Leadership Trust-building | Team-leader Blog

What’s Wrong with Optimistic Leaders? (Balanced Leadership Series).

Posted On: May 12, 2021By: admin Comments: Comment

Obviously, we all intuitively know that quality leaders are optimistic. Without optimism it is easy to dishearten your team and create a bleak workplace climate that detracts from employee engagement and innovative outcomes. Effective optimism enables people to dream big and take calculated risks. We would all agree that it is critical for healthy team functioning and creating a culture that minimises a fear of failure, so what could go wrong with optimistic leaders? The key is to get the balance right so that a leader is not operating with a blind optimism. Blind optimism occurs when high optimism in a leader is not complemented with the ability to analyse the potential pitfalls in a plan or strategy. It is not about diminishing optimism to fix the problem, but more about balancing it out with due diligence in planning and decision-making. If this balance is not achieved either through personal leadership growth or through other collaborative team members whose strengths are in this area, eventually the organisation will be led into serious trouble. The negative impact of this imbalance not only puts an organisation at fiscal risk, causes stress on the leader, but it also creates other human collateral damage. So, let’s examine these. Imbalanced optimism impedes quality leadership results, because it hinders leaders from being persistent in playing the long game toward success. Instead, they tend to overcommit to too many new things by jumping at many exciting shiny objects that come across their path. This can only produce

Employee Engagement for Dummies: How to go from Average to Genius at Employee Engagement!

Posted On: February 21, 2020By: admin Comments: Comment

One of the critical success factors of any organisation is the retention oftop talent. There is now no question that employee engagement heavily influences this. Furthermore, if you have been investigating this subject, you will know how important the direct manager’s relationship with any employee is to foster employee engagement. However, many managers have had little training in employee retention strategies. I have worked with developing managers for over 15 years and I want to share with you the bare bones of what can make any diligent manager into a genius in the area of employee engagement. Myths Must be Overcome: First there are some myths about employee engagement that need to be unmasked. Let’s dispel some of the myths that are being bandied around. Myth one: It is essentially an organisational issue: No, it is not essentially an organisational issue, but an individual psychological phenomenon within the psyche of each employee. Hence, by its very nature, it is a unique experience within each employee. Myth two: The best strategy to improve employee engagement is through an organisational level approach: Partly true, because context is always important, but left on its own without the individual approach, it will only ever be hit and miss. You need to predominantly address engagement at the individual level, plus examine if there are organisational cultural impediments to increasing employee engagement. Myth three: The manager’s interactions with their direct-reports are the direct cause of low employee engagement: Half-truth, for there is a correlation between them,

Developing Talent Management Pathways within an Organisation

Posted On: July 2, 2019By: admin Comments: Comment

Is talent management part of your strategic plan? With all the details involved in running a successful organisation, a leader can get overwhelmed at times. Therefore, it is good to step back regularly and remind ourselves that there are only a few key result areas that need our attention to lead to organisational success. Regarding the human resource side of this equation, implementing a clear talent management pathway within your organisation that attracts, retains and develops top talent will always outperform like-for-like organisations by a significant difference. Dr. Jim Asplund, one of Gallup’s chief scientists states, that the best-led organisations know the direct path to individual, team, and organisational success starts with a key investment in their employees’ greatest talents. How are you investing in this area? Starting a Talent Management PathwayWhat is involved in a talent management pathway? Assuming you have your recruitment processes in order, where you are only getting top talent into the final interview and consistently onboarding A players (ask me how) then you need systems in place to track each employee’s current growth and developmental needs. Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this. The heavy lifting has already been done, so it is just a matter of tapping into an existing resource. Harrison Assessments offers an online organisational dashboard, listing all employees, tracking their suitability alignment with their job role, along with their engagement in their work, and numerous other key metrics to assess existing talent and how to manage it. It

Managing Organizational Culture

Posted On: August 26, 2013By: admin Comments: Comment

The three words of this article’s title seem simple enough to understand and many organizations invest heavily in trying to achieve just this. But I think in order for us to intelligently discuss this topic, we need to ask a couple of questions and bring further clarity to the topic. The first question is, “What is organizational culture?” The second question is, “Can organizational culture be managed?” So allow me in a few words to answer these questions by examining different definitions and then to investigate any potential steps that could be taken to produce positive change. Most people who deal with this topic will articulate organizational culture through summarising the individual elements that make up culture such as, collective – behaviours, values, myths, symbols, norms, rituals, beliefs and assumptions that “this is the way we do things around here.” It would be difficult to find leaders who would disagree with these fundamental components as being the essence of what makes up organizational culture. However, it is the expanded definition of culture that I am going to discuss shortly that starts to expose different opinions. Furthermore, the preferred perspective chosen profoundly affects the strategic approach taken to deal with it. Generally speaking there are two main paradigms of organizational culture that people choose between. Some see it as a singular dominating influence that each individual operates within. Others see it being made up of various sub-cultures within the one organization with continual superficial adjustments being made by those in each

Emotional Intelligence – How to develop it!

Posted On: November 30, 2011By: admin Comments: Comment

Emotional Intelligence (EI) – that is, the capacity to work effectively with your and others’ emotions while engaging in human interactions. EI is demonstrating itself to be a critical factor in leadership effectiveness. Increased numbers of empirical research studies are being produced that reveal outcomes that can no longer be ignored by serious leaders. Some of the key measures associated with emotional intelligence that are being examined are job satisfaction levels, job effectiveness, the contagiousness of moods and physiological responses to others (heart rate, health). Studies show that the emotional intelligence of the boss directly affects employee job satisfaction levels, and this in turn impacts upon employee turnover. Furthermore when a boss brings a negative mood to the workplace through displays of irritability, and anxiety it takes away from a climate of enthusiasm, which diminishes work effectiveness. In contrast, when a boss is able to exude an optimistic and enthusiastic mood it impacts positively upon innovation, productivity, team work and increased resilience to difficult circumstances. With a greater number of research studies demonstrating the positive impact that increased emotional intelligence has upon business results, it is becoming more difficult to ignore this element of leadership development. The good news is that leaders can improve and grow in this area. I have worked one-to-one with leaders to achieve this very thing. So where do you start to work at improving this area? There are a number of options available to you. You might want to look at taking an assessment to