Leadership
I’ve posted the recommended reading blogs for one year now. It was a little experiment and I’ve enjoyed putting my thoughts to a few blogs but this will be my last for now.
Here are posts from December that I recommend:
The Best Leaders Are Helpful
Being helpful to teams can be an overlooked priority for leaders. “Listen and understand what people expect from you, not what will make you look good.” This post should act as a reminder to focus on giving over taking and offers suggestions on ways to help your teams. Remember, sometimes getting out of the team’s way can be their biggest help!
5 Ways Introverted Leadership can make You a Great Manager
Introverted leaders can naturally allow others to shine so looking at some of their traits makes this a great post. I believe any type of leader can succeed as long as they have… Continue reading
If you regularly read books or blogs on leadership then you’re never far away from leadership quotes or graphics. They can be a powerful way to get a good point across and give useful reminders, however, they can also fool us into leading a certain way!
Here are a few quotes:
“Leadership means running fast enough to keep ahead of your people”
“In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where he wants to go, and gets up and goes.”
“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”
Then we have these typical leadership images:
What impression do they give you about leadership?
When I see these a few thoughts come to mind:
- They say lead from the front
- The leader is the main person in the team
- Leaders have to know everything
- Without the leader the team won’t function
- The… Continue reading
incivility – rude or unsociable speech or behaviour.
This 15 minute TED talk by Christine Porath explains how incivility can have drastic effects on the teams and culture. She shares some powerful research showing the true cost incivility has but also simple steps on how we can avoid it by thanking people, sharing credit, listening attentively, humbly asking questions, acknowledging others, and smiling. I recommend watching…
Radical Candor by Kim Scott is one of my top recommended reads for leaders. For any leader or those aspiring to be it’s packed with great advice around building relationships and should challenge or direct how we do things.
This blog is simply to highlight some of the areas that jumped out at me so there are plenty of quotes with some thoughts of my own.
Relationships and building trust
Whether we like it or not we are in the results business, companies survive or fail based on their success. But managers whose priority is on the results often miss the biggest factor to success which is building relationships with the team.
“Bosses guide a team to achieve results.”
A manager’s responsibilities revolve around guidance, team-building, results. They each interlink and are dependent on each other if there is a weak link somewhere it can impact in other areas e.g.… Continue reading
Here are a few blogs I recommend reading from this month…
On Leadership: Why building trust is the core of every successful team
“Trust is the foundation of every great, high-performing team.” Great post on why trust and relationships are so important and how to build them. From the way your teams interact can you tell if they are built on trust?
Good Leader vs. Bad Leader: 5 Situations You Face Every Day
We can read many posts on the leadership without knowing how to put it into practise, the situations in this blog help role-play interactions in your mind that might be familiar. “The good leader sees the glass half full that everyone wants to help them.”
From Tortured to Thriving: 5 Ways We Can Transform Our Work Experience for the Better
Work does get the blame for many things that aren’t going well in our lives but this… Continue reading
Here are a few blogs I recommend reading from this month…
6 tips to be a better manager in the most common situations you’ll face
Asking for feedback from people has never resulted in too much success for me, a good tip is to “Ask for advice instead of feedback.” I do think that saying “I’m giving you this feedback because I want you to succeed.” can come across a bit pretentious and should only be used with certain people. The blog has good tips that is worth reading.
The 5 things your employee wants to say to you that you do not want to hear
“If you choose to listen, make sure you are ready to make changes based on what you hear or your best people who were willing to give you the feedback will walk.” Choose to listen! Transparency, communication, purpose are all crucial for building strong… Continue reading
In the echo chambers of time the phrases “Are you on mute?” and “Can you hear me?” will reverberate as an eternal reminder of how much precious time is lost in meetings. Many look back in despair at the time spent in awful meetings, it’s time that is lost forever! Has all hope disappeared for meetings? Are the mental scars of bad meetings too deep to repair? Do we even care anymore?!
It’s difficult to say how much time is used (or even wasted) in meetings, various studies report anywhere from 15% to 30% of our time is in meetings. Certainly, the higher the management ladder you are the more meetings you can expect. But my concern is with engineers and engineering managers whose focus is on implementing and delivering features for customers. If we are ‘wasting’ time here then it is directly impacting what is delivered to customers and… Continue reading
