivan’s good news for the rest of us is that organizations can train their performers to respond well to pressure. Sullivan says there are three things business leaders can learn from cadets:

1. Focused on a goal.

“When they graduate they will be deployed to lead a platoon, probably in Afghanistan or Iraq. They know the responsibilities and the risks. And everything they are doing is preparing them for that moment. Do you know what your primary mission is at work?”

2. Continuous improvement.

“They work in an organization that is continually striving to be better. When a mistake happens, the Army tries not to let it happen a second time. Are you aligned with the right organization? Or if you’re leading that organization, are you prepared to change things that aren’t working, even if change could be hard or even a reversal of something you implemented?”

3. Practice for success.

“These cadets are given the physical and mental training that will help them do their jobs at the highest level. They know you have to be able to perform a task perfectly under normal conditions before you can expect to do it in a stressful situation. Can you say the same thing? Are you able to do your job at a high level every day? If not, then you should not be surprised when you make the wrong decisions under pressure.”

Will following this advice make you the Michael Jordan of your business? Well, maybe not–some people are just hard-coded for success in tough situations. But working at focusing on the objective, adaptability to the environment and improvement of skills sure puts whatever natural abilities you have in the best position to succeed when the going gets tough.


By Sean Silverthorne (B-NET)

Perfectionism Is a Disease. Here’s How to Beat It.

It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up. It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details.

We can never achieve perfection — any of us. Yet so many people keep trying to reach this elusive goal and they drive themselves crazy in the process. So cut it out. Accept that it’s okay to do a mediocre job on a certain percentage of your work. If you need convincing, consider this: Perfectionism is a risk factor for depression. No kidding. Sydney Blatt, psychologist at Yale University, finds that perfectionists are more likely to kill themselves than regular, mediocre-performing people.

Here are three steps to take to avoid the perfectionism trap:

1. Allow yourself to be wrong in front of others.

Try having an opinion that is wrong. Tell a story that is stupid. Wear clothes that don’t match. Turn in a project that you can’t fully explain. People will not think you’re stupid. People will think you spent your time and energy doing something else — something that meant more to you.

We all have many competing demands. We do not presume to know other people’s demands. But we are all sure of one thing: Our work is often not the most important thing on our plate.

Also, you’ll notice that people are not particularly vested in you being right. They don’t care if you’re right or wrong in what you do or say. They just want you to get stuff done well enough that they can do what they need to do. And this is usually a far cry from perfection.

The other huge problem with perfectionism is that people stop learning when they’re constantly afraid of being wrong. We learn by making mistakes. The only way we understand ourselves is to test our limits. If we don’t want anyone to know we make mistakes, which is how perfectionists tend to behave, we are actually hiding our true selves.

2. Be a hard worker rather than a perfectionist.

You can be a hard-working person and cut corners. In fact, it’s often a requirement: Smart people cut corners. The art of being a star performer is knowing which corners to cut. Focus on your goals, and be honest with yourself about whether your goals require perfectionism along the way. A lot of times perfectionism is a way to avoid focusing on goals. Real goals, after all, almost always require a little bit of luck and assistance along the way — factors the perfectionists tend to dismiss.

3. Spend your energy making yourself likable.

Tiziana Casciaro reports in the Harvard Business Review that people are not all that interested in you being super-good at your job. They care if they like you. And, Casciaro found that if someone does not like you, he or she will decide you’re incompetent whether you are or not. Sad, yes, but the converse is true as well. You can do a poor job and no one will notice if they like you. And, newsflash: In many instances, this is good for business — teams do better work when everyone on the team likes everyone else. So don’t worry about doing a perfect job. Do a decent job, but leave yourself enough time to manage your relationships at work. Take lunch. Participate in office politics, because office politics is really about being nice — which, frankly, is more healthy and certainly more achievable than being perfect.

Common Interview Questions and How to Answer Them

If you are smart, you have already studied up on how to be great in an interview. You know what to wear, how to walk, and you studied the answers to the common questions. There are three questions, however, that are so obvious, so common that most people never think to study for them.

Yet they are also the hardest questions you’ll get.

1. Tell me about yourself?

This is not a literal question. This is a question for you to give framework to the interview. You will tell the person what is important to you, what she should talk with you about, and, most importantly, you will tell it to her in a story that she can remember, and relay to other people. You need to be interesting here, so don’t just list your jobs and duties like this is a verbal version of your resume. This is a time for you to turn your life history into a story that leads seamlessly into this job being the obvious next step for you.

We shape how we think about ourselves by the narrative we tell about our lives. In an interview, this skill is most important. You make yourself sound coherent and focused by making your story coherent and focused. A story that is disjointed makes you disjointed. Leave things out. Add some flourish.

When someone says, “How was that person you interviewed?” The interviewer should respond by telling your quick, opening story about you. So make it memorable.

2. How much money do you need to make?

Do not answer this question. You have no idea how much this position is worth to the company. The person interviewing your knows the firm’s bottom line, so he or she they should tell you how much the position is worth to the business. Maybe you did your last job for free. That has nothing to do with how much this position is worth to the current interviewer. So you politely say that you’d like them to decide how much the position is worth to them and offer that wage. Learn to say this ten different ways, because you might have to.

The first person to give a number sets the benchmark. If you set it too low, you’ll never know. If you set it high, they’ll tell you. But you don’t want to risk going low.

Any interviewer who will not give you the first number is not being fair. They can give you a ballpark for how much the position pays. They have a budget. No position is approved without a ballpark budget. So get that number before you give a number. If the interviewer insists on you giving a number, ask yourself if you want to work for someone who wants an unfair advantage from the beginning.

3. Do you have any questions for me?

Interviewers usually ask this at the end of the interview. This puts you in a bad spot because at the end of the interview, you don’t have questions. At the end of the interview you want the job. At the beginning of the interview you have some important questions: What does the perfect candidate for this job look like? What will the first month of this job be like for it to be a success?

Get the answers to these questions at the beginning of the interview, and then you can tailor your interview to address what you’ve learned. If you wait to answer the “do you have any questions” question at the end of the interview, it’s too late.

Finally, there’s one more thing smart people forget to do in an interview: Close. Salespeople are always focused on the close. When you are interviewing, you’re selling yourself, so you need to close. This means, first, asking for what you want. And second, looking for any barriers to getting what you want. Here’s the script: “Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. I want this job very much. Do you have any reservations about hiring me?”

At this point, you will have a chance to allay any fears the hiring manager has about you. It’s a tough moment to put yourself into, but it’s better to have a chance to do it than to give up now, when you are so close.

Most people will answer the question directly. Because most people are nice and honest. And that leads me to my last piece of advice. Assume people are nice and honest and approach them with optimism. Assume they will like you and you will like them, and then that’s the most likely outcome.

5 Real Ways to Boost Creativity (Everything You Know About Being Creative is Wrong)..

No doubt, you’ve taken some creativity training — either back in college or on the job. You know all about Creativity Circles, brainstorming sessions, and crowdsourcing innovation through suggestion boxes. And you know what? It’s pretty much all hogwash.

According to Newsweek, brainstorming sessions were discredited as far back as 1958, when it was found that the technique measurably reduces the creative output of a group compared to what they’d accomplish separately. (I did not know that.)

So what techniques really work? Here are a few:

Exercise. As little as 30 minutes of exercise improves “almost every dimension of cognition” for at least 2 hours. It only works on people who are already physically fit, though. For out-of-shape folks, the fatigue outweighs the benefits.

Switch projects. Multi-tasking might be counter-productive, but stopping one project to work on another at regular intervals has shown to help you solve difficult problems within those separate projects more quickly.

Watch less TV. One study shows that for every hour of television, kids spend 11% less time in creative activities. Three hours of TV adds up to a one-third drop in creativity.

Follow your passion. In a sense, this is common sense. Studies show you’ll do your best at things you are most passionate about. Where this runs afoul of common wisdom, though, is that it suggests you don’t need to be “well rounded” — and in fact, that corporate dictum to do a little of everything for career advancement might actually hurt your ability to work creatively.

Ditch the suggestion box. According to Newsweek, “Formalized suggestion protocols, whether a box on the wall, an e-mailed form, or an internal Web site, actually stifle innovation because employees feel that their ideas go into a black hole of bureaucracy.” The remedy: empower employees to put their ideas into practice without a lot of red tape.


Source B-Net
(By Dave Johnson)

"Tata's Acquisitions"