You’ve seen it happen. The same dedicated people carry the load year after year while your most qualified potential leaders hide in the back, politely declining. Or you’ve got some enthusiastic volunteers who step up—but then burn out and walk away. Sound familiar? When attracting busy, talented people to lead, the secret is to start with connection, clarity, curiosity, and commitment. Whether you’re leading a volunteer group, a non-profit, or a community team, these four dimensions will help you attract and retain leaders who can keep your mission thriving.

How to Recruit Volunteer Leaders

1. Start with story
2. Set a rhythm of why
3. Communicate opportunities
4. Facilitate relationships
5. Create bite-size roles
6. Limit terms
7. Identify habits for success
8. Inventory talent and skills
9. Include young people and give them power
10. Empower possibility
11. Allow for failure and learning
12. Schedule the finish
13. Practice accountability
14. Celebrate success

Leadership is leadership—whether you work in a volunteer organization or a for-profit corporation. Same with teamwork and collaboration. And no matter where you lead, the first conversation is with yourself. If you have a poverty mentality (“I have to beg people to do this”), you can’t attract the talent you need.

Instead, you can use the four dimensions of collaboration to create a culture people want to join. With these four dimensions, you’ll attract, keep, and grow leaders in your volunteer organization.

Connection

Connection to a purpose and people is the heart of volunteer service. To attract leaders, connect people to the mission and each other.

1. Start with Story

What’s at the heart of your work? That core “why” should pulse through everything you do. Condense your organization’s work to one sentence that captures what it’s all about. That inspires people to say, “Sign me up.”

Once you have that straightforward “why” spelled out, find ways to tell the story. Think of the people you serve. Tell their story. Better yet, have them tell their story.

Through story, you connect potential volunteer leaders to your values and mission. You want their heart before their time or money.

2. Set a Rhythm of Why

One of the best volunteer leaders I (David) ever worked with started every single gathering with that one-sentence statement of purpose. “We are here to…” It didn’t matter if it was a Board meeting, a happy-hour, or a recognition celebration. He started with WHY. And every member of the organization internalized that why. It drove everything we did and attracted volunteers.

Consistently connect back your WHY to help attract potential leaders to what matters most.

3. Communicate Opportunities

Too often, committees ask, “Who should lead this?” and limit their answers to their established connections. They overlook many qualified people because they don’t know them. Communicate opportunities to cast a broader net and connect your members to the chance to serve and lead.

4. Facilitate Relationships

One of the most valuable benefits of volunteer leadership are the people you meet. You can help your volunteers realize this benefit by investing in relationships. Take time for “connection before content” to help your volunteers get to know one another, understand one another’s expertise, and individual stories.

With limited time, you don’t need to invest hours—even a few minutes at the beginning of meetings for a compassionate conversation starter or SynergyStack habit discussion will help.

Clarity

Clarity about roles, timeframes, and how to succeed is vital for successful volunteers. Invest in clarity to make leadership accessible, help potential leaders say “yes” and succeed in their work.

5. Create Bite-Size Roles

Warning: this will annoy the guy who did the whole job for the last 20 years. You’ll need to politely tell him to chill. He needs relief, and it’s a new day.

Consider breaking the bigger jobs down into something a strong leader with an already booked life could imagine herself doing. As they grow into a bigger role, they may take on more responsibility.

But make that first “yes” as manageable as possible.

6. Limit Terms

It’s easy to rely on the same people to do the same thing year after year. The shoes become too big to fill, and the unintended side effect is intimidation … not to mention stagnation. Plus, knowing there’s an exit strategy is attractive. Everyone saw how the last guy got stuck.

And, the person may want to continue their service. There will still be a place for them.

7. Identify Habits for Success

There are two questions every volunteer (heck every employee, leader…every team member) needs to be able to answer: 1) What does success in this role accomplish?  2) How do I succeed?

Help your volunteer leaders with a clear picture of what a successful outcome achieves for the organization and the specific, observable habits that will help them have that success.

Curiosity

Curiosity helps you tap into the vast set of hidden talents, abilities and experiences your people bring with them. Invest in curiosity to find new people, new approaches, and help people grow in their roles.

8. Inventory Talents and Skills

You need to know what people are eager to give. Some will be too humble to tell you. I (Karin) was directing a children’s musical at our church and was thinking I’d have to bother the usual suspects to paint the set. One of the newer members came to me with his portfolio of AMAZING art, as if he were applying for a job. I had to resist the urge to kiss this man I didn’t know. He spent countless hours creating amazing scenery.

Bottom line, we didn’t know and we never would have asked.

9. Include Young People & Give Them Power

Kids have enormous leadership potential. If you have young people in your organization, scaffold them gently and take some risks. Our teenagers would get so annoyed when adults try to micro-manage their leadership efforts. They’ve got it. Give kids room and watch the magic. Then you can gently coach and help them grow as they run into challenges.

See also: Developing Leadership Skills in Children: 11 Ways to Grow Your Kids

10. Empower Possibility

Some volunteer organizations have a habit of asking someone to “lead” and then tell them exactly how it should be done. That will turn off your most creative volunteer leaders. Be willing to accept radically novel approaches and new ideas. (See Clarity above—if you define what a successful outcome does for the organization, ask them how they might get there.)

11. Allow for Failure and Learning

No one grows without taking risks and stumbling along the way. But criticism and gossip will turn away your best leaders FOREVER. They’ve got enough of that crap in their day job. Encourage, develop, and make it okay to experiment and fail forward.

Commitment

Commitment and accountability tell your volunteers that their work matters. Invest in commitment and accountability to help your volunteers feel a real sense of accomplishment as they fulfill the purpose of their work.

12. Schedule the Finish

One of the most frustrating volunteer experiences is when you work hard to meet a deadline, only to find out that no one else took the work seriously. “Why bother” sets in—and soon you’ll lose those dedicated leaders.

Promote accountability by scheduling the finish and ensuring that everyone has straightforward tasks and a specific time for the team to review progress. Discuss competing priorities to ensure the timelines are achievable.

When you schedule the finish, you bake accountability into the team’s work from the start.

13. Practice Accountability

Many volunteer leaders struggle with accountability. They worry that accountability will drive away their precious volunteers. But it actually does the opposite. When you follow up to ensure everyone follows through, you’re telling your volunteer leaders that you value their work and their time.

Their work matters and they can trust on one another to get it done. Human-centered accountability builds trust and morale as your volunteer team sees the results of their work.

(If you need tools to help you have a human-centered accountability conversation, check out our INSPIRE Method.)

14. Celebrate Success

Your volunteer leaders have contributed their time, creativity, and energy. It’s time to celebrate! Acknowledge what they and their teams have done. Celebrate the progress and achievements. You get more of what you celebrate and encourage, but less of what you criticize and ignore. So if you want more leaders, celebrate them. You will lay the groundwork to attract the next generation of volunteer leaders.

Your Turn

The four dimensions of connection, clarity, curiosity, and commitment will help you attract and grow volunteer leaders—and help your volunteer teams collaborate.

And if you could use a tool to help you build effective teams built on these four dimensions, check out the SynergyStack System. It’s got everything you need to help you accelerate performance, build collaboration, and reduce stress.

Now it’s your turn. We would love to hear from you. What is one of your most effective ways to attract volunteer leaders?

Note: This article was originally written in 2014. With the need for effective volunteer leaders as great as ever, we’ve revised and republished the article—so you will see comments from the original.

You Might Also Like:

• How to Lead When Your Employees Don’t Have to Follow
• One Surprising Reason Your Nonprofit Struggles to Grow
• Boost Productivity with a Human-Centered Culture

The post How To Recruit Leaders In Your Volunteer Organization appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Tired of sitting through endless PowerPoint presentations that never answer your question? Does your team drown you with emailed essays and spreadsheets without clear conclusions? Help your team provide more useful information and drive clear decision-making by asking yourself three questions.

Why Your Team Wastes Time with Vague Reports and Frustrating Presentations

When your team doesn’t give you the information you need, there are usually a couple of factors at play.

Often, they simply don’t know what you want or how you want it. They don’t understand how you’ll use the information or what happens next.

Sometimes, they’re looking for approval (look at how hard I worked on all this data!). Or they deliver vague reports and drown you in data to keep out of trouble and avoid your anger or criticism.

Three Questions to Help Your Team Give You Useful Information

You can solve for all these issues and unlock your team’s potential by asking yourself three questions.

1. Have You Clearly Asked for What You Want?

You know what you want. You need a clear recommendation and point of view from the people closest to the issue.

But do your people know that?

If you haven’t clearly asked for what you want, the answer is always “no, they don’t.”

And you almost certainly want that report or analysis differently than their last manager.

When you communicate what you want, think about the following questions:

• What will a successful report or presentation do? Are there specific criteria the team needs to meet? Clarify the criteria right away.
• How will you use the information? If you want raw data to analyze, let them know. If you want a single recommendation with one page of analysis that you can pass to the next level, tell them.
• How much analysis and precision do you need? Sometimes you need a general direction and a quick summary. Other times, you need maximum confidence and for the team to take the time to make sure it’s right.
• How do you like to get information? You might prefer to read a report and then ask questions. You might like a verbal presentation.
• When do you need it? Schedule the finish and ensure they can meet the timetable.

Take the time to clarify what you want. Your team can’t meet expectations they don’t know about.

2. Have You Checked for Understanding?

Once you tell them what you need, check for understanding. You don’t know that they have it and will truly present useful information until you hear them explain it in their own words. For example, you might say:

“If there aren’t any other questions, let’s do a quick check for understanding. What will a successful report do for us? How and when will you present it?”

Note: asking “Do you understand what you need to do here?” is not a check for understanding. You need to find out what they understand.

3. Are You Responding or Reacting?

You asked for what you want. You checked for understanding. But people still bring you vague reports or slide decks with hundreds of irrelevant slides.

Now what?

The next step is to pay attention to how you respond (not react) to your team. If you react poorly, you’ll get more useless information.

We’ve worked with many frustrated senior leaders frustrated who see too many data dumps and endless PowerPoint presentations.

But ask their team what’s going on and they’ll tell you, “It’s a total waste of time. No matter what I present, they’ll tear it apart, tell me I’m an idiot, and go in a different direction. Why waste my time? I don’t need the grief and will just to have redo everything I’d already done.”

When your team doesn’t bring you useful information, of course it’s frustrating. But you can avoid this negative spiral and help them do better next time by choosing a helpful response.

Here are tools to handle the two most common problems:

1. When They Didn’t Do What They Agreed

You asked for a one-page summary with bulleted recommendations you could include in the Board presentation. Due Thursday at 5:00. You checked for understanding and everyone agreed.

But you got a massive PowerPoint presentation with four spreadsheets of data in a microscopic font—on Friday morning.

Your best response here is an accountability conversation. You can use our I.N.S.P.I.R.E. method to have this conversation. Your part of this conversation could look like this:

I – Initiate: “My intent here is to help you prevent rework and for you and the team to be as effective as possible.”

N – Notice: “We agreed that you would present this information in a one-page summary with bulleted recommendations. This isn’t that.”

S – Support: (not really needed here as the problem is self-evident)

P – Probe: “I’m curious what happened?”

I – Invite: “Can you please get the one-page summary we agreed to done today? How can we ensure you do these presentations accurately going forward?”

R – Review: “I’m hearing that you just forgot and scrambled to get it done at the last minute. And that your solution will be to get it in your calendar with the details going forward. Do I have that right?”

E – Enforce: “We have another one of these reports coming up in two weeks. Let’s schedule time on Friday afternoon. I’ve just sent you a calendar invitation. We’ll spend ten minutes to go over that next report and fine-tune it before you submit it.”

2. When You Disagree or Can’t Use Their Recommendation

Your team gave you the information exactly as you requested. But just this morning, before their presentation, you got some information that changed the strategy. Now their recommendation doesn’t make sense.

Or maybe, now that you see their data, you disagree with their analysis.

How can you respond in a way that doesn’t discourage, disempower, or deflate?

The answer is to Respond with Regard. There are three steps to respond with regard: gratitude, information, and invitation. You get more of what you celebrate and encourage. So here’s how your part of this conversation might sound:

Gratitude: “Thank you so much for putting this together. I really appreciate the thought you put into it and for caring about where we’re heading.”

Information: “So this morning we learned that the joint venture that would help this project work isn’t going to happen. As I look at your analysis, that understandably played a big role.”

Invitation: “I would love to get your thoughts and recommendation knowing that this partnership isn’t happening. Let’s talk through when we can do that.”

Or, where you see things differently, your information step might sound like:

“Looking at your data, I’m coming to a different conclusion than yours. Here’s what I’m thinking. What am I missing? How do you see it differently?”

Your Turn

When you consistently ask yourself these three questions, your team won’t just give you useful information. You’ll improve morale, efficiency, and make better decisions. We’d love to hear from you: how do you help your team move from vague reports and data dumps to meaningful information you can use?

You might also like:

• Managing Up: Turning Information into Influence with Your Boss
• Help Your Boss Stop Wasting Time with Bad Delegation
• How to Get Your Team to Stop Sending You Frustrating Email Communication

The post No More Vague Reports: How to Help Your Team Give You Useful Information appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

How Do I Manage Up When Results are Down? #AskingforaFriend

This question came in through our learning lab in one of our live-online leadership development programs.

What’s the best way to “manage up'” when working through employee coaching and improvements?

The question brought back a rush of memories of one particularly impatient boss who wanted every performance issue fixed “yesterday” the “easy way.”

Meaning, “just fire the guy” and move on.  That boss wasn’t particularly close to the complexity of the work.

And, he had a hard time seeing the long-term potential in struggling employees.

So, I learned the art of managing up when results were down the hard way.

Why This is Hard

Coaching for lasting improvement can take a minute. Your employee needs time to try new approaches and learn what works best in different scenarios.

Great coaching requires real connection, vulnerability, and trust. No one wants to feel like every conversation is being followed and tracked by someone outside the room.

And even as your struggling team member is improving, it’s likely they’re still going to screw up from time to time, reinforcing their reputation as a poor performer.  It would be easy for a removed observer to prematurely conclude that your coaching’s no working, and it’s time to move on.

And of course, there’s Murphy’s law at play…even if that customer service rep you’ve been coaching to have more empathy has made major improvements, the one time she gets testy with a customer will inevitably be when your boss is walking by.

You care about your struggling employee. You care about your boss. And, you care about the long-term performance of your team. It’s hard to balance these nuanced relationships as a human-centered leader. But it is possible.

4 Steps to Keeping Your Manager Informed When AddressIng Performance Issues

You need to give that struggling employee feedback, coaching, and support while keeping your manager informed about progress in a way that gives them confidence that you’re doing the right thing for the employee and the business.

1. Set clear expectations with your employee and with your manager

Start with a shared definition of success. Ensure all three of you define what good performance looks like in the same way. Sure, start with the metrics, like making quota or attaining service level or productivity measures. And, also ensure you’re aligned on the behaviors that will lead to success.

Focus on the game, not just the score.

2. Work with your struggling employee on a clear path to improved performance

If you need help with this, these articles are rich with practical tools.

How to Provide More Meaningful Performance Feedback 

How To Coach Employees to High Performance When Time Is Limited

Be sure to establish timelines and check-ins to measure progress.

3. Schedule the finish

The next step to managing up when coaching a struggling employee is to share the high-level plan with your manager and check for understanding to ensure they’re aligned with your approach.

And, here’s the part where you buy yourself the time to make an impact.

Schedule the finish. Get some time on your manager’s calendar when you will talk about the situation again. When your manager knows you have a solid plan AND they know when they’ll get an update, they’ll be less likely to ask you about progress every time they bump into you.  You’ll feel less micro-managed and you have time to help your struggling team member without having to share the play by play.

4. Give them opportunities to repair their brand

This is perhaps the trickiest part of managing up with a once-struggling employee. Even if they’ve worked hard to turn their performance around and they’re nailing their role, Ii’s likely you both still have some managing up to do.

iI’s time to show your manager they’ve really changed.

Marshall Goldsmith gives some good advice on this in our recent Asking For a Friend interview (I’ve included a very short excerpt from that interview below… you can watch the rest of the show at this link.

“It’s much easier to change behavior than to change the perceptions of others. Changing the perceptions of others is hard because we all see each other in ways that are consistent with our previous stereotypes.”

An important part of your role in managing up is to help your manager see the change.

Managing Up: What if The Employee Can’t Turn it Around?

Of course, it’s also possible that despite your best efforts, the performance doesn’t turn around.

If you’ve been following this process, you have good documentation, and you’ve kept your manager informed, you’ve built trust in all directions. It’s time to move forward with the next phase of the performance management process without guilt.

Sometimes letting an employee go is the most human-centered action for all involved.

As a human-centered manager managing up well, you want to support your employees and help them to grow AND give your manager the piece of mind so they don’t need to get overly involved.

Leaders Coaching Leaders: One Secret to Sustainable Leadership Development

The post Managing Up: Keep Your Boss Informed About a Struggling Team Member appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

“Leading was easy when our team was small, but now our team is growing. What do I do now?”

“How do I scale my leadership influence as my team size grows?”

These are “Asking for a Friend” questions I hear frequently in our leadership development programs. 

How to Keep Leading Well as Your Team is Growing

Here are a few tips that can help you continue to lead well as your team is growing,

1. Translate your leadership vision to tactical, measurable behaviors.

If you want to scale your leadership, you’ll want to ensure that employees at every level understand what success looks like in their role, but also the daily behaviors needed to make it happen.

For example, something as simple as “hold regular one-on-one meetings,” can be open to a wide range of interpretations. What does “regular” mean? What happens in those one-on-ones?

Or, suppose “We are highly responsive to our customers” is vital to your vision. What does that mean for your managers and front-line employees? Does responsive mean you return the call within one hour, or 24? How do you balance responsiveness with productivity? How do you distinguish the truly urgent and important from the noise? What do you do with a chronic complainer?

Playing through these scenarios helps to make your vision real, and makes it easier for your team to provide a consistent experience no matter who is watching.

2. Teach your team how to think.

When you’re a strong, influential leader, and things are going well, it’s easy to overestimate the leadership capacity of your team.

It may seem like they’re leading well, but they may just be following your lead. As your team is growing resist the urge to solve problems FOR them and teach them how to think.

Our “9 What Coaching methodology” can be really helpful as you do this.

3. Build a highly integrated communication plan.

In the great maternity leave debacle, my biggest mistake was that I was at the center of all the communication.

Instead of attending skip-level meetings to SUPPORT my team leader’s messages and approach, I brought the message and worked to build trust WITH ME. I answered all their tough questions, as opposed to preparing my team managers to do so.

When I stepped away, my managers did not have the experience, skills, or courage to step into that role (see also How to Be a More Courageous Manager).

I’ve learned that to scale your leadership, one of the best approaches is to ensure that every manager on the team has a closely aligned and integrated 5×5 communication plan.

Of course, as the leader, you want to be a highly visible communicator. Even better when your direct reports are all amplifying and supporting your messages with their own 5×5 plan.

4. Build an infrastructure for courage and innovation.

One of the real joys and benefits of having a large team is all the hearts and minds you include as you work to improve the business.

To lead well as your team is growing you will want to build a deliberate approach to asking for and responding to ideas (note: sharing this article with your team can help).

5.  Find, develop and encourage informal influencers.

In addition to your direct report team, if you want to build your influence as your team is growing, seek out (and build relationships with) the informal opinion leaders and change agents on your team.

As my teams got larger and larger, I found this was absolutely vital to creating buy-in for our change efforts.

For example, when I was leading a 2000 person sales team, we consistently held operational excellence rallies where our highest performers were not only recognized for their contributions, but also served as teachers of best practices.

We also pulled a dozen front-line sales reps out of their day jobs and turned them into change agents for our key strategic initiatives. This worked like magic because they were well-respected, fun, and less intimidating than those of us with bigger position power. Their fellow reps could be real with them about their challenges and concerns, and then they could roll up their sleeves together to try out the new desired behaviors.

Each year, I also led a skip-level mentoring circle of high-potential store managers where we worked on real business challenges together.

When we needed to make a change, communicate a new priority or gather candid feedback, I had a whole network of trusted relationships beyond my direct report team to help quickly engage with the larger team.

Not only was this a great way to scale my leadership as my team was growing, but also enabled me to grow leadership bench strength at a very deep level.

Your turn. What advice do you have for someone whose team is growing fast?

The post Our Team is Growing: How do I Lead Well Now? (With Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Back in her Verizon days, one of Karin’s favorite questions to ask a team member whom she was encouraging to think like an entrepreneur was:

“If this was your company, would you  _______ (make this decision, hold this meeting, spend money in this matter, invest in this project)?”

As you can imagine, the answer was often. “Errr, well, no, but …”

The conversation after that “but” is at the heart of teaching your team how to think and act like an entrepreneur.

5 Ways to Help Your Team Think Like Entrepreneurs

“Entrepreneurship is a chance to trade a solution to someone who has a problem that needs solving. Solve more problems, solve bigger problems, solve problems more widely, and you’re an entrepreneur. It’s tempting to industrialize this work, to make it something with rules and bosses and processes. But that’s not the heart of it. The work is to solve problems in a way that you’re proud of.” 

– Seth Godin

1. Hire problem solvers.

It’s going to be hard to teach your team to think like entrepreneurs if they’ve always been a “just tell me what to do-er.”

It’s much easier to encourage someone to think like an entrepreneur if they have a track record of innovation and problem-solving.

If you want to hire people with the capacity to think like an entrepreneur, ask about their experience.

• What’s the best idea you’ve ever had to improve the business? Tell me about the idea. What did you do with it and what happened as a result?
• Tell me about a time that you strongly disagreed with your manager. What was the issue? How did you work to resolve the conflict?
• Describe the most difficult problem you’ve ever faced at work. How did you work to overcome it? What are you most proud of about your approach and what would you do differently the next time?
• What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made at work? What did you learn?

Hire for courage and innovation and be clear from the very first day of new-hire orientation that you really want your new employees to share ideas.

2. Create clarity around where you need great ideas.

Don’t just tell your team you want them to “think out of the box,” Or that you have “an open door” for them to bring you new ideas. Be sure they clearly understand your strategic direction and what success looks like.

One of the biggest challenges we hear from our fast-growing start-up clients is that it gets more and more difficult to keep everyone aligned on what matters most as the business scales.

Be sure your town hall meetings talk more than EBITDA, with a clear message of “What I need from ya.”  And that you’re communicating your strategic priorities and what matters most at least five times, five different ways. 

3. Make information accessible.

It’s impossible to connect dots you cannot see. When a manager is struggling to think like an entrepreneur, it’s often that they don’t have access to the information they need to be resourceful.

4. Give them a piece of the business to own.

One of the most meaningful leadership conversations David had in his first executive role was informing the middle level and front line leaders that “This is your company.” They were used to a visionary leader calling all the shots, so it took some time for them to get used to the idea that they were responsible for their team and together, shared responsibility for the business.

You don’t need to give someone full P&L responsibility to help them act like an owner of their part of the business. If you want a manager to think like an entrepreneur, find ways to give them both influence and authority. (In general, try never to give responsibility without authority.) This could be a project, a market, and group of customers, or even a group of emerging leaders to develop.

Our strategic empowerment worksheet can help you work with the manager you’re looking to empower, to understand what decisions they can make and which they need to run by you.

5. Reward risk-taking and scaffold failure.

A big difference we see in our fast-growing start-up clients is that risk-taking is not only encouraged, but rewarded. Even when things don’t turn out as planned.

One way to build risk-taking muscles is to encourage and reward the act of taking the risk—especially before everyone knows the results. If you only reward successful efforts, that doesn’t encourage risk-taking—it only encourages “sure bets.” So scaffold your risk-takers with support so they know where to play and not blow up the business, and then reward the attempts.

Another way to do this is to turn your post-mortem meetings into post-meeting celebrations—where you celebrate the learning, the successes, and the “What we can do next times?”

Your Turn

Let’s start a conversation. If you’re part of a large organization, what advice do the big guys have for the start-ups? And the startups have for the big guys?

See Also: 5 Ways to Become an Intrapreneur in Your Organization

The post How To Help Your Team Think Like an Entrepreneur appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Mastery Under Pressure

1:21 – Meet Tina Greenbaum, high-performance coach to CEOs, athletes, and politicians. (And a high-performance mom too!)

2:44 – Tina’s background caring for people and her earlier leadership memory

5:42 – How Tina discovered the roots of performance coaching from her work as a therapist helping people with eating disorders

7:27 – How you can think about Tina’s insights and the opportunities to apply them to your leadership and areas of life where you want to grow

9:37 – The need to access the deeper parts of your mind and body in order to achieve results

12:10 – Where our bad habits come from and how to think about them compassionately

15:31 – How to cultivate your awareness to identify the areas that act as roadblocks

24:19 – A deep dive into how leaders can work with their stress and help resolve it

27:18 – How to activate your brain and tap into deeper wisdom

29:03 – Your limited ability to focus and how to get the most from that resource

34:09 – How to free your mind to focus on what’s most important – with less stress

36:14 – Why the skill of relaxation is vital for high performance and how to achieve productive relaxation quickly

41:04 – The vital role authenticity plays for today’s top leaders and why doing the work of honestly looking at yourself is marketable (not to mention important for your own health and wellness)

42:39 – Why this sort of work is hard to do on your own and where to get help with it

46:36 – The power of visualization (no vision-boards required) – how to leverage your mind to achieve mastery under pressure

51:01 – Start your high-performance journey by getting curious about yourself.

Connect with Tina

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram

Get Tina’s Book

The post Mastery Under Pressure with Tina Greenbaum appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Calm the Chaos and Help Your Team Regain Their Focus

0:00 – Get your reduced price copy of Courageous Cultures through the end of June 2021

0:30 – Welcome to Season 8 of Leadership without Losing Your Soul

1:00 – The challenge with maintaining our focus and helping your team regain their focus: all kinds of crazy

2:16 – Recognize that these distractions, emergencies, and challenges won’t go away. Mastering the art of leading through them is essential.

3:19 – Start by ensuring everyone understands what actually matters most. What is the MIT? Where are the team and business going over the next 18 months? How do individual behaviors contribute to the team’s success?

4:18 – Next, expect the unexpected. Use a two-axis process graph to look at how disruptive and how common your disruptions are. Meet with your team to get all the distractions on the table.

5:10 – Then, focus on the items in quadrant four (most frequent, most disruptive).

6:18 – Step three is to plan your response for the most common and most disruptive interruptions, distractions, and emergencies. You know it’s coming, so create a game plan to get everyone through it, help your team regain their focus, and get back to the big picture as efficiently as possible.

7:08 – A specific example of how you might plan for a common and important disruption and help your team regain their focus

8:27 – Next, in step four, you look at margin. Maintaining margin to absorb and deal with the “expected unexpected” is critical to helping your team stay focused.

9:31 – Finally, step five (which is where many people try to start): eliminate the causes of your most common, most disruptive distractions, emergencies, and interruptions.

The post Calm the Chaos and Help Your Team Regain their Focus appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Hi Karin, I’ve read Winning Well: A Manager’s Guide to Getting Results Without Losing Your Soul. And, I love the I.N.S.P.I.R.E. method for difficult conversations. The coaching method works great much of the time. But, what do I do if one accountability conversation is not enough? #AskingForAFriend

How to Escalate an Accountability Conversation

You’ve set clear performance expectations. You’ve checked for understanding. And, you’ve done a great job addressing issues as they arise.

So what do you do, if your employee is still not picking up what you’re putting down?

Sometimes one conversation isn’t enough. If this is happening, escalate the conversation using the A.R.T. Method of Advanced Accountability.

Each step of the A.R.T. Method continues to use the INSPIRE Method.

Then, as you move through the three stages of the method, your N – Notice step changes.

You will Notice different behaviors at each stage. Here’s how it works:

Summary of the Let’s Grow Leaders A.R.T. Method For Advanced Accountability

1. Action conversation – focus on the specific behavior.
2. Repetition conversation – focus on the repeated pattern of behavior.
3. Trust conversation – focus on the broken commitment and relationship.

See also: How to Start Team Accountability If You Never Have Before

(See more in How to Provide More Meaningful Performance Feedback).

The post The A.R.T. of Advanced Accountability (Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

It’s not a shocker that this year, the most helpful articles were about creating a deeper connection with your team, leading well during times of uncertainty and disruption, and of course, practical tools for leading remote teams.

So here you go (click on the header link to access the article). These are our best leadership articles of 2020 based on your reading and sharing.

What do you think were our best leadership articles of 2020… what resonated most for you?

And of course, if you have a topic you like us to tackle in 2021 please let us know in the comments or drop us a note at info@letsgrowleaders.com

The Best Leadership Articles of 2020
(According to You)

1. How to Start the Decade in Deeper Conversation

We wrote this most popular leadership article in January of 2020 BEFORE we had any idea what was on the horizon. And yet with the quick pivot to remote work, it turns out this easy team-builder worked wonders for creating trust and connection in remote teams.

We’ve had tremendous feedback from participants of our live-online leadership training programs who’ve used this tool as part of their action learning this year.

2. What Employees are Yearning For in Remote One-on-Ones

When the Pandemic first hit one of our biggest concerns was how many managers we saw canceling their one-on-ones. This was our passionate response. We captured the biggest needs we were hearing from managers around the world.

Also fun, this article was recognized in the CTO awards for best leadership articles of the year. If you’re looking to get better at one-on-ones in the new year, this posts for you.

3. How to Lead When Your Employees Don’t Have to Follow

Also a pre-pandemic hit, David shares one of our core philosophies: “everyone’s a volunteer.”

4. Practical Help For Exhausted Leaders Who Need to Get More Done

Okay, this was also interesting. We wrote this in February almost as if we knew what was coming next. Who knew that we had no idea of the exhaustion that lay ahead. In this practical article, we share some of our foundational tools and approaches to get results and improve relationships without driving yourself (or your team) into the ground.

5. How to Lead in the Midst of Urgent Rapid Change and Strain

In this early pandemic article, we share a great story from our very last on-site client visit of the year, along with practical tips for leading through a crisis.

6. Three Ways to Create a Virtual Watercooler for Your Remote Team

So much of the research about leading remote teams points to what employees miss most are the informal opportunities for interaction and sharing best practices. This article gives you practical ways to recreate that for your team.

7. How to Capture What You’re Learning From This Crisis Right Now

We wrote this right at the beginning of the Pandemic when everything was in total lockdown, Clorox and toilet paper were in short supply, we were sanitizing groceries before they came in the house, and our readers told us they were quarantining their copies of our books in their garage for 24 hours before they could read it.

And so we captured this “BED Talk”

8. How to Disrupt the Disruption and Help Your Team Move Forward

A lot of the training work we’ve been doing with our clients over this past year has included practical tools and techniques to”disrupting the disruption” to build a brighter bolder future. Here are a few practical approaches that can help as you continue to navigate this crisis.

9. How to Co-Create a Better Future

This article pairs well with our #8 winner, with more practical approaches to help your team do the best they can with what they have from where they are.

10. Four Words to Help You Build a Powerful Team

“How can I help …?” can go a long way in building a team. In this article, we share important ways to uncover the support your team most needs.

Most Popular Leadership Article of All Time on Let’s Grow Leaders

7 Ways to Help Your Team Deal with Ambiguity – Let’s Grow Leaders

This article continues to top our “best leadership articles” list every single year. And, Winning Well: Leading Through Uncertainty and Change continues to be one of our most requested keynote programs. You can’t always choose what you show up to, but you can always choose how you show up.

The Best Leadership Articles of 2020 (as seen in other media)

Leadership without Losing Your Soul Podcast (With David Dye)

David’s podcast audience has been growing quickly with over 80 episodes. Here are the top 3 for 2020.

How to Avoid Micromanaging Remote Employees

Burnout to Breakthrough – Interview with Eileen McDargh

Advanced Guide to Leading Online Meetings that Don’t Suck

Asking For a Friend Vlog (With Karin Hurt)

In the 4th Quarter 2020, Karin’s Asking For a Friend Vlog went live on Friday’s at 11:30 EST with a sprinkling of her old school pithy moments of leadership advice.

And the most popular Asking For a Friend Live was about Connection and Celebration in remote teams with Scott Friedman and Debra Fine. (you must be logged into LinkedIn to view)

We are so grateful to all of you who read and share our articles. We’re delighted to have you part of our growing Let’s Grow Leaders Community.

See More Best of Let’s Grow Leaders here.

The post The Best Leadership Articles of 2020 (and more … based on your votes) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

And yet, it can all feel like a lot. Where do you start?

Use This Strategic Planning Conversation Starter To Get Your Team Talking

Focus on the 5 Cs

Today we’re sharing a tool we use in our leadership programs to help leaders think strategically about their business and prioritize the next steps. You can download it for free here to assist with your strategic planning conversations.

1. To start, give each member of your team a copy of the 5Cs assessment in advance of your strategic planning session.
2. Then take each of the five categories and calibrate your individual assessments around the five strategic areas.
   • Clarity: We know where we’re going and how we will get there.
   • Capacity: We invest in building our people, systems, and tools.
   • Commitment: We keep our promises.
   • Curiosity: We ask great questions and take appropriate risks.
   • Connection: We trust one another and invest in our mutual success.
3. You’ll likely come up with more strategic areas to focus on than time to address them. Here’s where the prioritization comes in. Consider what will have the biggest strategic impact and focus your planning there.

Let’s Grow Leaders 5 Cs Strategic Planning Tool

This strategic planning tool is just the beginning of the conversation. We’d love to talk with you more about your planning efforts and how we might help. Just give us a call at 443-750-1249 or drop us a note at karin.hurt@letsgrowleaders.com.

See Also:

End of Year Meetings: How to Make Yours Remarkable

Own the U.G.L.Y. Four Strategic Conversations to Have by Year End

Virtual Kick-Off Meeting: Why You Should Have One and How to Make it Great

How to Cultivate More Solutions-Oriented Employees

The post Strategic Planning Tool: How to Engage Your Team in Better Conversation appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.