Articles
WHAT IS A GOOD LEADER?
HOW TO BUILD A TEAM
GROW YOUR TEAM THROUGH WISE DELEGATION
BUSINESS PLANNING V MANAGING BY INSTINCT
USING ACTION LEARNING TO BECOME A BETTER LEADER
A LEARNING LOG FOR CRITICAL REFLECTION
WHAT SORT OF A LEADER OR LEARNER ARE YOU?
WHAT IS A GOOD LEADER?
Dr Pam Swepson
Lao-tzu’s says:
“A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and
acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you;. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say “We did this ourselves.”
Dr Pam says:
“A good leader is one who can go on holidays in confidence that the team will operate as usual, deal with anything unusual, and they can return renewed and refreshed to an empty in-tray!”
A good leader knows that they achieve WITH and THROUGH their team. A team is not a vehicle for a leader’s ego.
Instead a good leader has:
- a clear sense of where the team is going
- a clear understanding of themselves as people
- A good understanding of their team members as people
- A team who understand the business and everyone’s role in it
As your Leadership Coach and Management Consultant I will help you to work with our team to set your vision and develop your plans. As a psychologist, I can help you and your team to understand each other as people and to build the right team culture.
HOW TO BUILD A TEAM
Dr Pam Swepson
The easiest team to manage is a group of people who are all like you. The least effective team is a group of people who are all like you!
Your business task will be complex, otherwise, you would do it all yourself. Therefore you need to recruit a team of people who have a complex range of skills and experience. Go out of your way to find people who are different from you and from each other!
But, the glue that will bind a diverse group together are common values and common goals. Recruit for common values and use team building to create common goals.
As your Leadership Coach and Team Builder I will help you and your team to understand and appreciate the different skills and expertise each other brings and help you to build an effective and supportive team culture.
GROW YOUR TEAM THROUGH WISE DELEGATION
Dr Pam Swepson
Improve your team’s performance, improve individual performance and keep people on board and growing – by delegating!
A good leader knows that they achieve results WITH and THROUGH their team. Develop and grow your team members. The best way to do this is to delegate responsibilities to them. Even new or junior team members should be given some team responsibilities – fitting their skills and experience. Develop team members to act as leader when you are away by delegating more and more complex tasks to them and providing them with the training they need to step up to those tasks.
But what IS delegating? Delegating is asking people to be responsible for achieving a certain result – NOT for achieving it EXACTLY the same way you would. As a leader, you are responsible for results and for developing team member to achieve those results.
Wise delegation means giving everyone some team responsibilities – commensurate with their skills – then backing-off to let them work out the best way for THEM to achieve results. They might even do it better than you! And wouldn’t that be great!
My performance indicator of a good leader is one who can go on holidays in confidence that the team will operate as usual, deal with anything unusual, and they can return renewed and refreshed to an empty in-tray.
As your Management Consultant I will help you and your team to plan your business and specify team roles and responsibilities and team and individual performance indicators.
BUSINESS PLANNING V MANAGING BY INSTINCT
Dr Pam Swepson
In the rush of a normal day, leaders operate from gut instinct and habit – doing what has worked in the past, because they don’t have time to do anything else. And most of the time - this is not a problem! But it does not work when things go wrong or if you want to grow your business into new areas.
Still - some leaders attempt to fix problem or do new things by acting on instinct and jumping to a solution. This is the planning method known as “Fire - Aim - Ready” rather than “Ready - Aim - Fire!”: part of the Australian culture of ‘jump first, think later - if ever’. And to make matters worse, some leaders then evaluate the results of their shot-gun plan by only looking at the parts of their ‘solution’ that did work - and down playing or excusing the parts that did not! A sure way NOT to improve!!
Many years of experience have taught me that businesses and programs are most likely to fail if they have not been well planned. And good planning saves the cost of expensive fixes!
Instead of always acting on instinct good leaders take time to be really clear on what they want to fix or change. One way to do that is to use Action Research as a problem solving and planning tool. Here is how it works:
- Intend: Work out exactly what you want to change/achieve by taking a really good look at the current situation BEFORE taking any new actions. What is working and what isn’t? How do you know it IS working; ie what are your performance indicators? What would be good indicators of improvement and how do you rate on those performance indicators now?
- Plan: Now that you have a clear idea of the current situation and some indicators of what an improvement would look like, who needs to do what by when?
- Review: Develop a simple, low key monitoring system to keep tabs on your performance indicators so that the whole teams knows day-to-day if they are on track or not. Look for the good and the bad, what you expect and what you didn’t expect. You can’t continue to improve if you only look at ½ the story. Don’t apportion blame for first time failures – that is learning. Apportion blame only for continued failings.
As your Learning Coach, I will facilitate you and your team though ALL the steps to ensure your have a sound, workable plan which is an essential head start to success.
USING ACTION LEARNING TO BECOME A BETTER LEADER
Dr Pam Swepson
No one knows your business better than you and no one knows your leadership challenges better than you – and that includes management and leadership ‘experts’. I am not a leadership expert, but I am an action learning expert. I have worked with many leaders using Action Learning so that they learn from their day-to-day experiences to become the best leader they can be.
The important part of Action Learning is Critical Reflection. Action without Reflection is still running on instinct. It might work and it might not, but you will never know why. Critical reflection turns experiences into Learning about and from current problems. Learning from real life experience is ‘real’ learning that stays with you and becomes real knowledge that you can take into other problems.
As your Leadership Coach, I will help you to reflect critically by holding a mirror up to your experiences and asking you challenging questions. My clients tell me that I walk beside them to see things from their perspective, but reframe what I see to open up opportunities and learning for them.
A LEARNING LOG FOR CRITICAL REFLECTION
Dr Pam Swepson
One of the main things I provide leaders is time to think and reflect on their goals and their leadership skills – away from day-to-day pressures. But the grist for the mill for reflection are details of critical experiences.
One way to capture the details of critical experiences is by using a Learning Log. There are two different sorts of experiences – things that you do and things others do.
When you take some action and do or do not get the result you intended consider:
What did you want to achieve? What did you do? How effective were you and how do you know? Why do you think you got this result? What might you do next time?
When others do something that impacts on you, consider:
What exactly happened? What were the consequences for you? How did you feel about this? What did you think the other person was trying to achieve? How you might you check if you are right about their intentions? What you have you learned from this experience for you own leadership development?
As your Leadership Coach I will help you turn your experiences into learning to make you the best leader you can be.
WHAT SORT OF A LEADER OR LEARNER ARE YOU?
Dr Pam Swepson
The way you learn often influences the way your lead. Most people have naturally preferences for how they like to lead or learn.
Honey and Mumford (1992) identified four Learning Style preferences. All of them have their good aspects as well as their drawbacks. Good leaders are able to choose and use the best leading/learning style for each situation they are in. The four learning/leading styles are:
Activist Leader/Learners prefer to ‘have a go’, jumping in to see what happens. While learning from experience is crucial but it CAN lead activists to ‘jump to solutions’ – without enough thinking and planning.
Pragmatist Leader/Learners have learned the value of the ‘tried and tested’. They see no reason to interfere in a situation that is ‘not broken’. But pragmatists might fail to notice when a problem is NOT quite the same as the old one, or see new opportunities for doing different things.
Reflector Leader/Learners have learned the value of thinking long and hard before actually doing something. Good planning is essential to good action, but some Reflector Leaders CAN get stuck in the thinking stage and resist moving into the action phase because the plans are not ‘perfect’.
Theorist Leader/Learners have learned the value of having a ‘big picture’ theory as a way to understand their problems and as a source of solutions. However, Theorist Leaders might get frustrated when the crucial details of the reality they face does not fit the theory they are working from.
As your Leadership Coach I will help you to identify your Learning strengths and Learning ‘challenges’ so that you choose the most effective leadership style for each situation you face.